July 20, 2010 at 11:53Full Windows Phone 7 Prototype Review
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July 19, 2010 Microsoft began to send prototypes of phones with Windows Phone 7 to third-party developers. The same samples came to some online publications. I bring to your attention a free translation of the WP7 review from Engadget.com, supplemented by images from the emulator.
It was a long way, wasn't it? Although, in a sense, not so - in fact, about 2 years have passed since the beginning of the development of Windows Phone 7. If you think that this product will replace Windows Mobile 6.5, then this is true. Even the most recent versions of WinMo 6.5 were based on the same things as version 5.0 from back in 2005. of the year. At that time, WVGA displays for phones were science fiction, names with more than 2G were incomprehensible to most people, and there was no Habrahabr. Now much has changed: 8-year-olds have access to e-mail through their phones, and the market is dominated by mobile devices from Apple and Google, to which Microsoft passed the palm on a silver platter. No one, neither inside nor outside of Redmond, claims that these changes occurred too quickly, because it is no longer enough to dominate the desktop market only.
In light of this, you can say that Widows Phone 7 is a desperate attempt to become competitive again in the mobile market. Call it whatever you like, but regardless of this, brand loyalty will no longer help this operating system - it itself should be worthy. Moreover, WP7 should be virtually flawless in a market where there is iOS 4. Microsoft has a few months before it launches the first wave of phones on the market, but we recently got a prototype Samsung, codenamed “Taylor”, based on i8910HD. Does he look like a killer of iPhones and androids? Read in this review.
As before, the WP7 interface is made in the Metro style, which means the presence of a large number of 2D elements and rectangular blocks with text filled with color. In fact, 2D is not entirely true - the interface consists of several layers on each page, so when scrolling, the Parallax effect even appears , like on a Dandy. This effect works very well: it gives a sense of depth and detail, but does not distract from the content. The controversial moment of cutting off the end of the headlines has not gone away, but it looks beautiful. Although there are places where such clipping works quite funny, for example, in the Office hub: instead of “PowerPoint”, “PowerPoir” is read.
We were very surprised and amazed at the responsiveness of the interface. This is perhaps the most accurate and subtle display response on this side of the iOS4 barricades. It’s amazing how much work Microsoft has done on the user interface since we first saw it — now everything looks like a whole. We did not see any significant lags while using the phone, and the quick transitions between applications and web pages create a very pleasant impression.
The entire OS comes down to three main sections:
WP7 notifies the user of a new incoming SMS message with a pop-up window, like Android, so Microsoft is already ahead of Apple. And if music is playing in the background, then playback can be controlled after pressing the volume button:
It is strange that the panel on top, which is used to display information about the signal level, battery charge and WiFi, is shown only after touching the top of the screen. And in some applications (for example, photos) this panel does not appear at all. We do not know why Microsoft did so, but it takes extra movement to bring up this panel. And yes, guys, please add the percentage of battery power.
Another nice innovation in the interface is the animation in the form of a series of small dots at the top of the screen when something is loading or synchronizing. A trifle, but it's nice to know what the phone thinks or works. The interface does not have a large abundance of controls or options. Only you and your content ... and it works.
In our opinion, there are 2 big omissions: the device does not support copy / paste and multitasking in third-party applications. Although we heard about it on the MIX10, now this is no better. Microsoft made a good selection and editing of the text (at least in Word), and it seems that quite a bit is needed to add a contextual popup for the copy / paste function. And the lack of multitasking is practically unforgivable nowadays, because even Apple (which was catching up in this area) now supports multitasking. We hope that in some magical way these two problems can be solved before the platform is launched ...
I must say in advance: the on-screen keyboard in WP7 is very, very good. We can say that it is almost as good as the keyboard on the iPhone, and certainly better than the keyboard on Android. This is one of the best and most accurate virtual keyboards we have used across platforms - and that says a lot. The prototype we tested has a rather narrow screen, despite the size (3.7 inches) and resolution (480 × 800, standard for WP7). Therefore, while typing, sometimes it was a bit closely horizontal, but it did not bring serious problems.
