Does Windows Phone 7.5 now offer the best Exchange experience?

When Windows Phone released in 2010 it was widely panned by the business community for lacking the feature sets businesses had come to expect with Exchange and Windows Mobile 6.5.  Indeed, with every release of Exchange, the next release of Windows Mobile would almost always support the full functionality of Exchange. 

To exacerbate the situation iPhone licensed certain Exchange ActiveSync (EAS) policies from Microsoft which put them ahead of the initial Windows Phone release in regards to EAS.

With the release of Windows Phone 7.5 (Mango), support for several EAS policies came as well.  I believe it is important to now contrast these improvements between the latest versions of operating systems on the three major platforms.  I will go through the current list of support provided by Wikipedia and have discussion points of the specific Windows Phone discrepancies as current of Feb 1 2012.  For this exercise we are going to only discuss Windows Phone 7.5 as there is simply no reason why you would not be upgraded to Mango at this point.

Company	Microsoft	Apple	Google
Product	Windows Phone[4]	iPhone/iPod (iOS)[5]	Android
Version	7.5	5	4
	Mango		Ice Cream
			Sandwich
Exchange ActiveSync 2.5 – Exchange Server 2003 SP2
Features:
Direct Push	Yes	Yes	Yes
Email sync	Yes	Yes	Yes
Calendar sync	Yes	Yes	Yes
Contacts sync	Yes	Yes	Yes
Tasks Sync	Yes	Yes	No
Remote wipe	Yes	Yes	Yes
Sync multiple folders	Yes	Yes	Yes
GAL lookup	Yes	Yes2	Yes
SSL encrypted transmission	Yes	Yes	Yes

With what we would regard as basic EAS support, or 2.5, pretty much across the board all phones support full features.  Chuckles do go out to the fact that Android 4.0 still cannot sync tasks from Exchange.  GAL lookup on iOS only returns basic information for the user instead of the full contact info on Windows Phone.  It is safe to say that Windows Phone offers the best EAS 2.5 support.

Exchange ActiveSync 12.0 – Exchange Server 2007
Features:
User started remote wipe (server side)	Yes	Yes	Yes
Link Access	No	No	No
HTML email	Yes	Yes	Yes
Server Search	Yes	Yes	Yes
Set Out of Facility/Office (OOF)	Yes	No	No
Follow-up flags	Yes	No	Yes15
Meeting attendee information	Yes	Yes	No
PIN reset	No	No	No
AutoDiscover	Yes	Yes	Yes
Bandwidth reduction	Yes	Yes	Yes
Policies:
Allow attachment download (client side)	No	Yes	Yes
Maximum attachment size	No	No	Yes
Enable password recovery	No	No	No
Allow simple password	Yes	Yes	Yes
Password expiration (days)	Yes	Yes	Yes
Enforce password history	Yes	Yes	Yes
Encrypt storage card	No	N/A	No

 

With Exchange 2007, the EAS version jumps to 12, to match the version of Exchange itself.  Feature wise none of the operating systems support Link Access or reset PIN.  Link Access allows Exchange to proxy through links to SharePoint and UNC files without need to use a VPN.  I do have to take exception with the information provided by Wikipedia as I have personally witnessed and performed access to a file via Exchange email.  None of the OSs support the ability for Exchange to reset the lock screen PIN.  With 7.5, Windows Phone offers a leg up on the competition by having the ability to set Out of Office replies directly on the phone as well as set and sync follow up flags in mail (which iOS cannot do)  Windows Phone can also view meeting attendees which Android does not do.

In regards to EAS 12 policies Windows Phone does not support the policy “Allow Attachment Download”, this policy allows the phone user to choose whether to download the entire message with attachments or not.  Since the Windows Phone user has the ability to do this manually in each message, support of this functionality is unnecessary, although other OSs will respond “True” to a query from the server.  Lilewise, neither Windows Phone or iOS will respond to a Maximum Attachment Size query from the server.

Windows Phone does not support the policy to encrypt storage cards.  This is an issue that has been mentioned before by enterprise security pundits.  It should be known that only one Windows Phone to date has supported a user removable storage card, the Samsung Focus which uses the SD Card Association encryption scheme to encrypt and pair itself with the card.  Removing this card from the phone resets the phone and renders the card data useless.  Because of this, support for removable storage encryption is unnecessary.

