Monthly Archives: May 2011
Sparrow – Improvement from Mail.app?
I finally have enough of Mail.app this week. Mainly because I’ve been spending more time using it constantly last couple of weeks and notice many small things that bug me. So I start looking for alternatives and ran into Sparrow in the Mac AppStore so I decided to give it try.
Disclaimer
I’m not a huge email person. I’m more a face-to-face or Twitter person. I don’t get many emails a day, nor I create many new emails. Partly because I use email for communication only and not for other purposes. I don’t use email as my repository of information, I use Evernote for that. And I don’t use email as a to-do list, I have Remember The Milk. I also apply “Inbox-zero” approach to my emails so they are either actioned pretty much straightaway or they are deleted/archived.
I’ve used Sparrow for only 2 days so my opinion may (and probably will) change in the future.
First full day with Windows Phone 7 and only that
Despite Google Voice continual refusal to work with my AT&T pre-paid number, I decided that today will be a good day to try using my Windows Phone 7 exclusively for the day. My wife, Leah, is still in the UK and my parents who are visiting me here in NY will be with me all day. So no one in particular should be calling me, and I set the call forwarding on my iPhone to the LG.
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Finding Windows Phone 7 apps
On my iPhone/iPad, I rely on a collection of apps to make my life easier, more fun, and happier. In order to be able to fully immerse myself in the Windows Phone 7 world, I am hoping I can find the equivalent on WP7 Marketplace. Here is my progress so far:
iPhone apps |
Windows Phone 7 apps |
| Tweetbot | Birdsong/Twitter/Seesmic |
| Reeder | Feed Reader/GReadr |
| Foursquare | 4th & Mayor |
| Remember The Milk | WinMilk |
| Evernote | fasternote |
| Instapaper | Stacks for Instapaper |
| Weather Channel | Weather Channel |
| BBC News | BBC News Mobile |
| CNN | Web page pinned to Start page |
| Flickr | Flickr |
| Wikipanion | Wikipedia |
| WordPress | WordPress |
| OpenTable | OpenTable |
| Tip Calculator | Tip Calculator |
| Urbanspoon | Yelp |
| IMDb | IMDb |
| Netflix | Netflix |
| Amazon.com | Amazon.com |
| Amazon Kindle | Amazon Kindle |
| Google Voice | GoVoice |
| 1Password | 1Password |
| Pandora | N/A |
| Verizon FiOS DVR Manager | N/A |
| Skype | N/A |
| Meetup | N/A |
| N/A | |
| Words with Friends | N/A |
This is by no mean the complete list of apps I have on my iPhone, just the ones that I use almost every day and thus need to find equivalent on the WP7 side. I’ll update the list as I explore the Windows Phone Marketplace more. My hope is that this post will help other iPhone owners who want to try out WP7.
Windows Phone 7 – First Impression
I recently decided to expand my mobile experience horizon and acquired a Window Phone 7 from Brian Henderson, who I met a few years ago at the Seattle Alt.NET conference. Brian got the phone from this year Microsoft PDC and it is a LG Optimus 7 (a.k.a. LG-E900 outside North America). Having spent about four days with it, here is my raw first impression.
Disclaimer: This is not intended to be a hardware or software review. For that you can find them on the web easily. Here I would just point out things that stick out to me, especially comparing against the iPhone 4/iOS.