The keyboard looks simple and clean, like everything else in the OS. Monochrome keys (white characters on a black background or vice versa, depending on the application) and pop-up panels above them when pressed:
The keys are arranged in the usual order, plus a button has been added to switch to the emoticon layout:
Microsoft has acted in a clever way: a comma and a dot are always at hand, and to access infrequently used symbols and punctuation marks you need to hold the corresponding key (as on the iPhone):
We were surprised by the sophistication of the keyboard - because when we saw it on WMC and MIX10, it was not in such a good shape.
WP7 does not have a contact list as such. There is a People application, but that’s completely different. WP7 is a completely social platform, and there is no differentiation between people, be it an interlocutor by phone, SMS or e-mail. As soon as you add your Windows Live, Exchange or Facebook accounts, the phone loads all the contacts associated with you and the contents of the phone changes completely - there is nothing you can do about it. This means that, for example, the Photos application will have a bunch of pictures of the former boyfriend of your new aunt’s new dog, and to fix this, you can only delete your Facebook account from your phone.
This strategy probably works well with Exchange - contact synchronization is one of the main reasons for using Exchange. But Facebook is a different matter. If you have many friends on Facebook, the application will display them all and become useless in the sense of a traditional contact list. Microsoft recommends searching for contacts by typing, pinning the most important contacts on the home screen, and using a list of recently used contacts.
We believe that there is a solution much easier: to allocate Facebook in a kind of sandbox. It would be optimal if Microsoft adhered to the philosophy of Android, which allows the user to choose whether to import all their Facebook contacts into the contact list, and where there is a special Facebook application in which there is a complete list of friends. There is currently no standard Facebook application in WP7, so your Facebook friends just have nowhere to live except in the main contact list. And you can act like in Motorola Blur - import everyone, but give the ability to filter by contact type.
But the strangest thing is that WP7, with all its desire to be social, does not have integration with Twitter. For some, Twitter is just as important as Facebook (or maybe even more), and it seems like a blatant omission. It would be quite easy to add integration with Twitter, because the People application allows you to see both the general update feed of friends from social networks (Windows Live and Facebook), and the feed for individual contacts. Twitter would fit perfectly, they just have to do it.
As with most modern smartphones, WP7 has fairly simple and automated email settings. The first time you turn on your phone, you will be asked to provide a Windows Live ID, although it is not necessary to use it. On the email settings screen, you can connect accounts for Live, Outlook, Yahoo! Mail and Gmail. Of course, it is possible to manually configure POP or IMAP mailboxes. There is a choice of the method and frequency of synchronization: push, 15 minutes, 30 minutes, 1 hour and manual checking of mail.
The Email app is, overall, awesome, providing a clean, clear interface and easy access to the most commonly used features. On the standard inbox page you will receive an email in the form of a message feed. You can scroll left or right to sort by unread, by flags or by priority. Managing message groups has been done better than in most mail applications that we used - you just need to click the checkbox to the left of the message. This greatly simplifies deleting and moving messages. In addition, it was nice that when you delete the letter, you are transferred to the inbox, and not to the next message. Along the bottom of the screen, you have icons for creating a new message, viewing folders, updating and managing message groups.
By clicking on the hardware search button, you get a fairly powerful search that analyzes topics, message content, senders and recipients at the same time. Using this search is surprisingly easy to find what you are looking for. But, unfortunately, he searches only among messages downloaded to the device. So if you are looking for something that you have long lost on the server, you are out of luck ...
Back in WP7, there are no merged mailboxes. Each box is a kind of separate application, and when you create a new box, a new item is added to the list of applications. To pin this box on the home screen, you must pin this app there. We would like to see the opportunity to place several elements inside the same tile (like new folders in iOS4), where all mailboxes could be placed. Although, of course, it is preferable to just have a combined box.
In general, mail in WP7 is good, but not the best. There are many things that deserve praise, but many are lacking. We would really like Microsoft to have conversations, combined mailboxes, and message searches on the server. We think that many want it.
