Windows Phone at BlogHer: Must Have Gadget of 2011 [Review]

I had a pretty lofty list of tasks I was going to test my Windows Phone on when I went to BlogHer in San Diego, and indeed I made it jump through hoops when it was crunch time.  At a once-in-a-lifetime event, there’s only one chance to make something work.  I knew going into this experiment that if something didn’t work at the last minute with my Windows Phone, I’d be racking up serious opportunity loss.

Let’s specify that at BlogHer I took my LG Quantum Windows Phone.  I have also used my husband’s Samsung Focus Windows Phone, but mostly the review will be based on the LG Quantum.  Without further ado, let’s just jump into the nitty gritty.  Was my Windows Phone at BlogHer all it was cracked up to be?

Windows Phone: The Good

Favorite Features: My favorite feature on the LG Quantum Windows Phone is the slide-out qwerty keyboard and optional virtual keyboard. For someone with small fingers like I have, the hardware keyboard with physical buttons makes typing much faster and reduces the chance of typing errors.

From anywhere on your Windows Phone, you can press the windows start button to take you to the start screen. From anywhere on your Windows Phone, you can press the dedicated search button to open up your Bing search in a browser.

"Windows Phone’s People Hub truly is the Rolodex, phone book, contacts folder, and instant messenger replacement for our generation."

Battery life:  The battery life on my Windows Phone was amazing!  Our conference days started as early as 7am, and I would leave my hotel room with a fully charged cell phone.  Much to my surprise, when I would arrive back at the hotel room after the sessions (around 5:30pm) to call home, the phone would still have around half of its battery left.  I’d give it a few minutes of charging as I changed for my evening parties, then head out until around midnight. 

The Windows Phone had enough battery to last through an extended day, even though I used it a lot for photos and video.  I also run a white background on my start screen, which can cause extra battery drain in some cases, but did not seem to be a problem for my Windows Phone.

Camera roll:  The camera roll on the Windows Phone is handy in that it’s easy to access your pictures with a quick left or right scroll as soon as you take a photo.  This is not the case on all smart phones.

Video quality:  The video quality on the Windows Phone was surprisingly good for a built-in cell phone video camera.  It doesn’t shoot the same caliber of video as my Flip HD, of course, but it can eliminate your need for carrying a separate video camera for everyday use.

People Hub: The People Hub on the start screen of the Windows Phone is an essential tool for both business and personal life.  I constantly saw people in the Hub that I wanted to look for or meet up with while I was at the conference. It was indeed a command central for phone calls and texts to my family while I was away. I love that pulling up a person in the People Hub shows you the different ways to get ahold of them all in one place. Windows Phone’s People Hub truly is the Rolodex, phone book, contacts folder, and instant messenger replacement for our generation.

While we’re on the subject of the People Hub, let’s talk a little bit more about the features that make it so useful.  As soon as you open the People Hub, you’ll see a +, which is the way you add new contacts.  You can fill in their name, phone, e-mail, add a photo, or link up to their with Windows Live accounts for more information.  You can even set a special ringtone for different people so that you know who is calling before you look at the phone! 

In the “other” field you can add all kinds of tidbits about people you want to remember, such as their birthday, their husband’s or children’s names, their website, or special notes (like interesting stories that came up during an impromptu elevator conversation!).  Like I said, the contact information you can add to each person is truly comprehensive in Windows Phone.

If you’re very connected in social media, you may have a large number of people pre-populated into your People Hub.  In my case, when I open the People Hub, I have thousands of people to scroll through in order to find the individual I’m looking for. 

A nice way to navigate this if you have a lot of contacts is to use the slide-out keyboard and start typing in the letters of the name you’re looking for.  Chances are, with only one or two letters it will get you much closer to the part of the list are looking for, at which point you can just scroll a little way further and double click on the person.

Also, when you open up People Hub, the first thing it shows up at the top of the page is your own picture with your last update on Facebook.  It also shows what networks you have included on your profile (in my case it shows  Windows Live and Facebook). 

