All the standard applications you’ve come to except on any smart phone are pre-installed: Alarm, calculator, calendar, camera, internet browser, gallery, e-mail client, messaging, maps, a market for downloading third party applications, music and video player, phone dialer and a contact list.

The standard applications don’t really bring anything new to the table: The calculator turns into a semi-scientific one when the phone is used in horizontal mode, but this isn’t something we haven’t seen before. The calendar application is fairly standard, with the option to hide or show calendars synchronized from any accounts your phone is connected to. It only supports to date views, either day or month; no week view. The month view is also unbelievably tiny. Your appointments are displayed, but it’s impossible to read anything, forcing you to return to the day view to see what you are actually doing on a given day. Unfortunately, the weakest of the standard applications is the application many people use the most: The internet browser. It’s slow and it doesn’t support proper auto alignment of text when zooming in and out while browsing desktop versions of web sites. This results in a lot of scrolling, which makes it a hassle to read a lot of text.

In addition to the standard applications, Windows Phone 7.5 also sports two applications specific to the OS: Xbox Live integration and an Office application. The Xbox Live integration is probably a great tool if you have an Xbox 360 that you use, but mine is in its box after we moved homes last year and it doesn’t look like I’ll set it up anytime soon. The Office software can come in handy if you’re out and about and have to read, edit or create Office documents. From what I can tell, the Office application can read Word, PowerPoint and Excel documents, but only create new Word and Excel documents. Practical, but let’s be honest: If you sit down to work on the company budget on your phone, you will probably go crazy after ten minutes. It’s great for those last minute changes to a presentation, though. Everything can be saved on Microsoft’s SkyDrive, making it easy to get hold of the modified version on you Windows PC.

There are also a few LG applications installed on the LG Optimus 7 E900 I’m using for this test, but since the focus here is the Windows Phone 7.5 OS and not any good (or bad) ideas LG might have had, I’ll ignore these applications.

The keyboard has it’s good sides and bad sides. At first I found myself mistyping a lot, but this is only to be expected since I’m used to another keyboard. I managed to hit the right keys after a while, but a an option to calibrate the keyboard to my writing style had been great. It supports more than one active layout at the same time, and I have both Norwegian and English configured. Switching between them is done with a click of a button on the keyboard and the dictionary used for prediction changes automatically together with the layout. Unfortunately, the word prediction is rather slow and normally doesn’t show any suggestions before I’m done writing the word. Misspelled words are underlined, though, and if you want to replace a word with something from the dictionary, simply click the word and chose from the suggestions. Nifty. Copy and paste is supported, but not cut, for some reason. Moving the cursor inside the text is implemented rather elegant: Instead of long-clicking and getting the magnification glass (like on iOS) or clicking on the text a thousand times before the cursor is where you want it (like on Android), you long-click and get a cursor you can conveniently place in the text. You can move your finger all over the screen, but the cursor will snap inside the text area. This way, you can move your finger so that it doesn’t cover the word you want to move the cursor to.

One of the more confusing aspects with Windows Phone 7.5 is the way multitasking is handled. If I launch the Twitter client, start writing a tweet, then press the Windows button to return to the start screen and eventually re-launch the Twitter client from the start screen, I’d expect to be able to continue writing the tweet. But, no. Instead the a new instance of the application is launched and the tweet is gone. To use the kind of multitasking I want I instead have to long-click on the back-button on the phone, wait a second for the open applications to be displayed and then return to Twitter from there. The same is the case for the pre-installed messaging application: If you hit the Windows button in the middle of writing a text and you accidentally re-launch the messaging application from the start screen instead of using the long-click-back-button-trick, your text is gone. Weird and not very well thought through, to be honest.

And while we’re on the subject of the messaging application: It doesn’t play too well with iOS and the Emoji application. Anniken sent me some texts containing Emoji smilies and all I got on the Windows Phone was incoherent system error messages and blank texts. Yeah, I know that we’re talking hard core first world problems here, but the OS should handle incoming text messages it can interpret in a more user friendly way.