The SMS / MMS application in WP7 looks good. But we want the company to differentiate the messages of the sender and the receiver by color (at least shades of the same color).
Creating and sending messages is quite simple. Long press on individual messages gives you the opportunity to delete or forward them, and clicking on the list of conversations makes it possible to delete the entire conversation.
There were problems - in some cases, the text goes beyond the boundaries of the blocks. We know that the software is not yet complete, but it seems that now is not the time for such bugs.
Since IE gets a lot of bad things into its address, we must say that using a web browser in WP7 is very nice.
Downloading the desktop version of the Engadget site was a little slower than on the iPhone 4. The scaling, which is, of course, done using gestures, runs smoothly, like clockwork.
We appreciated the ability to pin web pages to the home screen (of course, there are also regular bookmarks).
Tabs are supported, on our device there were a maximum of 6, and we think that this is true for all WP7 phones. Let's be honest - probably, and do not need more than 6 simultaneously open pages on the phone. Tabs can be loaded in parallel, regardless of whether they are active or not, and this does not adversely affect the overall performance of the browser.
Neither Flash nor Silverlight are supported in the browser. But those who are familiar with the iPhone can confirm that this is usually not a problem. But the lack of support for HTML5 makes the situation with the browser somewhat painful ... The phone does not even have a separate application for YouTube!
Another thing that interested us was the number of sites that identified iPhone and Android devices to show the mobile version, but did not detect WP7. A key example is Gmail, which shows a nasty WAP version of a site. But we think that a large number of sites will make the necessary changes if the platform becomes popular.
If you are already familiar with the Zune player, then there will not be many surprises. The integration with Zune in WP7 is pretty seamless, it allows you to view and play the elements of your library, synchronize music and video with your computer, and if you have a subscription, you can download anything from the Internet to your phone (well, almost everything). In general, we liked this combo of phone and player, but sometimes the Zune interface seemed a bit confusing.
We liked the almost unlimited access to new music on the phone through the Zune Pass for $ 14.95. Something tells us that when the phones hit the market, the number of Zune Pass users will increase dramatically.
An important aspect about Zune on WP7 is the extreme interconnectivity of the phone with the desktop PC. Not only do you use Zune software to sync music and videos, you have the option to buy applications on your computer and sync photos. This is very similar to the iPhone and iTunes, and completely different from ActiveSync from the heyday of Windows Mobile.
We heard that one of the main goals of WP7 was the excellent work of the camera, not only in terms of size and image quality, but also in terms of speed. In the end, if your camera turns on too long, or you wait 5 seconds between shots, it becomes quite inconvenient to use the phone to capture interesting moments of life. Fortunately, it seems that Microsoft has fulfilled its promise - turning on the camera took us about4 seconds, and the time between shots was about 2. We do not evaluate the quality of photos or videos, as we are dealing with equipment that will never be released.
As soon as you take a picture, a very cool thing happens: the picture moves to the left, as if you are looking at a roll of film. You can view recently taken pictures by simply sliding this “tape” to the right, and return to the viewfinder by scrolling back to the left. This is very intuitive, and we suspect that novice users will find it easy.
Phone manufacturers can embed additional camera features, but by default this list is pretty impressive: customizable white balance, graphic effects (grayscale, sepia, etc.), saturation, ISO, shutter speed and even metering mode. Most of these features are available even when shooting video. Naturally, you can set the flash mode: automatically, always, or never.
The phone can be configured so that, immediately after taking a picture, it uploads the received image to your Windows Live SkyDrive account in the background. In the “Images” application you can upload photos to Facebook, but in the settings you have to choose between “upload to SkyDrive” and “upload to Facebook” - you can’t simultaneously. But you can scroll through the menu, why not?
The Images application is a universal tool for working with photos on your phone. Here are your pictures (local and online), and pictures of your friends. In this application, you can view and send photos, change the background of the lock screen and, as it is an expandable hub, use the services of third parties. You can change the background of this hub by a long press on the title. And, as we have already said, on the What's New page, you get an infinite number of updates to your Facebook friends' photos that you barely know. We would like to be able to select a specific list of friends to display here.
