7 Days with Windows Phone 7
With almost two years in the making, Microsoft's Windows Phone 7 OS is now official. We embarked on a 7-day journey to experience Microsoft's new mobile OS, and with it, a better understanding of its features. Here's our report, on Microsoft Windows Phone 7.
7 Days with Microsoft Windows Phone 7
Many of you might have read about Microsoft's latest mobile OS, Windows Phone 7. From mostly positive vibes, to some little grouses with its interfaces, it has all been said and done.
However, when Windows Phone 7 was given the official global announcement and had its devices ready on the retail shelf, it was still in its teething stages. Apps are still populating the Windows Marketplace, and there's much more to explore. From October 21st, various Windows Phone 7 devices became available on retail shelves, and with it, the floodgates finally opened.
In commemoration of the 7, we bring you seven days worth of highlights in this article chronicling our Windows Phone 7 impressions.
Day 1 - Going Home
What is extremely striking about the Windows Phone 7 is that it has a pretty easy and straight forward homepage, and its simplicity is clearly discernible from the get-go. Sure it is less decorative than its competitors, but instead of focusing on the attractive elements, it concentrates on providing a streamlined design that gives users a birdeye's view. You simply scroll either up or down to get a quick glimpse of what's available (or what needs attention), and it's extremely easy to pin apps or your important contacts - simply long press them to add and if need be, long press the tiles to move them around - onto your home page. While you can put as many tiles as you like, the list gets longer as you start pinning more shortcuts and tiles; you'll definitely find yourself scrolling quite a bit. As much as we like the simplicity of the UI, Microsoft should work around something more effective like spreading these hubs and tiles across individual pages to make the browsing experience even snappier and useful.
The tile and hub layout is easy on the eye, but requires a lot of scrolling once you start pinning too many apps/contacts to your home page (which is akin to adding too many shortcuts).
Long-pressing an app on the apps page list will allow you to select between pinning it to the home page, uninstalling or reviewing it.
Day 2 - The People that Matter
Microsoft prides itself on creating an address book that not only contains rudimentary information like mobile phone numbers or emails, but contacts' Facebook information as well. As we got more comfortable with the phone, we explored more on the contacts management aspect in the People hub. Here, contacts can be synced with your Windows Live, Google or Facebook account, allowing you to see at a glance their Facebook updates - think of it as a Facebook+ Address Book app. While the contact list can get quite messy with duplicated information and so forth, you can manually link these together under a single contact. The only gripe we have is that for now, the hub is only fully integrated with Facebook, leaving other popular social networking sites like Twitter, MySpace or Orkut in the dust.
Of course, the consolation here is that it provides a common and uncluttered place for information of your friends or loved ones, and deletes the need to open multiple apps.
Want to comment on somone's Facebook page or share a quick message on your own account? Access it through the People's Hub.
As mentioned earlier, you can pin someone's Facebook profile onto your homepage for easy access by selecting the pin button below.
Day 3 - Message in a Windows Phone 7
Most of the user interface is congruent with the text-based design that the OS is going for, which makes it extremely friendly and straightforward. The only drawback here is that you can't customize - even to a small extent- how you want it to look. If you have tinkered with an iPhone or Android handset before, the Windows Phone 7's thread message format is no stranger (except that it is look much more simple here). The keyboard layout is equally familiar, with some small tweaks here and there. A noticeable aspect is that typing on Windows Phone 7 devices feels extremely responsive and smooth compared to the other touchscreen smartphones we have encountered, and we found that the experience was an almost error-free one. While the user interface helps, the biggest contributor is likely due to the high minimum specs requirement that ensures snappy and accurate usage.
The trademark thread message format makes an appearance on the Windows Phone 7.
The email experience is slightly more elaborate, and works similar to the People hub. It is convenient to view all important sections in your email account (All, Unread, Urgent) on a single page by simply swiping from left to right, without having to navigate through several pages by flowing in and out of the main email section. To select more than one mail, you just have to simply click on the left of the email to kick-start the option to mass-select - of which you can choose to delete, move to another folder or mark as read/unread. The emphasis here again points to a seamless experience that requires very little effort to get to where you want to, or accomplish a certain task.
A typical main page of your Hotmail inbox.