Plus, People Hub is getting ready to get upgraded with even more exciting features when Mango is rolled out by your cell phone carrier.  Mango is the next version of Windows Phone, and I’m told it will be bringing the ability to tweet from the People Hub.  Mango is also releasing something called Groups, so that you can add people to a specific group, pin the group to your start screen, and use it as a micro People Hub.

Surprising Windows Phone Bonuses: I Didn’t Plan to Do This!

In the Open Mic Salon, where attendees entered their favorite post into a pool to be selected to read on stage, they had a last minute technology fail with their printers. Speakers could not get their posts printed out to take on the stage to speak! Luckily for me, when my time came to go on stage and there was nothing coming out of the printer, I had to think quickly. As I was called to speak on stage, the Windows Phone was my last-minute savior. I simply pulled up the web page in my browser, enlarged it so that I could read the tiny words at the podium, and delivered a wonderful performance.

Windows Phone: The Bad

Facebook integration: While I loved the Facebook integration for being able to directly upload photos right from the phone, I encountered problems with it. I tested out this feature the first night of BlogHer at Evening at the Expo. I used my Windows Phone to take pictures of the events and special guests and upload them directly to Facebook in real time. Each time I uploaded a new picture, I reveled in how productive I could be with only 1 small gadget in my purse!

"Windows Phone gave me access to the world with a connectivity and versatility that I’ve really never known before from a cell phone."

However, later that evening I checked Facebook, discovering that only 9 photos from the entire 2 hours had actually made it from the Windows Phone to Facebook. The worst part is that I never received an error message while uploading any of the photos. As far as I could tell, each upload was a success and I just kept snapping photos and uploading, even though they really weren’t going anywhere.

Camera quality: My chief complaint about the Windows Phone is that the camera is unreliable and the photo quality is poor.  To make sure that the problem with the camera was not just hardware related and specific to the LG Quantum Windows Phone, I also tried out the camera on my husband’s Samsung Focus Windows Phone.

Unfortunately, the cameras on both phones were equally unreliable.  Of all the pictures I took, about 50% of the pictures were great, and the other 50% were so bad that they were unusable.  When I describe the pictures as bad, I mean that they were unclear, blurred, and out of focus.

The unreliability of the camera was something that really hurt my experience with the Windows Phone at BlogHer.  Many of the photos that I needed to take were quick shots of people disappearing into crowds that needed to be captured right away.  In cases like that, I only had one chance to take the picture that I needed.  If that was one of the times that the Windows Phone camera delivered an out of focus photo, I didn’t have an opportunity to try again.  My moment had passed and unfortunately, for most of those misses, my perfect photo opp was gone forever.

Luckily, it’s very hard for me to leave home and not be prepared with a backup plan!  With that being the case, I took my point and shoot digital camera with me to San Diego as an emergency backup to the Windows Phone camera.  I was hoping that I would not have to switch to it, but after viewing the photos that I took from the first day of the conference and seeing the number of photos that were ruined, my only choice was to switch to my traditional digital camera.

My hope is that with the Mango update coming to Windows Phone the camera quality issues will be addressed.

How I Used the Windows Phone at BlogHer

Before I left for BlogHer, I made a giant list of the things I planned to use my Windows Phone for at the conference.  Now, I’m going through the list to see exactly what worked, what didn’t, and what I just didn’t have the opportunity to use as much as I originally thought.

"As I was called to speak on stage, the Windows Phone was my last-minute savior. I simply pulled up the web page in my browser… and delivered a wonderful performance."

1. Take quick pictures and video: The Windows Phone has a quick camera button on the side so that you can quickly switch to camera or video camera, even if you’re doing something else.  The dedicated camera button was indispensible as I caught opportune shots when there wasn’t time to dig out a larger digital camera. 

The perfect example of this was capturing fashion don’ts for our column; there were several moments during which I had only seconds to snap a picture of an individual before they would disappear in the crowd and I may never see them again.  However, as I mentioned above in the camera quality section, a lot of those quick opportunity photos did not turn out.