Microsoft has already begun distributing prototypes of phones (the same as in this review) to developers, and it will continue to do so. On the side of the box it even says: "developers. Developers! DEVELOPERS !! ” So yes, we can say that Redmond understands how important the availability of third-party applications is for the success (or failure) of the platform. Applications are ultimately downloaded through the Marketplace. This is not at all like Windows Mobile 6.5, but it is similar to what Apple and Google offer us, but with some features.
The first thing you notice when you open the Marketplace is that you have the “Music” category, while iOS allocates music to a separate iTunes application, and Android relies on third-party sellers such as Amazon. But this is not integrated in the way you think - clicking on the music, you just go to the Zune Marketplace, and that's good. In addition, choosing the Games category will take you to the Xbox Marketplace, which, unfortunately, is not yet available for testing. Scrolling to the left, you will be taken to the "Recommended" page, on which both music and applications are interestingly mixed into a single view.
We pass to the last category - “Applications”. Although there are currently only a small number of demo applications on the market, there were enough of them to get an idea of the buying process. Applications are typically divided into the latest, most popular and recommended. You can use the search by clicking on the corresponding hardware button.
If you are just browsing applications, you can scroll through the entire list or narrow it down into categories: Tools, Lifestyle, News & Weather, and Business Center. We will not be surprised if there are more categories in the future. The list displays the application icon, name, rating by5-star scale and a brief description of the application (after all, not all applications have a descriptive name). After selecting the application, you will see an information page on which there is the following: price, detailed description, screenshots, reviews, version number, language support and a list of phone services that the application requires access to.
After you decide to buy something, the whole process takes place in the background, and after a few minutes, you can find this application in the phone list. We would like some kind of unobtrusive notification when the application is installed, because now it seems like a guessing game.
Subtle integration with Office may turn out to be the most important difference between WP7 - a feature that only because of this, this phone can not be ignored by serious business users.
Although Word seems to render pages well on a small display, its editing capabilities are very weak - you cannot change fonts and you can choose only one of four text colors: orange, green, red and black. There is a spell check (the familiar red wavy lines), but there is no copy / paste function. Excel has a similar story, although it got a pretty good set of built-in functions.
But PowerPoint documents cannot be created on the phone at all. The main thing in PowerPoint for WP7 is probably the ability to show slide shows - especially for devices with a TV-out to show ready-made presentations from the phone.
WP7 supports interaction with SharePoint servers, which is undoubtedly useful for some business users. There is also OneNote, which in many ways is just Word under a different name. In it you can attach photos and voice recordings to a note, which should be in Word, but this is not. You can set OneNote to automatically sync with your Windows Live SkyDrive account, which means that your notes will be available on any computer connected to the Internet. "Cloud" is a thing, magic!
As we noted above, the integration with Xbox Live is not yet ready. You can only add a Live account and get an avatar on your phone. We hope that Microsoft will soon demonstrate what these devices will be capable of.
Bing cards implemented in WP7 are pretty good. You have real-time access to maps, satellite imagery and traffic information. A change of location is displayed quickly, but we found that it is usually a little less accurate than Google (indoors and without GPS). Map scaling is fast and smooth.
Since this is a client for Bing Maps, you can rely on the same location database as in Bing for a desktop computer. You can search for places using text or speech (more on this later), and matches will be displayed on the map. As you would expect, by clicking on the place icon, an information page will appear where you can find the phone number, URL, rating and even the schedule - it’s very convenient for restaurants. You can also see user reviews from Citysearch and JudysBook sites.
Our favorite part of maps is a list of directions when navigating to your destination. This is not voice guidance - the application divides the screen into two parts: a map and a list of control points. There are both pedestrian and car modes, but there is no public transport mode.