We liked the fact that a simple tap on the left of the email will allow us to mass select our mails.
Day 4 - Let Me Check my Calendar
Good news - the Calendar hub supports syncing with Google. Bad news - multiple Google Calendars (shared or created) cannot be transferred; only the initial one that comes with your account will be shown on your Windows Phone 7. That heavily impedes those who rely heavily on Google for their schedules. Furthermore, there's no weekly view or zoom functionality in the calendar. What's available however is you can view your tasks accordingly to month, day and agenda.
The month view gives you an overview of your schedule, so don't expect discernible details from the small fonts. Unfortunately, there's no pinch-to-zoom option.
Though we were a little displeased with the lack of some functions, there were others that were worth noting. One unique feature that we really liked is that as you create or edit events, you can choose to select appropriate attendees from your collection of contacts. As the entry is saved, an email will be sent out - if you choose the option - to these contacts, requesting for them to accept, or decline the event invitation. Your attendees can also be notified (you will be given a choice after saving the event) via email if there are subsequent changes to the event, such as renaming or changing the time of appointment. In a similar vein, if you are running late for an event and want to notify your attendees, you can click on an aptly-designed icon of a running man to send out an email to inform them. These emails are automatically titled after the name of your event, so correspondence has been streamlined to be snappy and quick. The default path for these emails will be directed to your synced hotmail accounts, but if you require SMS notifications, you can get Hotmail to send them to you for a nominal fee. The only downside is that this feature is restricted to email correspondence; you can't do it through SMS, Twitter or Facebook just yet.
Add attendees from your contact list to keep them updated on changes as well as send emails regarding the event.
An auto message that allows you to dash-and-go, especially useful if you are rushing for time. Simply click on the icon to the right at the bottom to activate this option.
Day 5 - Bring the Office with You
On the fifth day, we found ourselves without a notebook or a pen to take notes. What's a writer got to do? Why, we whip out Windows Phone 7 and fall back on its Microsoft Office application. Particularly, we accessed OneNote to create notes, be it text, images or audio, and uploaded it onto Windows Live.
Any documents with OneNote on Windows Phone 7 can be synchronized to your Windows Live account with ease.
Accessing OneNote from anywhere with an internet connection is useful with your very own SkyDrive. Getting used to the interface, however, could take some effort.
Of course, what is Microsoft Office, if you can't edit Word, Excel or Powerpoint documents on it? The Windows Phone 7 variant allows you to do just that. And once again, the keyboard on the Windows Phone 7 based mobile has proven to be one of the best ones out there, leaving minimal errors and giving us top-notch typing speeds while we edited documents. Looks like the speedy hardware and good implementation has translated to a better typing experience too.
Creating documents, however, is only limited to Word and Excel. And even though you can grab your documents off the web, there's no option to synchronize documents from your PC direct to the Windows Phone 7 device. As they say, you win some (with cloud services), you lose some (on sideloading). Hopefully that's something Microsoft can look into in the next update coming early next year.
You can choose to create documents on the phone, or just download and edit your existing documents.
For now, the biggest issue with Microsoft Office is the absence of cut and paste. While that might seem like a sticking point, Microsoft did officially announce the availability of this feature in an early 2011 update to Windows Phone 7. Still, we can't believe how such an important feature got omitted. It's an aspect that was immediately felt when we were editing documents on the phone, only to realize we can't cut and paste certain text segments into another paragraph. We can't wait for this function to liberate us from the constricted usability of advanced functions like creating and editing documents.
Day 6 - Rock and Roll with Zune
We'll admit - Zune isn't unfamiliar to us, but it wasn't something we were really paying attention to. To be precise, we are talking about the Zune software. Think of it like Apple's iTunes, only this is Microsoft Zune.
Entertainment is pretty dependent on Zune, mainly because you'll be using it as the conduit between your Windows Phone 7 device and your PC. Seeing as how microSD expandability is heavily limited (either not available or formatted and locked to the device), you'll have to sync everything via Zune instead of the usual drag and drop on your Windows Explorer.
You'll spend most of your time with Zune, synchronizing your music, video and pictures into Windows Phone 7.
