Tuesday morning started out good.  I was in a meeting room on the Microsoft campus, working on a Windows Phone 7 (wp7) application.  About 10:A.M. my local developer evangelist came to the room.  In his hand was a white and yellow box that contained my new Windows Phone.  Yes, I’m talking about a wp7 device made by LG.  The GW 910 is a phone that contains a slide out keyboard.

I’ve had the phone for three days now.  First impressions are good, the start screen was intuitive and easy to use.  I toured the included applications.  There aren’t that many, but the core ones look solid.  It’s a novelty to open Microsoft Excel and see the tiny spreadsheet.  Pinch gestures work, so it is easy to scale the cells up to a readable size.

It took me a while to learn how to uninstall applications.  On the wp7 you press and hold the application icon.  After a one second wait a menu pops up which contains the uninstall menu. 

There are still pending changes coming for the main UI.  Those changes are still cloaked however, you’ll need to wait a few weeks to see what’s new.

I didn’t like the keyboard, I prefer the one on my HTC Touch Pro 2.  One the other hand, the onscreen keyboard (known as the Soft Input Panel -SIP) was fast and easy to use, once I got use to the correct way to hold my finger in relation to the virtual keys.

Another hardware #fail, the touch screen is not sensitive enough.  I find myself touching the same icon/button repeatedly with no results.  This is definitely a LG issue.  I spent some time with the Samsung device on Wednesday and its screen was smooth and responsive. Oh, and the Samsung was noticeably faster too.

Writing and deploying apps to the phone

If you are a Silverlight developer you are going to love programming for this phone.   Silverlight just works. Most of the time your code can be ported directly to the phone.  It took me less than than ten minutes to port a Bing Map demo to the phone. The only quirks are understanding what Silverlight version is on the phone. It is part Silverlight 3, some of Silverlight 4 and some extra APIs thrown in for good measure.

Setting up your computer to use the deploy to the phone takes a few steps.  First, you must install all the wp7 tools and Beta SDK.  (learn more at http://developer.windowsphone.com/)  Then you have to install the Zune Beta (aka Dorado) on your local computer.  Once that is done, you just connect a USB cable,make sure the Zune software is running on local computer, choose the device from the drop down in Visual Studio and press F5 to debug.  It’s a beautiful experience.