Microsoft seeking customer feedback for Windows Phone 8 features

By Tom Warren, on 28th Sep 11 8:43 pm with 44 Comments

Microsoft revealed a suggestion box customer feedback form on Wednesday for consumers to suggest features for the next version of Windows Phone.

The software giant is curating feedback from end users to record the most requested features for future versions of Windows Phone. “Here’s your chance to play engineer and possibly even influence the future of Windows Phone,” said Microsoft’s Michael Stroh in a blog post announcing the new feature.

The feedback will be recorded and publicly viewable for others to rate and comment on. “This is something I know many of you have been clamoring for,” admitted Stroh. “Suggestion Box not only lets you steer feedback directly to the folks who actually design and build Windows Phone—but also vote on and debate other people’s pet projects.” Microsoft is leaving the suggestion box open to anyone to provide feedback on Windows Phone. The company is moderating suggestions to keep them phone-related and presumably family friendly. “We’d prefer not to see your unpatented inventions, movie pitches, favorite pizza toppings, or strategies for jumpstarting the economy, “said Stroh jokingly.

Some of the most popular suggestions include:

Microsoft is already working on its next versions of Windows Phone. Tango is believed to be an interim release between Windows Phone 7.5 “Mango” and the next-generation of Windows Phone, currently codenamed “Apollo.” There is reportedly two versions of Tango scheduled for release before Windows Phone “Apollo” is ready. Tango is allegedly designed with Nokia in mind and focused on lowering the price point for entry Windows Phone handsets. Windows Phone build 7.10.8200 was recently discovered in server side logs of a Windows Phone application. A screenshot, believed to be a Tango build, also leaked last month and demonstrated a new device search feature for Windows Phones.

If you’re interested in reaching out to Microsoft directly on the future of Windows Phone then here’s your chance. Simply visit the feature suggestions forum at Microsoft’s Windows Phone site.

  • Justfortherecord

    cool!

  • Emi Cyberschreiber

    nice to see Windows Phone team taking feedback and suggestions.
    now they released Mango, with really essential and important stuff. they can now take more feedback for next big release, even if its stuff only few users will use.

  • http://www.Nave360.com Sebastian Gorgon

    Why don’t they have that for windows 8? like a proper one 

    • http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100000688576949 Erik Oegema

      That comes with the open beta. Now it is just a Developer Preview, and that’s the reason they are now only intrested in developer feedback.

    • Emi Cyberschreiber

      maybe because you will read “oh i want customizacion, i dont like the Green please make it available”

      “let me turn metro off.. i dont even understand how essential it is for new windwos 8 but im not used to it so i think its completely useless”

      “skype integration”

      “Xbox live and be able to multiplayer with Xbox players”

      “fix admin rights, since even with UAC it seems not to work properly”

      well you understand the point… stuff that isn’t there, and hasn’t been talked about it. you know a DEVELOPER and PREVIEW isn’t meant to take feedback, just to let idiots like me use it as main OS. and developers to develop and understand new metro style applications and apis and WinRT and that stuff.

      not to take feedback over alot of obvious things like customization in Windows dev preview. when you have to hack uxtheme.dll to get it look nice.

      maybe they will? maybe they wont. but for now its not needed. anyway in blog post Steven Sinofsky sometimes asks “and how do you think we can i improve it?” to some people complaining about x feature they are explaining. 

    • Anonymous

      Can’t have customer feedback when there are no customers. WP7 is a released product. W8 is in the hands of developers, not customers.

    • Pinna

      Developers are playing around with W8. Users just want it to work. Devs will find bugs/design errors in places where the common user tries to stay away from.

    • Guest

      The planning for W8 is already done. It might have made sense before that.

  • Anonymous

    So maybe Microsoft isn’t always the most innovative company, but at least they do a really good job at listening to their customers.

    • http://www.facebook.com/leoplan2 Alvaro Osvaldo López-García

      like the WHS 2011 Drive Extender fiasco right?

    • Anonymous

      Nah, more like Windows 7, Office, Xbox, Kinect, Windows Phone, Windows Server, SQL Server, Sharepoint,  wow the list just goes on!

    • Test1ngi23
    • Anonymous

      More like: Sharepoint, the highly profitable CMS that consumers just love. Even developers with half a brain can manage Sharepoint.

    • Typhos

      i actually agree with ms removing de. its a good function but with todays hdd its not usefull anymore

    • http://thommck.wordpress.com Thom McKiernan

      Driver Extender is being replaced by their new JBOD software (like being used by all the hotmail servers) as it wasn’t reliable enough. Hopefully they’ll include it in a service pack.

    • Anonymous

      I hope they would lift the ten votes limit though.

    • Matt Gertmenian

      Lync integration even just for phone number + conference ID.   Maybe that’s on the Lync side where a different string could be put in the meeting notice to make a one click connection possible.

  • http://www.mainstreetchatham.com/ JimmyFal

    Hey Tom, will you be the first to print the bullet list of all 500 new features in Mango?

    • http://www.winrumors.com Tom W

      Phew, I’ll try…! :)

  • http://twitter.com/levifreeman Levi Freeman

    Longzheng started this craze with his “taskforce” where is his credit, anyway. please vote for my suggestion.

    get rid of an accidental dot when you press .com example: you type “microsoft.” then press “.com” which gives you microsoft..com … not correct. it should delete that dot and produce the correct “microsoft.com”

    Suggestion is here please vote:
    http://windowsphone.uservoice.com/forums/101801-feature-suggestions/suggestions/2282088-get-rid-of-an-accidental-dot-when-you-press-com?ref=title

  • Entegy

    Heh, I was the one maintaining the feature request thread on Microsoft Answers. Very glad to see this now!

