So I may or may not have mentioned that I managed to hook up QuadraTron with some Windows Phones back during the Global Game Jam.

Long story short on the Windows Phone: I like the OS, and straight out of the box it would beat an Android hands down… BUT the market place is pretty bad (Searching the name of an app, letter for letter, doesn’t guarantee you’ll find it and searching for a calculator turns up porn, so yeah.) and the system is locked up really tight which makes certain apps near impossible impliment. What is a modern smart phone without good apps? No really, I’m asking, cause I have no idea.

Luckily the Windows Phone does have a few good apps, the ones that come with the phone, and a few that Microsoft made to fill in the gaps. And one of those gaps up until now has been Skype. (Finally got to it in the third paragraph, hey I’m getting better at this…)

Microsoft bought Skype a while back which was met with mixed excitement and trepidation. So far Microsoft seems to have done well by Skype, although it took them what felt like forever (something like a year and a half… so about 6.8 forevers to be precise) they have released a very nice looking Skype app.

I really like the interface. No, I REALLY like the interface. It’s spartan, with just the essentials, exactly what you want on a phone. I could go for a few more options under settings but Microsoft has this thing right now of “Let’s develop for monkeys that don’t know wifi from bluetooth” so that ain’t gonna happen. My mom doesn’t know wifi from bluetooth (I’m still trying to teach her that Google is a webpage and Chrome is a browser.) so maybe that’s a good strategy. Time will tell for sure.

The bad/ugly etc: It really heats up my phone running the video (oh did I mention it has video? Yeah, suck it Android.)  Also, the Windows Phone completely lacks multi-tasking(freezing apps in memory(technically it’s a call from the environment that gives the app a chance to save where it was(nested parenthesis FTW)) and resuming them IS NOT multi-tasking) so accidentally hitting your Bing-button = disconnected conversation. It doesn’t even run a background process like the email app that alerts you to chats/voips, you have to start the app every time you want to check on your IMs.

So basically the app itself is functional, the interface is nice, but it’s not quite polished yet.

Final Score 3/5