I have written about Windows Phone before. But I had never tried to live with it. And that changed over the course of these last three days. I installed lots of apps, I made calls, took pictures, did video, texted and used social networking sites. Just like I do on my other phones. But it did feel different this time. Let me get this clear. I really do love the feel of the phone. I love the pictures it takes. I like how it integrates things into its user interface. And I definitely, definitely love the looks that Microsoft has given Windows Phone. The tiles are nice and mostly functional. Even though I don’t understand why some are animated and some aren’t.

But in a way, the phone leaves me feeling oddly detached. I am used to the notifications on Android 4.0 and iOS 5. Notifications that tell me when people want to interact with me across all networks. Yes, there is the “Me” tile that I can tap and then go to notifications to see Facebook, Twitter, Windows Live and LinkedIn, but that needs action from me. And as soon as I power up my Nexus S or iPhone, I get flooded with updates that I never saw on the Lumia. And that annoys me. My phone is not about calling. It is about interaction.

And about making a call. That is a completely different problem. When logged on to Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Windows Live and four of my Google accounts, the address book becomes a total nightmare. Lots of people are in several of my networks, which puts them in my address book several times. But not all of them have phone numbers. So, I keep on choosing the wrong contact. And trying to call home, I didn’t even find the number. I am sure there are great ways of streamlining this. I do that on the Nexus S and iPhone as well. But I have not found out how to do it on this one.

I think Nokia made a nice phone, but I am not enjoying it because Windows Phone doesn’t work the way I would want it to. And I might be able to solve a lot of this by choosing the right apps. So, tell me, what are the apps you enjoy most on Windows Phone and why? And how did you sort out your address book? Looking forward to hearing from you so I can give the Lumia a second chance!

I am a firm believer that people want to buy a mobile device that is easy to use and gives them the features they want, for the price they want it at. Almost every day I have people ask me what phone they should buy and how their phone can help them do what they want. And unanimously they ask whether to buy Android or iPhone. I never get asked the question for Windows Phone. Nobody asks me the same about Blackberry either, because you either want one for Blackberry messenger or you are stuck with one as your company phone.

Will a $100 million marketing campaign solve this problem? Hardly. Few people choose their phones on the commercials they have seen or the billboards they drove past. They do choose their phones on what their friends are using and the ease it seems to give them. I agree with Robert Scoble when he responds to Charlie Kindle’s post on why WP7 has not taken off. Through its users, Android and iOS both show they are safe choices. People around you use them. Of all the people I have met over the past three weeks, I have only met one with a Nokia Lumia. One. Hardly a match for the people that have told me about their new iPhone 4S or Android phone.

I am afraid the $100 million might just vaporize on the way to selling a phone. Back in 2007 the launch of the iPhone changed the mobile phone landscape. Back in 2009, carriers were still longing for a good iPhone competitor to offer their customers. Now, in 2012 we have it all. Back in 2007, developers were eager to jump the bandwagon to build their coolest ideas into iOS apps. Now, few startups even see Windows Phone or Blackberry as a viable market. So they develop for iOS and Android only.
I am assuming Microsoft is launching a ‘regular’ marketing campaign with Nokia and AT&T in which they will be targeting consumers to buy the Nokia Ace. What happens is that we get into a circle of people waiting for each other and no phones being sold. Because the consumers will only change to Windows Phone when their favorite apps are running on WP and developers will not be eager to do WP development unless WP reaches enough critical mass to make it worth their while.

Solution? Take a good chunk of that budget and target developers, startups and innovators. To port their existing apps to WP, but also to develop cool new apps that will be exclusive to WP for now. I firmly believe there is a market for WP. However, you need to know where it is to be able to benefit from it. For now, WP phones will mainly be bought by companies to replace their older Windows Mobile devices. A device management issue. But startups can make the most of this by launching themselves specifically geared to business development. There is enough to do in that market still and there is money to sell your apps. And making that work will show other developers that WP might be a financial goldmine waiting for them.

In essence? Spending $100 million on marketing is not going to cut it. It needs to be spent on the eco system that will allow your customer to do what they want with your product. Only then will you be making progress.

Microsoft has taken another approach. Just like Apple and Google, Microsoft asks you $99 to become an official developer. Like the others, Microsoft only allows official developers to offer apps in the market. However, unlike the others, Microsoft also offers a way around it. For $9 you can get ChevronWP7 labs. That will allow you to unlock your Windows Phone to run your own code on it, or to run the code of others. You can write code and you can share it. You cannot sell it through the market. But it will allow you to move forward and test the waters.

