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Windows phone 7 directions button missing

Posted on 2010/12/02
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When playing around in Windows Phone 7 I noticed that the Bing Maps functionality has a very nice and fast way to calculate a route from the point where you are by pressing the Directions button. (Your current location is determined by the A-GPS sensor in your WP7 device.) When calculating the route you have the choice to calculate a route driven by a car, or for walking.  Also finding a location on the map works easy by pressing the Find button and type a location or just speak to your phone to find it :) . When selecting details of the calculated route it smoothly zooms to the selected location. Very nice done.

“Current location on Bing Maps”

Normally I don’t use navigation a lot, but on my last vacation I was kind of lost the way back to my vacation home. I thought no problem at all, get my WP7 phone, start Bing Maps and voila find the route back home. WRONG…… Bing Maps was starting up and my current location was found within seconds, but there was no way to calculate a route or find a location on the map. The directions button was just disappeared. And when I tried to find a location, it only searches the internet and not the map. After a few tries Idecided to pickup my hardcopy map and navigate my way back on the ‘old school’ way. At that moment I was thinking that I did something wrong or that the internet connection wasn’t stable enough to calculate the route.

“Details of the calculated route on Bing Maps”

Back home I gave it another few tries, but without luck. Than I start thinking what settings do I have changed since I got my device. After a while I found out that I have changed the region settings from English to Netherlands. I have reverted this change, restarted my device and yes…….my directions button is back again.

I took the following steps to get my Directions and Find  functionality back on the Bing Maps:

1. Go to Settings

2. Open Region & Language

3. Change Browser & search language to English (United States)

4. Click on the link on top of the screen to accept the changes and restart your device.

I think that this functionality is only available in the languages in which WP7 is official launched. I will update this settings back to Netherlands when WP7 is officially launched in the Netherlands.

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First impression on the HTC Trophy with Windows Phone 7

Posted on 2010/11/15
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Today I received my HTC Trophy with Windows Phone 7 from my employer Avanade Netherlands. In this small post i will cover my first impression about this phone and the new mobile OS.

First of all: I’am not a very experienced smartphone user, have only used smartphones with Windows Mobile OS. So I will compare this phone against the experience I have with the previous versions.

After unboxing the phone, and installing the SIM card into it, I turned on the phone and it started a very clean and simple wizard which updated some settings like the region etc. Within five minutes I was able to read my email, surf the web and download apps from the marketplace. Easy as what!

Capacitive screen

When working through the wizard I already noted that the capacitive screen is working very smooth. It responds directly to finger gestures and moves in a nice speed.  This works really nice compared to the ‘old’ HTC Touch pro I was used to.

Tiles

The tiles on the home screen look very nice and clear to me. Customization is very easy, so it your phone will become soon your personal device. HTC has decided to no change very much to the home screen. They’ve added an HTC hub which is mostly doing something with the wheater and looks like the ‘old’ WM 6.5 screen. Not really interesting in my oponion. At least I expected more of it.

Clean fonts

When reading websites on the internet and working with some apps, I noticed that there are very clean fonts used in WP7. Reading from the screen is like an angel is touching your eyes :) . I’am getting a little bit to enthousiastic.

Onscreen keyboard

The onscreen keyboard is working very quick through it’s autocomplete functionality that even includes some dutch words. (Not all) I have choosen my previous phone with a hardware keyboard because I was not expecting that the onscreen keyboard will be handy enough. With this phone I was also worried a bit about this issue, but for now this onscreen keyboard works like a charm.

Bad things

Most people will ask: Haven’t you noticed anything bad in your first impression? Well, I don’t want to call it bad things but I think there are things missing. For example there is not very much information about your device status. (At least i haven’t found it) battery and memory status. Also the settings which you can change are minimal. It means you are not able to screw up the phone, but I like to change settings.

Overall I have a good feeling about the first impression and think that Ms has done a great job when building this OS. This definitly can be an Iphone killer if they have added the copy/paste functionality and tethering support.

Later on I will come up with pictures and probably a movie.

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