To summarize, Windows Phone offers the best EAS 12 features support, but does not support the most EAS 12 policies from a strict compliancy perspective.  However, it equally supports the most –pertinent- EAS 12 policies compared to other mobile OS.

Exchange ActiveSync 12.1 – Exchange Server 2007 SP1
Features:
Cancel remote wipe (server side)	N/A	N/A	N/A
Remote wipe confirmation	N/A	N/A	N/A
Default mobile policy (server side)	N/A	N/A	N/A
Bandwidth reductions (compressed/removed headers)	Yes	Yes	No
S/MIME13	No	Yes	No
Policies:
Disable desktop ActiveSync	Yes18	N/A	N/A
Disable removable storage	Yes18	N/A	No
Disable camera	No	Yes	Yes
Disable SMS text messaging	No	No	No
Disable Wi-Fi	No	No	No
Disable Bluetooth	No	No	No
Disable IrDA	Yes18	N/A	No
Allow internet sharing from device	Yes18	No	No
Allow desktop sharing from device	Yes18	No	No
Disable POP3/IMAP4 email	No	No	No
Allow consumer email	No	No	No
Allow browser	No	Yes	No
Allow unsigned applications	No	N/A	N/A
Allow unsigned CABs	No	N/A	N/A
Application allow list	No	N/A	N/A
Application block list	No	N/A	N/A
Require signed S/MIME messages	No	No	No
Require encrypted S/MIME messages	No	No	No
Require signed S/MIME algorithm	No	No	No
Require encrypted S/MIME algorithm	No	No	No
Allow S/MIME encrypted algorithm negotiation	No	No	No
Allow S/MIME SoftCerts	No	No	No
Allow device encryption	No	Yes16	Yes
Require device encryption	No	Yes16	Yes
Minimum number of complex characters	Yes	Yes	Yes
Configure message formats (HTML or plain text)	No	No	No
Include past email items (Days)	Yes	Yes	No
Email body truncation size (KB)	No	No	No
HTML email body truncation size (KB)	No	No	No
Include past calendar items (Days)	No	No	No
Require manual sync while roaming	No	Yes	Yes

Service Pack 1 for Exchange 2007 brought us EAS 12.1. From a feature perspective not much was gained.  However, policy wise, many additions were made.  EAS 12.1 was designed with managing with quite some granularity, Windows Mobile 6.x devices.  As a result, many of the policies we see in this release are not supported by any modern OS.  Feature wise, Windows Phone supports Bandwidth Compression, as does iOS.  Windows Phone does not supprt S/MIME.  The reasons for this are many, but I invite you to look up the background on S/MIME and its difficulties of implementation. 

For the policies, Windows Phone will reply in the affirmative when queried by the server to disable certain features.  However, features such as IrDA, CAB files, etc are not even applicable to Windows Phone, so support for these deprecated features are to maintain backwards compatibility as much as anything.  Windows Phone does not support the disabling of the camera or browser.  Also at 7.5, Windows Phone does not support on device encryption.  This is an issue for many corporations who need to secure devices physically out of their control.  Microsoft has indicated at Windows Phone 8, Bit Locker encryption will be provided to encrypt the phone and presumably meet this criteria.

To summarize EAS 12.1 support, Windows Phone supports the features equally, but currently is deficient in policy support. We hope for this to improve in Windows Phone 8.

Exchange ActiveSync 14.0 – Exchange Server 2010
Features:
Conversation View	Yes	No12	No
Move always	No	No	No
Reply state	Yes	No	Yes
UM card (client side only)	No	No	No
Free/Busy lookup	No	No	No
Nickname cache	Yes	No	No
SMS sync	No	No	No
Downloadable client	No	No	No
Notes sync	No	No	No
Policies:
Allow mobile OTA update	N/A	N/A	N/A
Mobile OTA update mode	N/A	N/A	N/A

EAS 14 ships with Exchange 2010.  Windows Phone supports the broadest set of the new features.  With Windows Phone we get the Conversation View, similar to GMail.  Windows Phone also supports Nickname Cache which is a sync of commonly used emails (So type Bob and it knows that as bgood@contoso.com), and this is synced between all clients such as Outlook and Outlook web access.  Windows Phone and Android will also reflect the reply state of the message, so you are not left wondering if you have replied to the email.  The only new policies introduced are regarding over the air update functionalities for Windows Mobile devices.  Support for this is not applicable.

In short, the new features brought by Exchange 2010 are best supported on Windows Phone.

