Windows Phone 7 vs 6.5: One Step Forward, Two Steps Back

Microsoft has given Windows Phone 7 to all of its employees. Before I got Phone 6.5 also from Microsoft. So now I can compare both.
 

Windows Phone Features / Version	6.5	7
Multi-touch Browsing experience is much better for 7
Radio FM Really sucks in 7. No memorized stations,  possibility to switch between headphones and a speaker.
Apps and App Store Nothing useful as of today for 7. Phone 7 follows a bad for the customer tradition of requiring a developer to spend 100 bucks in order to upload an app. With 6.5 you could install any 6.5 CAB file you found on the Web. There are quite a few free apps whose creators won’t pay these 100 bucks
Copy-Paste Currently missing in 7
Uploading Photos with One Click The cool stuff with Phone 7 is that you can upload a Photo to your 25GB free Sky-Dive account  with just one click
Support for writing in non-ASCII E.g. if you want to write in Russian, or even include a non-ASCII word  forget it (on top of you do not have copy-paste which could’ve been a work around)
Editing text you type You have to delete the whole word or sentence – e.g. I could not figure out putting a cursor in the middle of the word
Battery Indicator Hard to beleive but Phone 7 won't tell you exactly how much battery life is left. Be prepared for unexpected shutdowns
Multi-tasking Missing in 7. It also does not work on Phone 6.5 good (the apps are sometimes just shut down – looks like a regression from Windows Phone 6, where it worked better)
Having access to most of the stuff on the main page You can set up Phone 6.5 so that on the main page you can see weather, stocks, top news, turn on and off with one click the phone, WI-FI, Bluetooth, ring, vibrate…. And 10 most useful apps on the same screen on top of that!

Last but not least, if you are using Windows Phone 6.5, install my free Gmail client: NanoGmail

As Wayne Gretzky once said, "I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been." Unfortunately, with Windows Phone 7, Microsoft is starting to play where the puck was long time ago and ice is already melting.

Trimming WMA File Duration

A part of dial-in conferencing services that we just shipped as a part Microsoft Lync 2010 has to do with recording a name for an anonymous user when joining a conference and then playing it during the conference (e.g. "Mike Johnston has joined the conference").

The problem here is that sometimes, depending on a Gateway, there is an ending beep (recorded from the '#' sign that a user presses when she is done with recording). It is difficult to predict in advance how many milliseconds should be cut from the user name recorded file (since in some systems there is no trailing beep at all). By default we cut 500 milliseconds and let the administrator the possibility to configure a different value if she wants to.

What is the best way for admin to figure out how many milliseconds should be trimmed from a file containing a beep? Easy - here is a tool that when run creates a serie of files with n milliseconds  trimmed from its end. Unfortunately it was too late to include this tool as a part of Lync Reskit Tool but this issue should be definitely fixed by the next Lync release.

Instructions:

• Download the tool, unzip it, and place the executable to a directory, say C:\trim
• Copy a WMA file containing the trailing beep to the same directory and name it target.wma
• Run the tool trimfile.exe without any parameters
• As a result 21 files reslt100.wma, result150.wma, ..., result1000.wma will be created and placed to the same directory. The number indicates (approximate) number of milliseconds cut from the file.
• Listen to the resulting files to figure out how many milliseconds should be cut from the file.

The tool was created using Windows Media C++ libraries. If you want to play around with it, take a look at main.cpp, WMVCopy.h and WMVCopy.cpp