OK, we’re big enough to admit when we’re wrong. When we filmed our earlier look at Windows Phone 7 we stated that apps had to reload and kept forgetting what you were doing before. It seemed that a lot of third-party apps would just exit and then re-start from scratch, but we’ve since been told that some apps behave better. One app in particular is the official Twitter app, which grabs the latest tweets and writes them to an internal cache. This means you can reload the app and you’ve still got the locally stored tweets – you don’t need to look at a blank screen and wait for an update.
Now yes, I know we’re banging on about this multi-tasking / app closing behaviour quite a bit of late, but it’s important to get this right. From what we’ve read it’s not essential for apps to resume from where you left them, however – it should be essential behaviour. Another issue we’re seeing is that those “Live Tiles” aren’t really “Live” with third-party apps and – in the case of Twitter apps – you’ll currently not get told that a tweet has arrived.
This said, we hope that Microsoft can make Live Tile updates easier for developers to update. We also hope that Microsoft make app-resuming from stored data an essential part of submitting your app to the Marketplace. These things aren’t seriously limiting problems – we’re looking at the first batch of apps and you can bet that app developers will be fixing their apps as soon as they get feedback from users. Windows Phone 7 is still a very good OS and you should not, in any circumstances, doubt the potential it has.
Check out our latest Windows Phone 7 video where I describe all this a bit better and show you more of the new OS including the browser, calendar, calculator and more.
Link – Windows Phone 7 Overview (Part 3) – Windows Phone 7 Review (Updated)
Windows Phone 7 – Apps can resume properly, if they want.
October 24, 2010