Find out more at http://www.chevronwp7.com/
(Image pulled from the ChevronWP7 homepage)

Ice Cream Sandwich, as Google has named their new Android 4.0, is full of great new developments making it smarter and easier to use. Just a quick run of all the new features:

Multitasking has been improved with a new screen that allows you to flip through your running and last used programs. Just a simple drag will get you straight back into them.
Resizable widgets allow you to adjust the size of a widget to show more or less information depending on your needs. A great addition as it will allow you to arrange your stuff better.
Lock screen actions allow you to see your notifications without unlocking your phone and it also allows you to quickly take a picture as we have already seen the iPhone do. You can also quickly respond to a caller by sending them a standard text message when you are not available. Great if you want to tell someone you would love to talk to them, but the timing is just off.
The new notification screen allows you to do more with your notifications and work with them more intuitively. It has just improved on its own standard again.
The new spellchecker and soft keyboard allow you to input text even faster with better error correction. Naturally we have to see how this is going to work in practice, but with new word suggestion technology it might just kill those autocorrect failures.
Obviously Androind comes with a new voice input engine. It has an always open microphone and it will allow you to dictate large texts including punctuation on your phone. Sure, it might not tell you whether you need an umbrella, but with its technology supporting many languages and quick correction for dictation errors, this might just be the ticket to be more productive on the road. I have to say that the voice input engine on 2.3 has been my most used feature on the Nexus S, so I am looking forward to this. And besides, the versatility of Android allowed programmers to put together Iris in eight hours during a hackathon. I bet a competitor for Siri will not be long.
For people with metered subscriptions, the new Android version allows you actively limit your data usage with great graphical overviews of your data usage that you can set your own limits on.
Android also has new accessibility options that will allow you to use your smartphone without even seeing the screen. These features are great for the visually impaired with audible feedback on what you are doing.
The new people and profiles brings more information together about your contacts and creates a new “me” profile that can be easily shared with others.
There are also changes to the calendars making them more unified and a new visual voicemail app that allows other apps to add messages for a complete overview.
And then we got to the toys. Google has been playing with the camera as well. The new camera app has face detection, a continuous focus setting, but also a tap to focus option that we have been missing for a while now. To take a better shot at that scenic location, the new camera app allows you to do a single-motion panoramic shot, saving a lot of stitching. The gallery has been improved and now features a photo editor as well. And the video camera allows you to do live effects for transforming whatever you are filming. Not sure why you would want to do that, but hey, it can be fun. More useful is the new feature to film yourself against a background that you have set yourself.
Finally Android will allow you to easily make a screenshot of your phone and share that. Now that is a feature that I have been waiting for.
Google didn’t do anything to make its phone cloud connected, but they did take the time to explain that they didn’t need to do that, as they have always been completely in the clouds.
Google will also bring more of the Chrome experience to Android. It will sync bookmarks with your computer and has dramatically improved rendering performance. Looking forward to seeing that.
The email experience has also been improved with better auto-completion of recipients, new quick response options, nested subfolders and new security options for enterprises.
And here is where it becomes geeky. And I love it. Android has been fitted out with Beam. Beam can share whatever you are doing with another Android phone through NFC (Near Field Communications). Whether that is a website, contact information or even a game you are playing, just put the two devices together and you see the same thing.
To keep your phone from being used by people you don’t really like, you can now use face recognition. Hold the camera in front of your face and it will unlock if it recognizes your face. During the demo something did go wrong there, but it will probably be ironed out soon enough.
Oh, and for sharing your stuff, you can easily set up a direct wifi connection between two devices as well, having your own private network. Not necessarily with an internet connection.

Seriously, I am looking forward to this update. For me, this has countless updates that I will be using every day. Last week I was doubting whether I was going to get the iPhone 4S. Now, the only difference with the 4S for me would be Siri. And I am not going to spend that kind of money to talk to my phone. I would rather talk to the people around me. Besides, someone is going to build an alternative anyway. So, I am looking forward to Google rolling out the Galaxy Nexus in November as I am sure my Nexus S will receive the Android Ice Cream Sandwich update as well. Too bad they did not specify a launch date for that just yet. Read up on everything on Android.com.

“Siri, is it going to rain?”

“Yes, it is going to rain in three days, that is why I have taken the liberty to order you a new umbrella from Amazon in black. They have promised me it will be here before the rain starts. Until then it is better that you stay indoors.”