It was very handy to be able to switch between camera and video camera on the same screen with just the touch of a button.  I found myself using video more often than I normally do, simply because it was accessible.

2. Post updates to Facebook and Twitter: Not being able to send updates to both Facebook and twitter from one screen was a real inconvenience.  Once I was in the twitter app’s screen, I didn’t have time after every tweet to get out and post the same update to Facebook.  This meant that as I live-tweeted sessions, the same information was not also broadcast on Facebook.

3. Manage my email inbox without being “out of office”: Having all of my e-mail accounts accessible right from the start screen of my Windows Phone was a lifesaver!  I can’t imagine how I would have gotten through the weekend without the constant access to my e-mail on the Windows Phone.  Waiting until I got back to my hotel room after sessions and evening activities would have meant spending hours sifting through hundreds of emails and hoping that I hadn’t missed anything that was time sensitive.

There was also an instance where having the e-mail accessible from my Windows Phone saved me a long walk from a party back to the hotel.  My contact information for an event that I was supposed to attend at the Hard Rock Hotel was not complete, and I couldn’t remember the name of the contact person I was supposed to be meeting!  It was looking like I was going to have to walk all the way from the venue back to my hotel, fire up my laptop and open Outlook to find the e-mail with the woman’s name and cell phone number. 

Instead of wasting all that time, I simply opened up my e-mail from the tile on the start screen of my Windows Phone and quickly scrolled to the message that had the information I needed.  I was able to get access to the venue and find the person I was supposed to be meeting, all thanks to my Windows Phone!

4. Check the weather before I leave my hotel room: My weather and clock app wasn’t as useful as I thought it would be in San Diego; the weather appears to be the same everyday there all year long!

5. Check in for my flights from my mobile phone. I did check in for my flights from my Windows Phone and it worked like a charm.

6. Carry pics of my sweet babies: I didn’t have to carry my mini photo album with pictures of my family to San Diego.  I was able to use the camera roll, the Facebook photos, and the wallpaper to bring along all the pictures I had time to look at.

7. Get directions to private parties at nearby hotels and restaurants.  The maps feature is truly spectacular.  With Windows Phone’s maps feature, it’s quite possible that you will never get lost again!  With the maps feature, the phone automatically detects where you are.  Next, you put in the address you would like to go to, and the Windows Phone gives you directions, step by step, on how to get there.

8. Most importantly: BLOG! I’ve heard that the WordPress app for Windows Phone is really good, but unfortunately I didn’t have time to use it while I was at BlogHer.  For the sessions in which I was live blogging, I brought my Mini laptop with me so that I could use LiveWriter (my program of choice) for blogging.

Windows Phone: Take It or Leave It

Windows Phone comes with my high recommendation as a Must-Have Cell Phone of 2011.  I intended to test it out as a tiny, portable, always-available virtual assistant who can handle anything I needed to do while I was traveling.  I discovered that Windows Phone really can take over the role of a virtual assistant for busy professionals on the go.  Many of the things I’d have to ask my assistant to do for me, I can now do for myself in less time than it would take to assign it to someone else. 

The Windows Phone freed up space for me as I traveled, since I was able to leave an extra video camera, photo album, my Bible, books to read on the plane, calculator, and mp3 player at home.  The Windows Phone was really able to hold all those items inside of it while it gave me access to the world with a connectivity and versatility that I’ve really never known before from a cell phone.

Since the Windows Phone is such a great gadget, I’m excited to announce that I’ll be giving one away in our next big giveaway!  Stay tuned for details on how to enter.  Remember, if you’re the lucky winner, nothing says you have to give it to your teen going back to school, your college kid moving away from home, or your spouse who travels a lot.  You could always keep it for yourself and find out all the things it can do for you!

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Disclaimer: In compliance with the FTC Guides, this article has material connections. IS World Media (ISWM received fees for the writing or publication. This article is an informative public relations post about Microsoft’s Windows Phone. Danelle Ice has a compensated relationship with Microsoft. Windows Phone logos were used with permission by Microsoft.

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