Long-press is a terrible imitation of "hover" since long-press also has other actions associated with it, so users have no way of knowing whether long-press means "give me more info" or "do stuff (different from normal click)". Plus, long-press is tediously slow. Some devices it's actually hard to do a long-press well because the touchscreen is oversensitive to small movements of your finger... this problem insn't a killer for rare interactions, but if it's something your doing all the time it will drive you batty.
This is something Windows Phone excels at, actually. Any program that uses icons will put them along the bottom bar. If you open up the three-dot Menu? The bottom bar slides up to reveal
(1) text labels for the icons and
(2) additional less-frequently-used actions that have a full text name instead of an icon.
This is fantastic because it means you have one interaction you use to say "I can't see where click to do X". Either you find the option in (2) or you discover that the action was already staring you in the face in (1).
Came here to say that aswell, I'm really happy with the Windows Phone solution. And I can tell my mom, if she's confused about some strange icons, just to press the 3 dots, and it'll say in text.
This is something Windows Phone excels at, actually. Any program that uses icons will put them along the bottom bar. If you open up the three-dot Menu? The bottom bar slides up to reveal
(1) text labels for the icons and
(2) additional less-frequently-used actions that have a full text name instead of an icon.
This is fantastic because it means you have one interaction you use to say "I can't see where click to do X". Either you find the option in (2) or you discover that the action was already staring you in the face in (1).