Like maps, WP7 searches use, of course, Bing. Microsoft made a neat Bing search page for a small screen, similar to a page from a site. On the right side of the input field there is a microphone enable icon for voice search. It really works if you do not want to find something with a strange name. After starting the search, in addition to the list of web pages, you get a list of news and search results for places.
Search is, in fact, a large application that can be accessed by pressing the hardware search button. But not always - applications during their work can replace this search (for example, “People”, “Maps”, “Marketplace”).
What we were shown so far does not look like a complete mobile operating system. Some parts of the system are more like some kind of frame - an example of how the platform of the new generation phones should look. This is both good and bad. On the one hand, we are still very excited about the viability of the Metro interface and some smart solutions in WP7. On the other hand, Microsoft in just a few months should turn this into a viable product that can endure fierce competition, and there are some serious issues that need to be addressed. Honestly, this is a little scary.
If the WP7 team adds a clipboard and some elements of multitasking, Microsoft can get a pretty solid debut version of WP7, especially in combination with a fierce propaganda campaign for developers.
Of course, this is a big “if” - time is running out, and the market has already proved that it will not wait for the company to play catch-up. And the speech at the moment is not about victory, but about participation in the race, and if Microsoft does not know this, then it may be too late.
It was a long way, wasn't it? Although, in a sense, not so - in fact, about In light of this, you can say that Widows Phone 7 is a desperate attempt to become competitive again in the mobile market. Call it whatever you like, but regardless of this, brand loyalty will no longer help this operating system - it itself should be worthy. Moreover, WP7 should be virtually flawless in a market where there is iOS 4. Microsoft has a few months before it launches the first wave of phones on the market, but we recently got a prototype Samsung, codenamed “Taylor”, based on i8910HD. Does he look like a killer of iPhones and androids? Read in this review.
Appearance
As before, the WP7 interface is made in the Metro style, which means the presence of a large number of 2D elements and rectangular blocks with text filled with color. In fact, 2D is not entirely true - the interface consists of several layers on each page, so when scrolling, the Parallax effect even appears , like on a Dandy. This effect works very well: it gives a sense of depth and detail, but does not distract from the content. The controversial moment of cutting off the end of the headlines has not gone away, but it looks beautiful. Although there are places where such clipping works quite funny, for example, in the Office hub: instead of “PowerPoint”, “PowerPoir” is read.
We were very surprised and amazed at the responsiveness of the interface. This is perhaps the most accurate and subtle display response on this side of the iOS4 barricades. It’s amazing how much work Microsoft has done on the user interface since we first saw it — now everything looks like a whole. We did not see any significant lags while using the phone, and the quick transitions between applications and web pages create a very pleasant impression.
The entire OS comes down to three main sections:
- Tiles on the home page (tiles) (favorite applications, people and web pages)
- List of applications (alphabetical list of all applications)
- Hubs (a cross between applications and menus)
WP7 notifies the user of a new incoming SMS message with a pop-up window, like Android, so Microsoft is already ahead of Apple. And if music is playing in the background, then playback can be controlled after pressing the volume button:
It is strange that the panel on top, which is used to display information about the signal level, battery charge and WiFi, is shown only after touching the top of the screen. And in some applications (for example, photos) this panel does not appear at all. We do not know why Microsoft did so, but it takes extra movement to bring up this panel. And yes, guys, please add the percentage of battery power.
Another nice innovation in the interface is the animation in the form of a series of small dots at the top of the screen when something is loading or synchronizing. A trifle, but it's nice to know what the phone thinks or works. The interface does not have a large abundance of controls or options. Only you and your content ... and it works.
In our opinion, there are 2 big omissions: the device does not support copy / paste and multitasking in third-party applications. Although we heard about it on the MIX10, now this is no better. Microsoft made a good selection and editing of the text (at least in Word), and it seems that quite a bit is needed to add a contextual popup for the copy / paste function. And the lack of multitasking is practically unforgivable nowadays, because even Apple (which was catching up in this area) now supports multitasking. We hope that in some magical way these two problems can be solved before the platform is launched ...