Exchange ActiveSync 14.1 – Exchange Server 2010 SP1
Features:
Conversation segments	Yes	No	No
GAL Photos	Yes	No	No
IRM support	Yes	No	No
Block/Allow/Quarantine List (device info)	Yes	No10	Yes
Allow attachment download (server side)	N/A	N/A	N/A
Policies:
Allow IRM over EAS	Yes	No	No

Most recently, Exchange Service Pack 1 introduced some new and useful features for EAS 14.1  ONLY Windows Phone supports these new and useful features.  With SP1 we get full support for Information Rights Management (IRM) which is a more straight forward and practical way of securing corporate information via email.  Windows Phone will also now pull contact photos from GAL if utilized in the enterprise.  It can now pull segments of email conversations as well.  Of the policies, only Windows Phone supports IRM over EAS.

There is no question, if you want to extend the latest features of Exchange SP1, Windows Phone is your only solution.

So, does Windows Phone offer the best Exchange experience these days?  Feature wise, without a doubt.  If you want to enable the most EAS features across platforms, Windows Phone is the way to go.  It is important to note that none of the modern mobile operating systems support EAS features like Windows Mobile, but then again, some of those features (like CAB black/white lists) are obsolete.

From a policy perspective, Windows Phone is still lacking in three areas, device encryption, camera disablement, and browser disablement.  If companies are not currently or planning to implement these policies then I can say Windows Phone still holds the advantage here.  Also, if you want to take advantage of new enterprise friendly technologies like IRM, Windows Phone is the only way to go.

A tale of two platforms….Sameapp Shodown!

 

 

 

 

Netflix:

iPod Touch v1.1.2-773

Windows Phone v1.1.5.1

 

As soon as the Windows Phone came out I couldn’t wait to compare the same app on both it and the iPod/iPhone.  The obvious first one of these is of course Netflix.  Netflix goes out of their way to try and offer a similar experience across all screens for their app, so this would provide a good opportunity to highlight the GUI advantages/disadvantages.

The first thing we are presented with for both apps is of course the home screen.  The iPod screen features a familiar row of soft buttons along the bottom of the app for Home Genre Search and Instant Queue.  Windows Phone has the same topics implemented through sliding text at the top.  Being that Windows Phone is panoramic in nature, the text actually scrolls off the screen.  This would seem to give the iPod version an advantage since you can click any of the buttons without scrolling.  However, I noticed that when I turned to landscape for the Windows Phone all categories were now present.  I could then click on each one just as I would the IPod soft button.  Trying the same thing on the iPod reveals….well, it reveals that the home screen doesn’t switch to landscape.  Bummer.

Another point to the home screen is that the recommendations are broken out into screens.  On Windows Phone, the recommendations are presented all on one scrolling page with thumbnails and the ability to stream directly.  Definite advantage to Windows Phone here as you are not flipping back and forth between pages.

When it comes to playback, the iPod shows some advantages that Windows Phone chooses not to implement.  One is the 30 seconds back button on the player.  The other is an aspect ratio button that allows you to view 4:3 in original or stretched.  I could find no such functionality on Windows Phone.  One hindrance to the iPod Touch version is that due to the lack of a hardware back button, it has a “done” button.  However, what I have found with this is that if you hit “done” in the middle of a movie, Netflix does not save your spot.  It actually makes the Resume function worthless because you are always going to start the show over.  I presume this is something that will get fixed when Netflix brings it up to version parity with Windows Phone.

 

In all, I have to give the Windows Phone version of Netflix a slight edge here.  The ability to browse in portrait or landscape as well as browse all recommendations from one page definitely shows some UI advantages of a modern phone OS.  The iPhone version does show some refinement in the playback portion, but these are minor features that get little use.  If the next update to the Windows Phone version adds 30 sec back rewind and aspect, the iPod version will definitely start to look aged.

Google + RIM: The Perfect Shotgun Wedding

Now that the sleeping giant has awakened and graced the world with Windows Phone 7, many are looking around the room at who the odd man out is.  Most people will agree that the incumbent, Apple, is not too concerned about this sudden 4th player coming to the table.  I think soon the stats will show that not too many defections occurred with the release of Windows Phone.

However, the ones that seem to be knashing their teeth the most are the Android crowd.  In fact, shortly before WP7’s launch, Google was bold enough to come out and say the world doesn’t need another OS….clearly worried about fragmentation.