  • Guest

    Okay, can we please stop using the MS buzzword of the week “curate” now?

  • http://www.facebook.com/people/Jonathan-Marston/542557737 Jonathan Marston

    Main things I want are VPN support and a notification history of some kind…besides those I’m pretty happy with Mango :-)

    • J A

      With other fully enscrypted/secure and faster connectivity options, I don’t think anyone actually needs VPN on their mobile devices. How many people or organizations actually use VPN on their phones today?  Let’s look forward and not backwards.

    • Anonymous

      It’s built into some api’s it’s just not stable and wasn’t released.  I’d personally like VPN just to play around with it but would prefer a Citrix, GoToMeeting or LogMeIn kind of connection before a VPN.

  • JustPassingThru

    Guys, pls vote for this one too!  “accept Paypal to buy apps in WP7 Marketplace”As an option for the credit cards. It should be possible to buy apps from the marketplace using paypal, like in the xbox marketplace. so people like me, outside of the US and in a country not yet supported by Marketplace can purchase those games/apps.

    • http://twitter.com/OldCongress Gamer

      hell no, paypal is one of the worst company I’ve ever seen.
      They don’t give a damn and respect to the seller at all, any fraud issue and you’ll lose the shit out of your pocket.

    • JustPassingThru

      Really.?! but it could be useful as an alternative for those app purchases… Support for Marketplace is so limited to just a few countries as of today, and people like me are missing a lot of those quality apps.

  • Pinna

    I liked the app “My WP7 Idea”. I have no idea what happened to it. It would be nice to have an “My WP8 Idea”-app where the user can post a suggestion right from his phone. Just open the app and post it. If you like my suggestion: Link-> http://uservoice.com/a/nazhr

  • Anonymous

    Make one for Windows 8 too! People are crazy suggesting things -everywhere- for W8!

  • Anonymous

    So, mango is old news… where is my Tango!!!!

    …and the media starts…

  • Anonymous

    Nice to see MSFT gathering customer ideas. Apple just decides what is right for everyone, whether they like it or not. Apple is arrogant. Microsoft is humble.

  • Django

    I want IE to remember passwords for the web sites….

  • http://www.facebook.com/people/San-Ien-Jao/717169541 San Ien Jao

    AAARRRGGHHHH MS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! ONLY ONE THING I MISS ON MY WP7!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
    SMAAAAARRTDIAAAALEEEERRR

    Smartdialer like the HTC Android Phones…. nice little feature to have please MS!

    • raikkonen

      WTF android? I has dual language smartdialer in my windows mobile smartphone 2002

    • Pirateninga

      HEY MS!!!!!!!!! I REALLY REALLY WANY TO BE ABLE TO BE ABLE TO SWAP OUT SD CARDS FOR HIGHER ONES. Althought the USB Storage mentioned in the article would be a cool idea.

  • Anonymous

    ………….

  • http://www.facebook.com/petertocci Pete Tocci

    I added one.  Get ride of “what’s new” in the Me Hub.  Pretty usless.  Also, voted for proper push notifications for Twitter/Facebook, as well as direct message support for Twitter in the Inbox Hub.  I had to download the Facebook app just to get easy push notifications.  Pretty upset, the whole social networking thing was done half-assed it seems.  Facebook chat works wonderfully, however.  

  • Anonymous

    Nice to see “Zune Services for countries outside US” on the list :D

  • Anonymous

    No one thinks the only partially competent ebook reader (freda] on WP7 is broken? Has anyone tried using freda (with dropbox) and a long book list? Absolute torture!

    WE need an ebook reader with an eReader Hub, and the ability to store/access/sync our content locally!!

  • http://thommck.wordpress.com Thom McKiernan

    This is fantastic stuff but I used up my 10 votes in the first 5 minutes!

    A few tips,1) I encourage people to comment on the ideas even if you have no votes left you can say +1 or -1 in the comments box. Don’t forget to include your reasoning!2)Also it’s important to flag duplicates so the votes can be merged. If I do report one as a duplicate I also comment on it along with a link to the Suggestion with the most votes to help encourage and inform others@tomwarren:disqus  Feel free to add these tips to the article if you think they are worthwhile :)  

  • Ci7

    please Microsoft , add  RTL/Arabic support!!!

  • http://www.xiirus.net Carlo Mendoza
  • http://twitter.com/electrookosh Nothing

    Windows Phone 8. I’m gonna come with some ideas (I cba describing them in exact full detail, an employment from MS would be nice for that)- MS, you’re the king of the “Cloud”. I’ve said for so long now that “your Favs could never” because everyone knows Microsoft have amazing cloud technologies. On-demand music, on-demand video and audio books. Work on “Zune Pass” for WW and beat Spotify. Trust me, it lacks in a lot of areas. - Work on the multimedia approach. Right now WP7 is saying: This shits all over your favs because it works amazingly and have alot of features. But the photo and video parts of the phone and OS still lacks. A better camera app and editing app. And there’s more.- The Zune part of the phone is like the phones big gem, that really stands out. But there’s always more that you can do. Album art, lyrics, suggestions and video “gifs” are all possible solutions. Go!That’s just off the top of my mind, contact me for more ideas and solutions. Coming from a positive, young, technical student.