During my testing the phone notified me of a new version of the operating system being available. Windows Phone 7.5 doesn’t support Over The Air (OTA) updates, but requires you to install the Zune application from Microsoft. It’s a 100+ MB download and even though the software itself does a lot more than just update your phone, it feels like overkill to have to download and install such a behemoth when my only intention was to get the update installed. Once Zune was up and running, however, the update process itself was a breeze and only took about 15 minutes to complete.

All in all, there is nothing about Windows Phone 7.5 applications that really makes me go “WOW”! Yes, they do have their pros, like the e-mail client’s way of conveniently letting you group e-mail accounts and show everything in one inbox, or the text messaging application’s integration with Windows Live Messenger. But there is hardly anything in the application mix that makes Windows Phone 7.5 stand out from iOS and Android.

But we can’t just buckle under and crawl into the fetal position under a desk because we failed once. Now the planning has started for the 2011 USA Tour: Reloaded.

So, what are four well-set guys going to do in the States for two weeks? I honestly don’t know much about what’s happening in the cities we’ll pass through on our route, but thankfully there are tools that can help us. RoadTrip America has such a tool; a “RoadTrip Map Wizard” that let’s you plot your route and helps you find things to do along the way. What I ended up with after punching in the route was this:

It’s not easy to see from the map, but we’re starting in Salt Lake City, moving on to Elko, then Reno, San Francisco, Santa Maria, Los Angeles and then we finish off in Las Vegas. Of course. What is easy to see is that there isn’t shit to do between Salt Lake City and Reno. But that’s intentional, believe it or not. We wanted to get a glimpse of no-man’s-land-America. U-turn America, if you will. But without all the killing. Still, I’m sure we can find something to do if we befriend some locals. The natives always know best.

The RoadTrip America RoadTrip Map Wizard^TM mostly came up with things along the route that were more suited for the 60+ versions of us than the 30+ versions we are now. What about the Winchester Mystery House?

Sarah Winchester, heiress of the Winchester Rifle empire, was a very rich woman, and the house she had constructed shows it. She was also a bit eccentric, and after a psychic reputedly informed her that she’d die if construction on the house ever stopped, she took the advice to heart and used her fortune to finance round-the-clock construction beginning in 1884.

I think I’ll pass. The same goes for the Giant Wisteria Vine:

This Wisteria Vine totally covers a large tree and is one of the more amazing sights along this little traveled road in the early spring.

Come on! It’s a vine! After playing around with Google Maps for a while, I discovered that there are plenty of other, and by far more interesting, things to do than go the Winchester Mystery House or look at the Giant Wisteria Vine. Take my search for “Shooting Range near Reno, NV, United States“, for instance. One of the results was Nevada Recreation, whose mascot is a squirrel with a machine gun who is, and I quote, “completely
NUTS about his job”.

An excerpt from Nevada & Local Gun Laws (emphasis is mine):

In Nevada, you may carry a loaded or unloaded firearm on your person without a permit so long as the firearm is fully exposed (known as “open carry”).purse, jacket, etc.) is considered “concealed carry” and is discussed below.

Well, seems like it should be possible for me to get a chance to fire that Dessert Eagle (item #48 on The List).

But since the important thing here is the operating system, we’ll ignore the hardware whenever possible – one of the reasons why Android is frowned upon by some people is that many phones with crappy hardware have been allowed into the wild. For instance, what was HTC thinking when they released the HTC Wildfire? I don’t know. Of course, the OS and the hardware go hand-in-hand, but when it’s plausible that an issue is directly related to the hardware LG decided to use in the E900, I’ll look the other way.

One thing you won’t see in this entry is a lot of screen shots. Windows Phone 7.5 has the same issue that haunted Android for a very long time: There’s no easy way to take screen shots on the phone. This is the kind of missing feature that makes me want to punch myself in the face. Apple did this right from iOS 2.0, released way back then in 2008: If you want people to show off their cool, new phone to people in the interwebs, you have to make it easy for them to take screenshots they can share.