Keyboard
I must say in advance: the on-screen keyboard in WP7 is very, very good. We can say that it is almost as good as the keyboard on the iPhone, and certainly better than the keyboard on Android. This is one of the best and most accurate virtual keyboards we have used across platforms - and that says a lot. The prototype we tested has a rather narrow screen, despite the size (3.7 inches) and resolution (480 × 800, standard for WP7). Therefore, while typing, sometimes it was a bit closely horizontal, but it did not bring serious problems.
The keyboard looks simple and clean, like everything else in the OS. Monochrome keys (white characters on a black background or vice versa, depending on the application) and pop-up panels above them when pressed:
The keys are arranged in the usual order, plus a button has been added to switch to the emoticon layout:
Microsoft has acted in a clever way: a comma and a dot are always at hand, and to access infrequently used symbols and punctuation marks you need to hold the corresponding key (as on the iPhone):
We were surprised by the sophistication of the keyboard - because when we saw it on WMC and MIX10, it was not in such a good shape.
Contacts and social networks
WP7 does not have a contact list as such. There is a People application, but that’s completely different. WP7 is a completely social platform, and there is no differentiation between people, be it an interlocutor by phone, SMS or e-mail. As soon as you add your Windows Live, Exchange or Facebook accounts, the phone loads all the contacts associated with you and the contents of the phone changes completely - there is nothing you can do about it. This means that, for example, the Photos application will have a bunch of pictures of the former boyfriend of your new aunt’s new dog, and to fix this, you can only delete your Facebook account from your phone.
This strategy probably works well with Exchange - contact synchronization is one of the main reasons for using Exchange. But Facebook is a different matter. If you have many friends on Facebook, the application will display them all and become useless in the sense of a traditional contact list. Microsoft recommends searching for contacts by typing, pinning the most important contacts on the home screen, and using a list of recently used contacts.
We believe that there is a solution much easier: to allocate Facebook in a kind of sandbox. It would be optimal if Microsoft adhered to the philosophy of Android, which allows the user to choose whether to import all their Facebook contacts into the contact list, and where there is a special Facebook application in which there is a complete list of friends. There is currently no standard Facebook application in WP7, so your Facebook friends just have nowhere to live except in the main contact list. And you can act like in Motorola Blur - import everyone, but give the ability to filter by contact type.
But the strangest thing is that WP7, with all its desire to be social, does not have integration with Twitter. For some, Twitter is just as important as Facebook (or maybe even more), and it seems like a blatant omission. It would be quite easy to add integration with Twitter, because the People application allows you to see both the general update feed of friends from social networks (Windows Live and Facebook), and the feed for individual contacts. Twitter would fit perfectly, they just have to do it.
Email and Messages
As with most modern smartphones, WP7 has fairly simple and automated email settings. The first time you turn on your phone, you will be asked to provide a Windows Live ID, although it is not necessary to use it. On the email settings screen, you can connect accounts for Live, Outlook, Yahoo! Mail and Gmail. Of course, it is possible to manually configure POP or IMAP mailboxes. There is a choice of the method and frequency of synchronization: push, 15 minutes, 30 minutes, 1 hour and manual checking of mail.
The Email app is, overall, awesome, providing a clean, clear interface and easy access to the most commonly used features. On the standard inbox page you will receive an email in the form of a message feed. You can scroll left or right to sort by unread, by flags or by priority. Managing message groups has been done better than in most mail applications that we used - you just need to click the checkbox to the left of the message. This greatly simplifies deleting and moving messages. In addition, it was nice that when you delete the letter, you are transferred to the inbox, and not to the next message. Along the bottom of the screen, you have icons for creating a new message, viewing folders, updating and managing message groups.
By clicking on the hardware search button, you get a fairly powerful search that analyzes topics, message content, senders and recipients at the same time. Using this search is surprisingly easy to find what you are looking for. But, unfortunately, he searches only among messages downloaded to the device. So if you are looking for something that you have long lost on the server, you are out of luck ...
