Molly Wood's thoughts on first week with Mango: "decidedly mixed"

For those who may not remember, Brandon Watson issued a serious challenge to a few web-celebs a couple of weeks ago asking them to try Mango. If they didn't like Mango, Microsoft would donate $1000 to the person's charity of choice. One of the aforementioned personalities involved in the challenge is CNET's Molly Wood and a few days ago she shared her early impressions, which you can watch above. Now she has posted up her complete thoughts on her first full week with Mango. She lays them out in a pros/cons list so here's the condensed version:

• The Pros
• Interface: "The Mango interface is lovely. The screen tiles are attractive and the "live tile" behavior (they update constantly with new Facebook images, flip-board incoming e-mail counters, and so on) is dynamic without being annoying."
• Social: "Mango has integrated Facebook and Twitter support (and Windows Live and LinkedIn, for the record), and it's pretty nice."
• Local: "Simple and elegant, and I dig it."
• Autocomplete: "The autocomplete is awesome. It's accurate, it's less aggressive than the post-Gingerbread Android dictionary, and it seems to have a lot more words. Love it."
• Speech: "I like. I've used it several times for composing texts and for launching searches."
• The Cons
• Speech: "Speech is there in Mango, but it's not there in Mango. [...] Android is doing speech to text light years better than Mango at this point, because it's integrated across the OS."
• Turn by turn: "Here's what I don't understand, though. Why is the turn-by-turn navigation only audible when you tap the screen for directions!?"
• Fit and finish: "I know I'm running a developer's build of Mango, but I also know it's probably not far off from finished, and there are more than a few oddities that make Mango feel like a first-gen product, instead of the 7.5th iteration on a long-lived mobile operating system. They're niggling, but they annoy."
• Apps: "There's just no getting around that fact: the app support isn't quite there yet, and it'll have to get there before this platform can be truly competitive. I, at least, don't want to be the one at the party, or on the field shoot, who can't get the cool app that everyone else is downloading all around me."

For the most part we agree with her assessment. There were a few parts where she thought a feature wasn't available when it actually was. For example, adding phone numbers to the address book is done by tapping on the number in the Call History, while she assumed it was done by long-pressing on the number (which is fine to be a little confused about). Also, we still think we have plenty of apps and the Marketplace is only growing faster, but of course for her line of work she needs access to the latest popular apps which Windows Phone is still working on.

In conclusion she felt that Mango in its current state is a love-hate relationship (we definitely agree). Wood promised to continue using Mango and teased she plans to look more closely at Microsoft's many integrated services (like Office, SkyDrive, and Zune Pass) for Week 2. Stay tuned for that, but in the meantime you can finish reading her full Week 1 thoughts.

Source: CNET