What then of RIM?  The Blackberry is flailing to find a voice in the consumer smartphone fervor.  Certainly, it provided a good corporate alternative to Windows Mobile when it came to email.  But how many people do you know are saying “hey, I want to go out and buy a Blackberry!”…?  The Torch was a miserable failure from a consumer standpoint.  No doubt, corporate users will replace dying BBs with Torches, but one has to wonder how many of those users carry an iPhone or Android.

Then we have what is perhaps the most damning announcement, Dell is kicking RIM out of the house.  Even in good economic times, CIOs had a hard time stomaching a secondary server that was needed to work with the corporate Exchange infrastructure.  Now Dell is boldly announcing what more companies are thinking…why do we need a Blackberry Enterprise Server when now we have a phone that works directly with Exchange and is something people would actually want to carry?

Certainly not the position RIM wants to be in, and with the recent privacy fervor with India, Saudi Arabia, et al…how comfortable do you feel emailing someone with a Blackberry?  It could all come together for a perfect storm of bloodletting (or juicing as it were) for the Blackberry.

So who might be the white knight in all of this?  Well Google of course.  They are dying to get inside enterprises, and their Google Apps suite certainly hasn’t been doing the job.  Google and Blackberry hitching up would suddenly get Google’s name on a server in practically every major company in the world.  From there they could launch an attack on the enterprise from the inside. 

First task would be to separate BES from Exchange and make it a force unto itself with a Google messaging platform.  It would essentially be an Exchange and Office Communication Server (now Microsoft Lync) wrapped up into one.  Consumers already rave about Google Voice….GV for the Enterprise?  Even better.

Then of course Google could put the aging Blackberry OS to rest and migrate everything to Android, while keeping the more coherent app store Blackberry has fostered.  No need to stay in the hardware business either.  There is something to be said about letting OEMs make the hardware, just go the Microsoft route and establish a chassis standard.

RIM escapes their current debacle altogether and Google removes a player from the market while firmly wedging themselves between Microsoft and Apple….while staying relevant.

Funny things my son says

So this weekend the weather was particularly nice, my son and I were sitting out in the back yard in our chairs watching the airplanes and I was telling him the name of each tree in the back yard.  I told him botany was the science of plants and trees (way over the head of a 4 yo, yet it spurned this thought):

“Dad, when I was at Mimi’s we learned about science”

“Oh really?”  “What science things did you learn about?”

“Pirates.”

Hello world!

Welcome to WordPress.com. This is your first post. Edit or delete it and start blogging!

“Finished” Battlefield 1943

I guess I should say, I have all of the achievements for this game now.  But you never really finish it.  It is just so addictive you have to get online and just keep playing and playing. 

More uselss computing history (Toadie this time)

I have another computing entity besides MONSTER.  Toadie came about as a “helper computer” for MONSTER (a Monster has its Toadie, get it)?  Toadie was originally cobbled together from spare parts during my work at Datafix.  It started out as a 486 133Mhz box.  I have no idea what OS I was running on the thing.  Toadie v1 didn’t last very long in this incarnation.

Toadie quickly lept from being a mundane PC to being a mobile computer.  Toadie v2 was actually an HP OmniGo 100.  This was a sweet little PDA that ran the GEOS operating system.

Toadie v3 came into being after Toadie v2 met its demise getting dropped while walking out of Wal-Mart.  v3 was an HP HP 320LX.  This was one of the first PDAs running Windows CE (version ONE!)  The cool thing about this PDA was that to upgrade to v2 of Windows CE, you just popped in this chip and BAM! Windows CE v2!

Toadie v4 came about when I got an HP Journada 420.  It was a rather bulky thing and it ran Windows CE 2.11.  If I recall correctly this one got broken too because I moved on to…

Toadie v5, which was an HP Jornada 548.  This ran Pocket PC 2000.  Pretty impressive unit.

At this point I was carrying a cell phone too, and I had been through various attempts at getting a smart phone, but nothing that could really be called a mobile computer.  Finally Sprint came out with the Toshiba 2032.  This ran Pocket PC 2002.  Unfortunately it was also a very dreadful PDA phone.  So Toadie v6 was short lived.

I went back to carrying a regular mobile phone, except this time the mobile had bluetooth.  So I came across an iPaq 3970 which was running Pocket PC 2002, but I was able to upgrade it to WIndows Mobile 2003.  This was a wonderfully fast PDA and when paired to my bluetooth phone I could surf the web on it.  It was a great performer but I still wanted convergence. This became Toadie v7 for a short time.

