Windows Phone (WP) has been at the receiving end of as much criticism as praise ever since it was launched. While there is no doubt that this is a promising new mobile phone operating system, there are many things glaringly left to be done. We had discussed last week about how this new kid on the block will succeed by mentioning five reasons for the same. In this article, we present an alternative perspective about the new OS, where we will state five problems with WP that will make it difficult to succeed against its rivals.

Lack Of Apps
With just over 80,000 apps, the Marketplace is far behind its more experienced competitors. If we even discount the numbers, there are quite a few apps that are found to be missing on this platform. Skype had been missing for quite some time, and although it has just been added, it clearly lacks the finesse sported by its iOS or Android versions. Opera browser is still not available for this platform, even though it had long been available as Opera Mini as well as Opera Mobile for Windows Mobile platform. Video streaming apps that let you play streaming videos from your computer, directly to the phone, are still missing, with the rare exception of some experimental app called Tversity Remote. With the Windows Mobile Marketplace shutting down this month, we hope that the company will focus its attention towards the current state of its application store.

No Support For Flash
While many would argue that the world is moving towards HTML5, it is still a fact that almost every video streaming site uses Flash and this should not be ignored. Lacking support for this API and not implementing a workaround to be able to view streaming videos from such sites leaves a vast majority out in the lurch, while competing mobile OSs such as Android support this feature.

Too Many Restrictions
There are many fields in which unnecessary restrictions have been applied in WP devices. It has Bluetooth that is only useful for streaming audio, but you are not allowed to transfer files to other Bluetooth devices; a limitation shared by the iPhone. Memory card is not supported officially, and you have to depend on the inbuilt storage that is usually 8 or 16 GB. In this age of HD movies and large apps, this space gets filled up before you even notice. Files cannot be drag-and-dropped; you need Zune installed on the computer to which you connect the phone to be able to do that.

Limited Format Media Playback
Windows Phone devices have a very limited video and audio format support. As mentioned earlier, you can only transfer videos to the phone using Zune software installed on the PC. The format choice is therefore limited to those that are recognised by Zune. You cannot hope to play popular file formats such as MKV and M2TS. HD media playback is also restricted to 720p, and 1080p is still unavailable. While WP devices support DLNA, TV-out has also been largely ignored, so non-DLNA televisions cannot play videos directly from the phone.

Internet Explorer Woes
Internet Explorer in WP devices is no doubt one of the better mobile web browsers at present. It is based on the same core as the desktop version of IE, and hence the better rendering. However, it still has quite a few rough edges to smoothen. The browser does not seem to cache pages as you surf. You can easily notice this on a slower connection when you go from one page to another and hit the Back button, only to see the previous page being downloaded again. You can bookmark pages, but you cannot save them to view them offline later. The browser does not seem to have a text search feature, leaving you to manually scroll through the text to locate a term.

Windows Phone is a comparatively new platform and we only hope that it will iron out the above issues with the next release of the mobile OS.

Tags : Mobile Phones, Windows Phone, Jayesh