Modelon Solutions

Well, someone upgrade my phone to the upcoming version of Windows Phone 8.1 using the developer preview program (read about it here) and I must say that I like what I see.

As I am from Canada, I do not yet have access to Cortana, but I guess that I will play with that whenever the new version launches officially. By the way, I really wished that Microsoft, phone manufacturers and telcos got their act together and that phones got upgrade automatically. I am tired of hearing that there are updates available and that some phones get upgraded while others do not…

The features I enjoy the most are:

• The action screen, which allows me to see what is going without starting each app seperatly
• The ability to put a pictures of my kids as the background of the start screen – a nice effect that gets everyone talking
• The wordflow keyboard, which doubled my typing speed while taking the typos out
• The new calendar view, which shows me everything about the week at a glance

There are a bunch of other features, and Paul Thurrott does a great job at showing them all here, in a full review.

Here is the list of things i would really like to see in the near future, in order for the platform to stay competitive

• NFC Host Card Emulation – the only way right now to use your phone to pay for stuff is to get a sim card that has a “secure element” that implements payment functionality. Since the sim card comes from your Telco (in my case Rogers in Canada), I am pretty much stuck with their offering, which does not appeal to me. I wish Windows Phone would adopt HCE (as did Android) and that would allow me to deal directly with the payment providers, skipping the intermediaries.
• DLNA – I wish I could “play to” my phone from a Windows 8 computer. That way if i am watching a live feed but need to leave my office for a few minutes, I can just transfer to feed to my phone and continue watching and transfer it back when i get to my desk again.
• DLNA – I also wish I could take a song or video on my phone and play to my tv using DLNA, it works from a Windows 8 computer but now from my phone, very annoying.
• TV – this one is crazy I know, but I don’t subscribe to cable tv and rely on an antenna. Now for those times I do watch tv, why aren’t the free channels that are broadcast over the air not available in HD quality as streams over the internet ? I’d love to see this in some form or another, and why not throw in radio while we are at it. My goal is not to watch tv while in another country, but it is to watch tv in my house or the cottage on a device other than my tv.

That’s it ! I hope some folks at Microsoft read this !