But let’s get started.

Even though I said I would ignore the hardware, it’s the hardware I will start with. The phone. It’s so tiny. To give you an idea why I feel this way, let me show you where I’m coming from now: My current phone¹⁾, the classic Samsung Galaxy Tab measures 7.48 x 4.74 x 0.47 (190.1 x 120.45 x 11.98 mm), while the Optimus 7 dwarfs in comparison at 4.92 x 2.35 x 0.45 (125 x 59.8 x 11.5 mm). The screen is also considerably smaller; 7 inches on the tab and 3.8 inches on the Optimus 7. Here’s a close-to-life-size picture of the two side by side:

It’s possible to place three Optimus 7 phones (horizontally) on top of the Galaxy Tab. As you can probably imagine, this is a whole new world for me – or at least a revisit to an old one – I’ve used the Galaxy Tab for about a year now and grown accustomed to its might. And size sometimes matters.

When turning on the Optimus 7 for the first time, you’re greeted with what has become familiar to everyone who has configured a brand new smartphone: Setting up an account. In the case of Windows Phone 7.5 it’s a Windows Live account, which will automatically connect you to Microsoft’s Windows Live services: Hotmail, Messenger, SkyDrive and Xbox Live. If you have more than one Windows Live account, it’s possible to configure them all. Hotmail is automatically set up and Messenger integrates nicely with the text messaging application.

Windows Phone 7.5 lets you connect your phone to a wide range of services, in addition to Windows Live: Exchange, Yahoo! Mail, Google, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and POP and IMAP e-mail. I configured pretty much everything except for Yahoo! Mail and Facebook, and setting up everything was a breeze. It’s only possible to connect to one Twitter and LinkedIn account, though, and I’m guessing the same limitation goes for Facebook. It is, however, possible to connect to several Google accounts.

The connected services integrate beautifully with the contact list application: Even though I’m connected to LinkedIn, I don’t want to pollute the contact list with every LinkedIn contact I have. Thankfully, it’s easy to hide all the LinkedIn contacts. But even though these contacts are not displayed directly in the contact list, the applicaiton will still enrich other contacts with information from LinkedIn. As an example, many of my Google contacts don’t have a profile picture. The contact list solves this nicely by adding the LinkedIn picture to the contact, even though LinkedIn contacts aren’t displayed in the contact list.

The only issues I had when connecting the phone to external services was that I couldn’t get any of the Exchange contacts to appear on the phone. But this might be cause by a setting on the Exchange server, and if not, probably something that would solve itself with a Google search. One other thing I usually do as my standard playing-around-with-a-new-phone-routine is to configure notifications, ring tones and whatnot. For some reason I was unable to find a ring tone that sounded like an actual phone. The ring tones ranged from porn background music to dance trance, but nothing that would make my phone sound like, you know, a phone. Even the ring tones titled “bell”, “classic” and “bling” didn’t remotely resemble a ringing phone. It’s not the end of the world, but a bit surprising.

After the initial setup you are taken to the desktop, or what is just called “start” in Windows Phone 7.5. It gives you easy access to the most frequently used features of the phone, but it’s possible to configure the start screen to fit your own needs.

One of the most noticeable things you’ll see on the start screen is how different it looks compared to the iPhone and typical Android phones. Gone are gloss and shadows. Instead Microsoft has created Metro, based on the design principles of classic Swiss graphic design. Microsoft’s design team says that the Metro UI is partly inspired by signs commonly found at public transport systems and that it’s designed to be “sleek, quick, modern” and a “refresh” from the icon-based interfaces of Windows, Android and iOS. Metro places emphasis on good typography and has large text that catches the eye. It’s very different, there’s no doubt about that.