Back in WP7, there are no merged mailboxes. Each box is a kind of separate application, and when you create a new box, a new item is added to the list of applications. To pin this box on the home screen, you must pin this app there. We would like to see the opportunity to place several elements inside the same tile (like new folders in iOS4), where all mailboxes could be placed. Although, of course, it is preferable to just have a combined box.
In general, mail in WP7 is good, but not the best. There are many things that deserve praise, but many are lacking. We would really like Microsoft to have conversations, combined mailboxes, and message searches on the server. We think that many want it.
SMS
The SMS / MMS application in WP7 looks good. But we want the company to differentiate the messages of the sender and the receiver by color (at least shades of the same color).
Creating and sending messages is quite simple. Long press on individual messages gives you the opportunity to delete or forward them, and clicking on the list of conversations makes it possible to delete the entire conversation.
There were problems - in some cases, the text goes beyond the boundaries of the blocks. We know that the software is not yet complete, but it seems that now is not the time for such bugs.
Browser
Since IE gets a lot of bad things into its address, we must say that using a web browser in WP7 is very nice.
Downloading the desktop version of the Engadget site was a little slower than on the iPhone 4. The scaling, which is, of course, done using gestures, runs smoothly, like clockwork.
We appreciated the ability to pin web pages to the home screen (of course, there are also regular bookmarks).
Tabs are supported, on our device there were a maximum of 6, and we think that this is true for all WP7 phones. Let's be honest - probably, and do not need more than 6 simultaneously open pages on the phone. Tabs can be loaded in parallel, regardless of whether they are active or not, and this does not adversely affect the overall performance of the browser.
Neither Flash nor Silverlight are supported in the browser. But those who are familiar with the iPhone can confirm that this is usually not a problem. But the lack of support for HTML5 makes the situation with the browser somewhat painful ... The phone does not even have a separate application for YouTube!
Another thing that interested us was the number of sites that identified iPhone and Android devices to show the mobile version, but did not detect WP7. A key example is Gmail, which shows a nasty WAP version of a site. But we think that a large number of sites will make the necessary changes if the platform becomes popular.
Zune
If you are already familiar with the Zune player, then there will not be many surprises. The integration with Zune in WP7 is pretty seamless, it allows you to view and play the elements of your library, synchronize music and video with your computer, and if you have a subscription, you can download anything from the Internet to your phone (well, almost everything). In general, we liked this combo of phone and player, but sometimes the Zune interface seemed a bit confusing.
We liked the almost unlimited access to new music on the phone through the Zune Pass for $ 14.95. Something tells us that when the phones hit the market, the number of Zune Pass users will increase dramatically.
An important aspect about Zune on WP7 is the extreme interconnectivity of the phone with the desktop PC. Not only do you use Zune software to sync music and videos, you have the option to buy applications on your computer and sync photos. This is very similar to the iPhone and iTunes, and completely different from ActiveSync from the heyday of Windows Mobile.
Camera and photo management
We heard that one of the main goals of WP7 was the excellent work of the camera, not only in terms of size and image quality, but also in terms of speed. In the end, if your camera turns on too long, or you wait 5 seconds between shots, it becomes quite inconvenient to use the phone to capture interesting moments of life. Fortunately, it seems that Microsoft has fulfilled its promise - turning on the camera took us about
As soon as you take a picture, a very cool thing happens: the picture moves to the left, as if you are looking at a roll of film. You can view recently taken pictures by simply sliding this “tape” to the right, and return to the viewfinder by scrolling back to the left. This is very intuitive, and we suspect that novice users will find it easy.
Phone manufacturers can embed additional camera features, but by default this list is pretty impressive: customizable white balance, graphic effects (grayscale, sepia, etc.), saturation, ISO, shutter speed and even metering mode. Most of these features are available even when shooting video. Naturally, you can set the flash mode: automatically, always, or never.
The phone can be configured so that, immediately after taking a picture, it uploads the received image to your Windows Live SkyDrive account in the background. In the “Images” application you can upload photos to Facebook, but in the settings you have to choose between “upload to SkyDrive” and “upload to Facebook” - you can’t simultaneously. But you can scroll through the menu, why not?