This brings us to Toadie v8.  This was the PPC-6600 from Sprint.  It was an awesome phone running Windows Mobile 2003.  Toadie v7.  One thing ticked me off with Sprint though is that they wouldn’t offer an upgrade to Windows Mobile 5.  This, combined with the fact that I was out of contract and ready to change, led me to the next iteration of Toadie.

Toadie v9 was the HTC 8125 on Cingular.  Work was paying for my phone line now, so I used it as an excuse to dump Sprint.  The 8125 was a decent phone, but it was woefully bulky.  It also had poor battery life and was overall pretty slow on Cingular’s EDGE network.

Toadie v10 was the Samsung Blackjack.  It started out running Windows Mobile 5, but I upgraded it to WIndows Mobile 6.  The blackjack was an awesome phone, but I accidentally cracked the screen on it and had to get a replacement.

Toadie v11 is a Treo 750.  It is running Windows Mobile 6 Professional.  I love the form factor of this phone and really I haven’t found anything that has made me want to change yet.  The Samsung Epix comes close, but I think I will wait and see if Microsoft will be coming out with a phone of their own.

 

EDIT 3/26/12  I realize I have left a few off here…

Toadie v12 was a brief foray with a Motorola Q9, I think the proper term for it was a Q9h….at any rate the thing rocked.  It was a hand me down because my Treo was convienently sold while it still had some value.  Unfortunately this Q9 had been really beat up over time.

Toadie v13 was a brief return to a Samsung Blackjack.  It was also a hand me down.

Toadie v14 was a return to a Motorola Q9 h but this one was in MUCH better shape than the hand me down.  I wore this phone out pretty much.  I consider this phone to be the pinnacle of Windows Mobile Standard devices, even though it was only running 6.1 it ran circles around Blackberries and just about anything else.

Toadie v15….the first Windows Phone 7 device…a Samsung Focus.  What an epic device.  It started out with the release version of WIndows Phone but was soon updated to 7.5 in 2011.  Incredible incredible device.  The only reason I parted with it was because..

Toadiev16….an HTC Titan.  Now normally I would not be stepping into another phone quite so fast because the Focus did everything I needed.  However, this was one of those craigslist specials.  for $100 I simply couldn’t resist.  Supposedly it didn’t work, but a factory reset fixed that.

Useless computing history

I was lying in bed awake the other night due to my horrible bed (which is another story for another day).  When you are lying there the strangest subjects come to mind.  I think it is a modern day version of counting sheep, but I started thinking about the history of my PCs. specifically, the lineage of my MONSTER named PCs.  Some of this is vague from memory.  I will do something later for the computing entity known as Toady.

It is important to note that before MONSTER started I owned two other computers.  I started out with a IBM PC Jr.  I got this around….mmm maybe 1990? Anyways it was a piece of trash.  It had dual floppies (one of which died).  I was so desperate to get rid of this thing.  I remember we used to get these magazines of some discount liquidation joint, I forget what, and they liquidated old IBM PS/2s.  I managed to foist off the PC Jr onto some folks and I scored myself an IBM PS/2 Model 60.  This was a 286 which I later upgraded using an Intel Retrofit board to a 386sx.   This would allow me to play various modern games of the day (circa 1992-93).

When I went off to college I quickly figured out I couldn’t do much with my Model 60 because the campus ran on TCP/IP and all my Model 60 could muster was NetBIOS which didn’t route (very well).

 

This is where the first MONSTER came into being.  MONSTER V1 used a full tower AT chassis (weighed a ton).  Inside this thing I packed in a Sony dual speed SCSI CD-ROM which was attached to a Sound Blaster 16 SCSI-2 on which I had a Creative Wave Blaster mounted on it (awesome MIDI sound for games)

For the motherboard I had a very unique choice.  I came across a new kid on the block called Nexgen which offered a competing chip to Intel called the Nx586.  The "crummy" thing about this was that the CPU was soldered to the motherboard, unlike Intel boards of the day which were upgradeable.  The thing was really fast for its time.  You might have heard of this company as AMD eventually bought them and the chip became the K6 line of CPUs (very fast for their day).

For video I’m a little fuzzy on this, but I’m pretty sure I had a Voodoo Banshee.  On the hard drive I’m not going to be able to remember, but it was probably a Western Digital Caviar, maybe 100Gb or so.  My OS of choice for Monsterv1 was OS/2 Warp.

