In Response to "Windows Phone 7 Shortcomings"

This evening I was scanning dzone.com and came across this interesting rebuttal by Adam Benoit on the shortcomings of Windows Phone 7.

The 121 reasons listed as to why the Windows Phone 7 OS isn’t particularly good were rebutted fairly succinctly (although acknowledged; far too many shortcomings defer to the as-yet unknown Windows Phone 8).

A couple of the points weren’t directly addressed, and I’d like to take a look at one of them.  See the original rebuttal article for the full 121 reasons including counter-points.

OS Limitations

“8. Your contact details are automatically uploaded to cloud service whether you like it or not.”

I’m sure I read somewhere that you could also synch contacts via Exchange Server.  Whilst obviously not ideal for home users this could be one workaround.

You can synch outlook based contact information if you happen to use an Exchange Server.  If not the referenced Microsoft KB article has details, but unfortunately requires synching to the Cloud.  This brings me to my next point:

Privacy

Personally, I’m an opponent of this kind of lock-in.  I think it stinks that Microsoft (more or less) forces your address book onto their servers.  It’s potentially a privacy nightmare, and I won’t own a phone that requires me to synch the personal details of my friends and family to a corporation-controlled server.

This is a good example of why users need to be able to jail break their phones.  I’m sure we’ll figure out some way to get the details in, bypassing Windows Live.