Personally, I think Metro is great. It’s clean, simple and filled with tons of subtle animations that actually makes sense and hopefully don’t drain the battery too fast. The pre-installed applications that are designed using the Metro design guidelines look absolutely stunning. Both the People (contact list) and e-mail applications are a real treat to the eyes. Some external applications, like Spotify for Windows Phone is also designed using the Metro design guidelines and it’s great to both look at and use. It beats the Android version by a mile and a half and even has proper playlist folder support, which is missing on Android.

The problem with the design guidelines, though, is that they are just that: Guidelines. The majority of the available Windows Phone application are made by programmers like me, who tend to focus on the inner workings of the applications first, the functionality second and the visual design as a distant third. It’s a shame, because when you throw developer designed applications into a mix of stunning looking applications design with Metro in mind, these application looks horrible.

I’ve only just scratched the surface of Windows Phone 7.5 and there’s still a long way to go before the three weeks are up. It will be interesting to see if Microsoft has been able to create an operating system good enough for me to break away from my old habits and learn some new ones without me going all Trichotillomania.

1) Yes, I will continue to call it a “phone” even though I’ve never held it up to my ear when making a phone call. Hands free, people!

Could I have been doing some drunken internet shopping? It has only happened once before, and it’s a long time ago. I watched an excellent movie, Deep Rising, after coming home from a long night out and decided I just had to buy it on DVD. It was impossible to come by in Norway, but luckily I managed to dig it up in an obscure American online store. A few weeks later the DVD arrived in the mail. With P&P, import tax and an unfortunate exchange rate, the price of the thing easily exceeded three times the normal price of a DVD. And after seeing the movie again I learned a hard lesson in life: Drunken internet shopping is a really bad idea. The movie was crap.

If I had been riding the plastic VISA dragon again, this registered packet from Amsterdam could potentially contain anything. Maybe it was a tiny prostitute or some dope?¹⁾ Should I worry about plain clothes cops hiding in the snowdrift outside the post office?

As it turned out, I had nothing to worry about. Of course. What I received was my RIPE Atlas probe. RIPE NCC is an independent, not-for-profit membership organisation that supports the infrastructure of the Internet through technical coordination and it’s located in – you guessed it – Amsterdam.

With the Atlas, RIPE is building the next generation active Internet measurement system. It is currently in the prototype stage and will eventually scale up to thousands of measurement nodes distributed around the globe. A probe is a tiny hardware device that runs measurements in the RIPE Atlas system and reports these measurements to the data collection components. I’ve now connected one of the nodes to my network to feeds the Atlas with relevant measurement data. Or all my passwords and credit card numbers.

I’m not doing this only to do RIPE a favor. I’m suspecting the my ISP has overbooked their bandwidth capacity considerably in my area: Last week I was at home sick for a day and around noon I started a download that sped through at maximum speed. As one should expect, since I do, you know, pay for that speed. In the evening, however, downloads tend to just crawl along. The most likely culprit is someone with way too much warez to share. I suspect the downstairs neighbors; I’m pretty sure I can hear the PSU fans of a server when I walk past their front door.

With the Atlas probe I’m hoping to extract some measurements that show ping values skyrocket and bandwidth measurements plummet in the evening. It’s nice to have some sort of data when sending that angry (but polite) old-cranky-man e-mail to the ISP. And if I don’t get the data I want from the probe, I’m still contributing to the RIPE Atlas. If you also want to connect a probe to your network, you can use this form.

1) Just to clarify; I’ve never order neither (tiny) prostitutes nor dope (on the internet).

Whoever wins gets to go on a conference of their choice. My choice, should the grand price mysteriously fall into my lap? Black Hat USA. Some of the greatest minds in IT security come together to share some of the most impressive hacks you’ll see that year. Who would not want to go to a conference where they recommend that you to leave all your gadgets at home and just bring a notebook and a pen? If you bring any gadgets you can be pretty sure they are hacked beyond all recognition when you leave the conference. Sounds like fun to me!

