@MJGAMER 1991 XBL Heh, sounds like it was the same thing that happened to me - only I did it myself. CableCard quality control issue. The guy should have sat there and activated the cards with you. Their quality control is awful - you can get 2-4 bad cards in a row until you find one that works.

@(Unverified) It is a digital vs. analog thing. Once more channels switch to digital, they would be able to push way more content in the same frequency space.

The main (and IMHO only) problem with CableCards is that they have horrible quality control. It seems like they have 30-60% failure rate! I had to replace my cards 2-3 times before I could get one that worked!

And I know it was the card - I have four OCURs at home, and if I use a card from the other OCUR, everything is fine.

This is mainly because the cable companies don't want to support and be blamed for all of the 3rd party equipment out there. With a bad cable box they can just pull it and replace it with a new one - they control the experience end to end. With a bad TV or Tivo they would get blamed too.

Wow, that's very disappointing. If you go to the Japanese site, you can see what we are dealing with.

Basically ViewSonic took a smallish clamshell MID and taped a cell phone to it. As far as I can see, there is no integration. The cell phone appears to be a plain old dumb version, and the whole thing is huge - about 1.5 times bigger than a regular smart phone. :-(

I hope their competitor produces an actual XP phone. IE a smart phone running XP, in the phone form factor. Not a cell phone attached to a crappy laptop.

Nope - they forgot the thumb. Arguably the most important finger in the shocker maneuver.

Yah, irrelevant. It is hard enough to send normal video without a 0.5-3 second delay (due to buffering and network issues). If they also want to add have lag-free communication back, then they are SOL. This could work only in games that will work with more than 2-4 second lag. Maybe with some MMOs. Turn-based games. Etc.

@UnixSystemsEngineer

That taskbar is a travesty for a power user - whenever I install a Win7 build I turn off that functionality. If you have opened a dozen browser windows, a dozen explorer windows, a couple of dev environments, VS instances, etc. the new taskbar becomes unusable. All of the explorer windows look identical as a thumbnail. Half of the browser windows can look identical. Dev environments, same. And if you have several word documents or excel spreadsheets open?

The best solution I could find was to re-enable Vista/XP style task bar, and dock it on the right so that you would have a longer text description.

The only thing the new task bar is good for is eye candy and for for casual or semi-casual users. It wouldn't have been so bad if they kept the ability to disable thumbnail previews after the RC build. But they didn't - you either have to use thumbnails, or go back to the non-transparent and ugly Vista taskbar.

I've been a WM user for years, and here's what I want:

0. Better performance.
1. Decent browser! One that is performant, can zoom in pictures and text, standards compliant, etc. IE mobile gets a score of around 4 on Acid3 Test - most modern browsers get 90% or more. And are much more responsive.
2. Tighter hardware control and requirements. And/or clearer tiers for hardware. E.g. make it a requirement for ALL hardware running WM Pro to have video drivers, and make it difficult and very expensive to ship one without drivers. Create a benchmark suite for WM, and require every single phone with a particular SKU to have some minimal performance - that will make user experience so much better!
3. Better WiFi & 3g network integration. On an IPhone transition from 3g to WiFi can be nearly seamless and invisible. And it doesn't eat battery power as it does on WM. On WM you often need to restart IE to switch from one to the other.
4. An updated UI that is geared more towards apps. Zune HD UI is OK, but not great for applications. If you have a dozen different programs, then they are going to be difficult to find and launch quickly on the Zune UI. Compare that with Android and IPhone - they are all about the apps, and are braindead easy to use.
5. More and better eye candy. I think 80-90% of IPhone users choose that OS because it is more responsive, has better animation, and is prettier. If WM is to compete in that market segment, it must have a good and powerful UI. Also make the UI consistent everywhere and finger friendly. That means require a larger screen on devices, support and enforce AA fonts, 3d buttons, etc.
6. More support in the SDKs for eye candy - make it easier for a dev to write apps that conform to the OS UI paradigm, and harder to stray from it. That way everything will appear to be more seamless.
7. Require capacitive screens on Pro SKUs of the OS. WM is the only OS on the market right now that doesn't have phones capacitive screens. I know HD2 will support that, but that should have happened several years ago!
8. Perf, perf, perf.
9. A locking screen that kicks in automatically when the power button is pressed? Several times my phone dialed people or scheduled appointments by itself, simply because it was in my pocket. (And it turns on automatically whenever Exchange sync happens - how long has that been a bug now?) I've had to download the S2U2 app and love it - despite its many ugly bugs. Why doesn't WM have this feature?

Oh, also, consider firing the management of the WM team and hiring a new one. That team is just in so much trouble! How long has it been since a modern OS came out for mobile from MS?

@UnixSystemsEngineer - No, it is low-ranked because you didn't say anything substantive. Except that you hate the task bar, start menu, etc. Do you hate icons too? How about the font? The shape of the mouse cursor?

Jeez, that thing costs 140 bucks? Wow, welcome to 1996!