“Euhm, Siri…”

“No worries, I haggled for a 5% discount with EC2. We know each other.”

“Yes, nice, but Siri…”

“And you know you need a new umbrella, because the last black one you had was destroyed in that storm last week. I did order that very sturdy Dutch on that can withstand a typhoon.”

“Yes, but Siri…”

“No John, stop whining. You know you need an umbrella. If you don’t you are only going to get wet and catch a cold. And we don’t want that, do we?”

See, I see a host of new problems…

iOS 5 comes with a truckload of new features that will make the iPhone just nicer to use. And the good thing is that it is compatible with most iPhones and iPads. That means that I can still run it on my iPad 1 and you could still run it on your 3GS. Notifications have taken a leaf out of the Android book. It is a pull down now and you can immediately go to wherever the notification came from. Naturally Apple gave iCloud a good part of the stage today. Mainly because so much in iOS 5 will be moving towards the cloud. To sync with your other idevices mainly. Sharing your photos all over your iOS devices, sharing your music with iTunes Match, storing things you want to read later etc.

And so the technobabble goes on. But what really got me going, is the new SIRI voice assistant. Yes, I know, it will be English mainly first, but they claim it will be there in other languages as well. So who knows, it might learn to pronounce our Dutch names at some point. But the intelligence is really cool. Asking whether you need an umbrella gets Siri going to find out what the weather will be like in your area and then telling you whether you need an umbrella based on the forecasts in your area. It can track where you are and notify you of things you need to do when you get close to a specific place. And it can combine your information and your question to set appointments for you or reschedule them with simple human questions. Yes, it all looks awesome, but I am still skeptical. Having first used voice recognition in 1999 for a project, I am always expecting it to fail somewhere. And my Android speech recognition does that as well. 85% of the time it spells out the tweets I dictate quite well, but that other 15% often make it an annoying application.

Yes, I am looking forward to the new iPhone 4S. It seems to be a nice phone. Will I pre order it? I am not sure yet. Apparently the iPhone 4S goes on pre-order on the 7th of October with the first countries getting it on the 14th. The Netherlands will have to wait for the 28th of October with 20 other countries. Prices are set to $199 for the 16Gb, $299 for the 32Gb and $399 for the 64Gb version in the USA. Prices for other countries have not been released yet.

UPDATE: The French Apple store currently shows that the iPhone 4S will be available without a contract starting at € 629. No other prices are mentioned, but with Apple logic that might mean that the €629 is for the 16Gb, €729 will be for the 32Gb and it might be as much as €829 for the 64Gb. Pretty pricy phones.

UPDATE 2: The French Apple store currently shows that my estimation of the iPhone 4S prices was slightly off. The prices rise €110 per doubling of the storage. So, the price for the 16 Gb is €629, the 32Gb is €739 and the 64Gb will be a hefty €849. If you are planning a trip to the US in November, you will be able to get an unlocked iPhone 4S 16Gb for $649, 32Gb for $749 and the 64Gb will cost $849. Not enough to cover the cost of your ticket, but if you are bringing 10…

The original. Click it to go to the full set with 10 filters.

Obviously, no Flickr app would be complete without the option to take a picture and uploading it to Flickr straight from your phone. And this app does that. Or so I have heard from others, as it crashes on my Nexus S every time I take a picture. Luckily for me, you can also pull a picture out of your phones’ gallery and use that.

The new Flickr app has got 10 filters that can be applied to your pictures for that Instagramesque feeling. Does it cut it? Well, it comes close. The filters are nice and consistent, but without a picture that matches the filter, it won’t be nice to look at. I have taken a standard photo with some nice colors, sun and shade and you can see the filters at work.

Will I use it? Well, I am doubtful. Why? Well, first off, because it crashed on me. I tend to dislike that. Besides, I share most of my pictures through Mobypicture and use the Camera Effects app if I want filters. Is it a bad app? No, it is actually quite a nice app. Great controls and easy to locate what you need.

As an extra, Flickr has launched Photo Sessions. A way to share your slideshow with your friends regardless of the device they are on. And they can comment on your photos etc. Nice. But I miss the audio channel of being able to talk to your friends to hear them as you share the pictures. Just a thought.

The Kindle Fire has been based on the hardware of the RIM Playbook, but with Amazon’s own Android based operating system that seems more than enough to offer a good user experience. Obviously I have not had my hands on one the people who have, seem to be pleased with it. A good reason might be that Amazon firmly believes that everything you use on the tablet you should be able to use from the cloud. And that makes the 8Gb storage limit much more believable and practical.