But to win an app contest where the competitors are the “best consultants in the universe”¹⁾ can be challenging and a killer app is required. Unfortunately, I have no idea what to develop. I did have a pretty good concept outlined, but it turned out the data required isn’t public and collecting the data myself is impossible, or at least not very practical. Also, all the killer applications are already developed. But the thing is that most these killer applications are based on an idea so simple and trivial any idiot could come up with them. Another option is to take a great concept and do it better. But how many flashlight applications are there room for? At least 1000.

During the last couple of days I’ve worked really hard to come up with a good concept. I’ve even brought out that pen and paper all the creative people recommend. I’m this close to starting to write on Anniken’s napkins and I have still not had a great idea that hasn’t already been done. I’ve given myself a deadline until next week to come up with something. If that doesn’t happen, I’ll just have to leech off of someone else’s great idea.

The Simpsons did it.

1) Totally unbiased management quote.

• “A lie told often enough becomes the truth.” — Vladimir Lenin
• “Can a nation be free if it oppresses other nations? It cannot.” — Vladimir Lenin
• “Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
• “Every man is guilty of all the good he did not do.” — Voltaire
• “I don’t know where I’m going, but I’m on my way.” — Voltaire
• “I am free of all prejudice. I hate everyone equally.” — W. C. Fields
• “I never drink water because of the disgusting things that fish do to it.” — W. C. Fields
• “It ain’t what they call you, it’s what you answer to.” — W. C. Fields
• “Take me down to the bar! We’ll drink breakfast together!” — W. C. Fields
• “Price is what you pay. Value is what you get.” — Warren Buffett
• “Everybody is ignorant, only on different subjects.” — Will Rogers
• “Thought is free.” — William Shakespeare
• “A conservative is a man who sits and thinks. Mostly sits.” — Woodrow Wilson
• “If you want to make enemies, try to change something.” — Woodrow Wilson
• “To you I’m an atheist; to God, I’m the loyal opposition.” — Woody Allen
• “Cut my pie into four pieces, I don’t think I could eat eight.” — Yogi Berra
• “There are no traffic jams on the extra mile.” — Zig Ziglar
• I would rather tell you one truth you don’t like than to tell you a hundred lies you do like.

Thankfully, there are sites like ThemeForest. ThemeForest works as an aggregator for all those people trapped in basements around the world and enables them to sell their creations on a secure market place. Not unlike how all other market places work. Many theme artists make good money on ThemeForest as well, having sold for a million USD or more. I’m guessing that the creators of ThemeForest also laugh a little when they go to bed at night.

Unfortunately, there isn’t exactly an abundance of responsive premium themes either. Since there is limited money flowing in the blogging sphere – very few bloggers actually make money from their site – premium themes tend to be tailored for businesses and creative professions who need portfolios. I’m neither a business nor creative enough to need a portfolio, and this makes the selection of usable themes even more limited.

So far I’ve seriously considered Rewrite, PixelPower and Angular. Rewrite and PixelPower are blog themes, while Angular primarily is a portfolio theme with a nice blog section. All three themes look great and work well in terms of responsiveness. Previews are also available for all three themes (links above) and this gives the potential buyer an impression how the theme will look with his or her content.

Now, the problem with the previews is that the theme authors use just the right kind of content when the previews are created. I’ve got ten years¹⁾ worth of content with various length, images in all shapes and sizes and everything in a format that can’t exactly be described as “consistent”: The design has changed a lot over those ten years and the content format has changed with it. To be sure that things look good, or at least OK, with a new theme requires that I’m able to test drive everything with my own content. This can be challenging with a premium theme and shelling out $30+ for something untested that might not work well isn’t really an option.

So the hunt continues.

1) Woah! It’s been ten years! Countless hours poured into something that has helped me keep my head above water every now and then.

• WordPress is huge.
• It’s no longer a pain in the ass to run on Windows.
• Responsive web design is the way to go.
• Plugin development is something I’d like to dive deeper into.
• I discovered the distraction free writing feature.