I later got rid of the NexGen board and in its place put in a VIA Technologies K6 class motherboard.  I think my CPU was running at either 166 or 200Mhz.  I’m also pretty sure that the video stayed the same.  By this time I had migrated away from OS/2 and was running Windows 98.

Monster v2 was a significant upgrade.  At this point I had stopped working at Datafix and while I worked at CAST I had my own business license and was building computers on the side.  MONSTER v2 was an Elan Vital Chassis with a K6-2 (Super 7) motherboard (most likely an Asus but maybe a VIA).  Graphics at this point might have been a Matrox Mystique, but I think I kept that Banshee for a long time.  Also by this point I had moved on from SCSI and the sound card was an Ensoniq PCI and all drive were IDE.

MONSTER v3 kept the same chassis but by this time the AMD Athlon processors had arrived. This was my first foray into 1Ghz computing and as such I had a Slot A Athlon sitting on an AMD 750 chipset motherboard made by Asus.  I have to say that Slot A was an extremely annoying socket technology, and I was really ready to move on to something else ASAP.

So MONSTER v3 was the first of the Socket A Athlons that I owned.  This was the Thunderbird Athlon and my particular chip ran at 1.1Ghz (just a small jump from the Slot A).  The big difference here was that I could upgrade the chip easier to 1.4Ghz if I wanted, but I never did.  I was still using the same chassis but these Athlons were getting really thirsty for power and the power supply that I had was only a 250W.  Combine this with the fact that I was running an Nvidia GeForce (the original) my PSU could barely keep up.

The last incremental upgrade of MONSTER v3 came along as an Athlon XP  and by this time I was also running Windows XP.  By this time though AMD chips were really stressing my power supply and I was having numerous problems with motherboards and finicky memory (again probably due to low voltages.  I was really not interested in going bigger, so I went the opposite route and went smaller.

MONSTER v4 was my first (and last) attempt at building a HTPC.  U used a very small case and power supply packed with fans to try and cool the hot Athlon XP 2400+ running inside.  Video at this time was coming from a Nvidia Nforce 4 chipset (essentially a Geforce 2).  I had managed to snag a copy of Windows XP MCE and I also had plopped in an Nvidia NTV Card.  This whole setup was a mess though.  It ran so hot that the machine would often times just shut down.  I had to run it with the top off all the time that I finally just said forget it and sold the whole mess on eBay.

By this time (2005) I had started working for a new company and they bought me a computer for use at home.  I decided to hang up my system building hat and get what would become MONSTER v5.  Monster V5 was a Dell E510 Pentium 4 with hyperthreading.  It only had 1Gb of RAM but it did have a decent ATI X600XL video card so it could support dual displays.  I couldn’t complain about free, but I wish it could have been an AMD.  Oh well.

MONSTER v6 is the most recent iteration of my systems.  It is the one I used to post this blog.  It is an XPS|One 24" all in one from Dell.  This was what I had in mind when I set out to build MONSTER v4.  It is a great HTPC with a Core 2 Quad CPU (Q8200 which is actually quite crap).  Again this was a work freebie so i can’t complain, but they actually gave me a horrible video card in it with some kind of Intel integrated graphics junk.  4Gb of RAM though, which is all it can use since Dell refuses to go with anything but Windows Vista 32-bit.

 

So there you have it, my computer ownership history in a nutshell.

Finished Viking: Battle for Asgard

I finally finished this game on normal difficulty.  Like quite a few games I’ve played lately, the end boss was ridiculously hard compared to the rest of the game.  I prefer a slow build up in difficulty so that the guys right before the main boss are pretty tough themselves.  This wasn’t the case though.

Some reviews really panned this game, but it was one of those games that you had to stick through it to really appreciate it.

So the things I liked:

Nice move combinations
The mix of stealth with pure hack and slash
Fairly decent variety in the environment.  Some areas were pretty dark
"Even" distribution of achievements.  At the end of the game I had everything but one achievement (I’ll get to that later)

Things I didn’t like:

Some backtracking (leystones helped but not always)
One achievement wouldn’t trigger when I SWORE I met the requirements.  I think this was a game save bug issue.  I may go back and play on hard and see if I can pick it up again.

 

All in all a great game.  It will have limited replay value, but it was a game that kept me engaged.

Return to blogging

 

 

I will be returning to writing some blogs.  I’m mainly going to be talking about Zune and Xbox 360.