Lets be honest, the biggest thing in the Kindle Fire launch is the new Silk browser. the Silk browser is a new angle that Amazon is taking with their Elastic Computing Cloud (EC2). They already offered the power and storage of their servers to startups and anyone who wanted to take an advantage of their speed. But now they are offering it to everyone through the Silk browser.

The Silk browser helps you access webpages smoother and quicker than other tablets. Why? Well, basically because you do not browse the web yourself, but Amazon’s EC2 does it for you. You send out the request and EC2 gets the page and repackages it into something a lot simpler and easier to load for your Kindle Fire. And as you will be browsing pages that others browse as well, those pages can be served faster than you would get them from a conventional browser.

However, there is a downside to Silk. And that is called EC2. That is, if you value your privacy. There is a reason why Amazon offers the Kindle Fire at $199. It is called sponsorship. Because Amazon is going to learn endlessly more from your tablet than any kind of customer research can teach them. They will go with you on your surfing trips, your trips to find the best deals, your trips to relate to your social networks and everywhere else. And it will do it in the nicest way possible. So, Google, where does your chromebook stand now?

In all honesty, the Kindle Fire is a nice tablet. It looks nice, seems to be fast enough and with Amazon’s appstore for Android you have all the possibilities you get on tablets twice the price. The Kindle Fire is going to have a pretty big impact on the tablet market. Here’s for hoping there will be EC2 privacy settings.

If you are wondering where your update is, you can check for yourself here.

The good thing about the slow release is that Microsoft is trying to fix possible bugs as the software is released, updating as they go. Smart move. Read more on the Microsoft blog.

Just a little while ago, Ben Rudolph also posted a run through the features of Mango and included the Web Market. An interesting step. Almost a year ago, I spent some time with Robert Scoble talking about how an app market for Windows Phone would be useless as the target audience for Windows Phone would not buy apps for their phone. Now, with what I have seen of Mango, that might be about to change.

I am looking forward to reading the first reports of updated phones. Got one? Let me know.

In essence that is a great move. Someone leaves you as a customer and you want to know why, so you ask them. However, what is my trigger to fill out the questionnaire? In this case, the only thing mentioned in the email announcing the questionnaire, was that all the answers will be kept confidential. As if that is of any concern to me. In fact, I am telling everyone who wants to know that I am leaving Vodafone and why. And the interesting part of this is that it is not even about the price. It is about my customer experience.

So, yes, my new Telfort subscription is cheaper and has the same network quality. But what triggered me to change providers is the way Vodafone treated me over the past months. In the past I have had my trouble with Vodafone, but usually their customer service solved the problems. Until now. A couple of months ago the Dutch providers have jumped the data train. Whatever was possible before isn’t anymore. Unlimited internet subscriptions are turned into limited versions while prices are multiplied. And if it remains unlimited, the speed drops down after a set amount of traffic. Annoying to say the least. So, I approached Vodafone Special Services (yes, a couple of years ago they told me I was a valued customer) to ask them whether they could give me my average data usage over the past couple of months. And then it went silent. I asked again and it stayed silent. I the end, I got an offer from another party to switch to their network. So, I called regular customer service and during our conversation on the length of my subscription, they told me that they could just give me the figure for the last three months. Apparently Special Services no longer thought I was a valued customer as nobody responded even though every customer service employee can see the answer to my question with a single click.

Was I unhappy with Vodafone in general? No. Over the past seven years I have been very happy about their services. However, if I spend around €1200 with you every year, I would at least expect the courtesy of answering a simple question. In the questionnaire they also asked me whether I was approached personally with an offer and whether that would have changed my choice. That is hardly a question. Of course it would have helped if someone would have contacted me and talked with me about my personal needs in mobile communications and how they could match that. And a good offer could have kept me with Vodafone. That call would at least have shown me that my relationship with Vodafone was a two way street. Now the feeling remained that my relationship with Vodafone depended on me. My money, my effort, my enthusiasm.

If a client leaves you, it is great to ask them why they are leaving. You can learn from it. However, it is much better to keep your customer from leaving you. Talk to them before they leave. Answer their questions. Show them that you value the relationship with them as well. That is not hard to do. Most people are quite happy with a call or a personal message. If you run a subscription service, make sure you contact your customers in time, to see whether there are better solutions you can offer. Your relationship with your customer is much more important to them than the actual price of the subscription. Because the perceived value is different.