Molly Wood of Molly-Rants CNet fame has accepted Brandon Watson’s challenge to try out Windows Phone and if she isn’t more pleased with her experience, he will donate $1,000 to a charity of her choice. She has updated her blog to “rant” about her final verdict on Windows Phone ‘Mango’ and it’s not really surprising.
To sum it up simply, she likes Windows Phone, but doesn’t love it and doesn’t see this as her next platform, instead opting to go with the hot mess, also known as Android. Her frustrations stem mostly from the lack of system-wide speech-to-text, poor turn-by-turn directions implementation and a confusingly buggy HTC Trophy that, for some reason, needs to reboot constantly.
Her thoughts on the ZunePass service is that it is a good service, but she balks at the lack of ability to integrate with SkyDrive. For some reason she wants to load the music to a SkyDrive account and then stream from there? Not sure about the logic behind that. Why take music from one cloud and move it to another when it makes sense in its current state?
She also shared her thoughts on SkyDrive integration, in general. There is currently very good SkyDrive integration in both the Pictures hub and the Office hub, but the Music + Videos hub is where mango drops the ball. While I cannot agree that Zune Pass should have anything to do with SkyDrive, I do see a need for integration with music and video that non-ZunePass users might appreciate within the hub itself.
Overall, her verdict is kind of a wash. Which is sort of a cop-out because by watching the video, you can tell that she is stuck on Android, for some reason, and could never see herself giving props to Microsoft for a well-done product, but what did we expect from CNet? There is clearly a preference-factor here and Windows Phone isn’t for everyone and still has a little ways to go before being a complete solution, but even in it’s current state it’s still a much better platform than the power-hungry, spam-riddled mess that is the Android OS. I can agree with some of her assessment, but let’s be frank, we all knew how this was going to turn out.