In the short term, responsive web design was the presentation that triggered me the most. I’m familiar with response web design and use a lot of responsive sites. Even this site is somewhat responsive, it’ll remove some white space on a device with a smaller screen, for instance a tablet device. Now I want to make the site’s design even more responsive and better looking on mobile devices. WPtouch is a great plugin, but when it’s possible to get the site to look familiar even on small screen, there’s really no need to use it.

One option would be to make the current theme more responsive, but that will probably be a lot of work for someone like me. Also, from past attempts to do my own redesign from scratch, I know my limitations. So my best bet is what I always do: Find a nice looking, free theme and hack away!

I’ve been looking around a little, and at this point Renova seems like a good option. But I’d prefer to have two columns, not just one. That can probably be arranged, though. It might take a while, but I’m positive the next design will be responsive. For more responsive goodness, have a look at the Media Queries showcase.

At least I managed to write wrestle through this entry and schedule it yesterday!

09:53 CET: After a good morning walk I’m at Thon Hotell Opera. I’ve got my name tag and t-shirt (another one of them convention t-shirts you never use) and the main room is starting to fill up, but it’s not crowded enough for a picture yet. I’ve seen one familiar face, one of the presenters – who looked somewhat hung over. There’s public Wi-Fi, by the way. I’m not connecting.

I’ve been trying to use the Android WordPress app to update, but holy crap, the thing is unstable when handling images: Crashes, XML parsing errors, disappearing updates. The WordPress app has them all. So I fell back to using Opera Mobile, which works, but it’s not ideal since the WordPress admin GUIDE isn’t exactly exactly made for mobile.

11:25 CET: After Hanni Ross’ opening remarks I know now even more ways how to contribute to WordPress. Not sure where she got the percentages on the Norwegian translations of WordPress, though, because they don’t match the ones on translate.wordpress.org. And now: “Writing a plugin” by Morten Hauan. Title in English, presentation in Norwegian. Trailer fraud?

12:08 CET: Hauan gave a great introduction to plugin writing in WordPress. I’ve only touched the surface of plugin development in WordPress myself, and got some ideas on how to change wp-days-ago with what I learned. Next up: “Responsive Web Design” by Wilhem Joys Andresen. Voted best dressed this evening.

12:38 CET: Woah, that was fast! Wilhem, former Opera Software employee, now independent consultant, briefly took us through media queries. Nothing new and groundbreaking, but the more you talk about it, the greater the chance designers around the world will see the light. It’s the future, man (and it started way back in 2001). Unlike 99% of other presenters, Joys Andresen finished twenty minutes before schedule. Soon it’s time for lunch and a room packed with nerds awkwardly socializing.

13:57 CET: We’re back from lunch and I’m happy to report that there will be no pictures of food. But the lunch was nice. Next Marko Heijnen will tell us how to create native apps with WordPress. Rumors have it that the hipster phone will be involved. Maybe Marko knows something about the bugs in the Android client as well.

14:31 CET: And Marko is done. Must have been a nightmare for the interpreters to handle that one. Not as much native focus as I’d hoped, but gave a good introduction to how you can use WordPress while thinking way out of the box.

14:52 CET: I don’t know about you, but I just had a powernap. Feeling fresh an ready for Josh Holmes, who will tell us how to run WordPress on Windows. My experience: Noooooo!

16:01 CET: Josh is done and I’m not scared of running WordPress on Windows anymore. The rest of the pack is preparing for lighting sessions, while I’m heading out to do some errands. Back at 17:00 sharp for Zé Fontainhas’ keynote.

17:01 CET: Let the keynote commence!

17:38 CET: Aaand we’re done. Zé took us through the history of WordPress and took a quick look into the future. Certainly interesting stuff, followed by a good Q& A session.

I’m coming back next year. Given that there will be a next year, of course.

Pictures after the break.