Honestly, we like the Zune interface, thanks to the similar user experience from the software and Windows Phone 7. While you can simply sync your whole music collection into your Windows Phone 7, do take note of the storage limit on your device. As such, we did the most prudent and practical thing - creating playlists and dragging it into the device.
Managing your media files is an important aspect to keep your experience across the PC and Windows Phone 7 tightly integrated.
On Windows Phone 7, the interface is definitely simple, split right down to Music, Videos, Podcasts and Radio. Newly added songs will also get their own category, and if you're not done with an album or video, there's a History tab to continue.
Categories make it easy to locate your multimedia files on Windows Phone 7.
Accessing music and videos on the Music & Video hub is an easy affair. Perhaps, the only grouse we had is that you can't skip to specific parts of the video, relying instead on the forward and back button to scroll through the video till you reach the desired point.
You can pin your favorite songs onto the home page.
And yes, you can tab/pin your favorite songs, videos or even radio station to the home page. Don't get too excited and overload the home page with too many songs though. It can get kind of tiring to scroll through a long and exhaustive list of hubs on the home page. If Microsoft is smart, they should update the OS to include multi-page home page functionality to improve self-organization.
Day 7 - In the Market for Xbox Live
Like any person eagerly waiting to unwrap the new toy, we did the same for the Marketplace and Xbox Live section for Windows Phone 7. For the former, we've been aggressively downloading apps over the last week to enhance our experience with Windows Phone 7. Well, mostly free apps, but even so, there's a ton of useful and practical apps that don't cost you a leg and an arm. Case in point, social network apps such as Facebook, Twitter and Foursquare have joined the Windows Phone 7 arena.
The Marketplace is segregated neatly, making it easy to search for apps in each category.
Following the streamlined interface across its other features, the Marketplace interface was easy to navigate, thanks to the Featured, Free, New and Top categories on the Marketplace. Or, if you're more comfortable doing your app shopping on a PC, you can always fall back on Zune. After all, your Windows Live account is tied to the various services, including Zune, Marketplace and finally, Xbox Live.
Make full use of the Zune software to check out and download new apps onto Windows Phone 7.
Xbox Live was one of the major talking points, and we definitely had our eye on how it works on Windows Phone 7. From what we've seen, there is an impressive lineup to keep you glued to your phone. From a zombie-slashing nun in Twin Blades, to a sci-fi RPG game from The Harvest, we think this is just the tip of the iceberg of what's to come on Windows Phone 7.
Games that are Xbox Live compatible are indicated clearly, which will work towards the achievement scores on your Xbox Live account. And yes, this works with any existing Xbox Live account that you have. But in hindsight, you would want to link it to the same Windows Live account (which is probably the likely case).
Both Xbox Live compatible and normal games are listed in the Games hub for easy access.
As somewhat of a novelty, you can get your avatar to react to your touch with a range of emotions. But beyond the novelty, Xbox Live gave us the potential to talk to fellow Xbox Live members and friends on Windows Phone 7.
Noticed we said potential. In our excitement, we also got hit by a hard fact that messages can only be sent to other Xbox Live members if you're a Gold member.
If you're a new Xbox Live user, you can customize your avatar using the Xbox Live Extra app. Oh, and remember to give your avatar a little scare by shaking the phone.
The Future of Windows Phone 7
How do we sum up the future of Windows Phone 7 in one word?
Great. Microsoft's mobile division has been taking a few hits, specifically with the demise of its Kin mobile phone. But from what has been shown with the Windows Phone 7 operating system, we are getting positive vibes from its proposition.
While there is room for improvement, the mobile OS is definitely forthcoming. The Windows Live Messenger hasn't been integrated into Windows Phone 7, but it is still available via a third party developer, Miyowa. As far as we know, there will be cut-and-paste function introduced in an early 2011 update for Windows Phone 7. And as usual, Microsoft should have a significant presence at the next Mobile World Congress, delivering more news and updates to its new mobile OS.
Overall, Microsoft Windows Phone 7 is definitely moving in the right direction, and we sincerely hope it won't veer off track in the months to come. Even with its unique proposition of ease of usage, guaranteed performance, content creation/management and gaming cred, it still has its work cut out for it and we really hope to see it get ahead of the competition.
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