Wednesday, December 22, 2010

Things I wish the Windows Phone would have

- An easy way to share contacts between 2 Windows Phones

Unbelievable, but there is no easy way to just send a contact info from my phone directly to my wife's phone. It is possible, but the solution I found is too complicated, requires computer use and having Office installed: from my mail account on Exchange (where my contacts are saved), send a mail to my wife's accout on Hotmail and attach the contact's info. On a computer, install Outlook with Outlook Hotmail Connector, then follow the steps in Importing contacts from PC article to copy the contact info in the Hotmail contacts of the other account. The phone will sync it from here automatically. There is also a caveat, that Office wants to store by default the contacts in the "Last, First" name format, so if you want them appearing on the phone correctly you'd have to make sure they are saved in the "First Last" format....

- An easy way to publish/share a video recorded with the phone


For pictures, the phone knows how to upload the pictures automatically on SkyDrive or Facebook. However, for videos there isn't a similar way. Why?!?
There is also a Youtube application from Microsoft, but this also doesn't seem to allow uploading a video I just recorded...
Now if I understand correctly, I can import the video on the PC after I'll install the Zune software (which btw, doesn't install on Windows 2008 R2 Server), and I can share it from there, but why do I have to use a PC and install software for this simple task?

If these things will annoy me too much I may end up writing an application to solve the problem (or some other developers may beat me to it).

But I'm hoping the version 2 of the Windows Phone software that will come early next year will help solve these simple tasks. This is functionality that should be directly supported by the phone, and should not require installing 3rd party applications, using a computer or install other software there (paid or free) :-(

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