The Images application is a universal tool for working with photos on your phone. Here are your pictures (local and online), and pictures of your friends. In this application, you can view and send photos, change the background of the lock screen and, as it is an expandable hub, use the services of third parties. You can change the background of this hub by a long press on the title. And, as we have already said, on the What's New page, you get an infinite number of updates to your Facebook friends' photos that you barely know. We would like to be able to select a specific list of friends to display here.
Marketplace
Microsoft has already begun distributing prototypes of phones (the same as in this review) to developers, and it will continue to do so. On the side of the box it even says: "developers. Developers! DEVELOPERS !! ” So yes, we can say that Redmond understands how important the availability of third-party applications is for the success (or failure) of the platform. Applications are ultimately downloaded through the Marketplace. This is not at all like Windows Mobile 6.5, but it is similar to what Apple and Google offer us, but with some features.
The first thing you notice when you open the Marketplace is that you have the “Music” category, while iOS allocates music to a separate iTunes application, and Android relies on third-party sellers such as Amazon. But this is not integrated in the way you think - clicking on the music, you just go to the Zune Marketplace, and that's good. In addition, choosing the Games category will take you to the Xbox Marketplace, which, unfortunately, is not yet available for testing. Scrolling to the left, you will be taken to the "Recommended" page, on which both music and applications are interestingly mixed into a single view.
We pass to the last category - “Applications”. Although there are currently only a small number of demo applications on the market, there were enough of them to get an idea of the buying process. Applications are typically divided into the latest, most popular and recommended. You can use the search by clicking on the corresponding hardware button.
If you are just browsing applications, you can scroll through the entire list or narrow it down into categories: Tools, Lifestyle, News & Weather, and Business Center. We will not be surprised if there are more categories in the future. The list displays the application icon, name, rating by
After you decide to buy something, the whole process takes place in the background, and after a few minutes, you can find this application in the phone list. We would like some kind of unobtrusive notification when the application is installed, because now it seems like a guessing game.
Office
Subtle integration with Office may turn out to be the most important difference between WP7 - a feature that only because of this, this phone can not be ignored by serious business users.
Although Word seems to render pages well on a small display, its editing capabilities are very weak - you cannot change fonts and you can choose only one of four text colors: orange, green, red and black. There is a spell check (the familiar red wavy lines), but there is no copy / paste function. Excel has a similar story, although it got a pretty good set of built-in functions.
But PowerPoint documents cannot be created on the phone at all. The main thing in PowerPoint for WP7 is probably the ability to show slide shows - especially for devices with a TV-out to show ready-made presentations from the phone.
WP7 supports interaction with SharePoint servers, which is undoubtedly useful for some business users. There is also OneNote, which in many ways is just Word under a different name. In it you can attach photos and voice recordings to a note, which should be in Word, but this is not. You can set OneNote to automatically sync with your Windows Live SkyDrive account, which means that your notes will be available on any computer connected to the Internet. "Cloud" is a thing, magic!
Xbox live
As we noted above, the integration with Xbox Live is not yet ready. You can only add a Live account and get an avatar on your phone. We hope that Microsoft will soon demonstrate what these devices will be capable of.
Cards
Bing cards implemented in WP7 are pretty good. You have real-time access to maps, satellite imagery and traffic information. A change of location is displayed quickly, but we found that it is usually a little less accurate than Google (indoors and without GPS). Map scaling is fast and smooth.
Since this is a client for Bing Maps, you can rely on the same location database as in Bing for a desktop computer. You can search for places using text or speech (more on this later), and matches will be displayed on the map. As you would expect, by clicking on the place icon, an information page will appear where you can find the phone number, URL, rating and even the schedule - it’s very convenient for restaurants. You can also see user reviews from Citysearch and JudysBook sites.
Our favorite part of maps is a list of directions when navigating to your destination. This is not voice guidance - the application divides the screen into two parts: a map and a list of control points. There are both pedestrian and car modes, but there is no public transport mode.
Search
Like maps, WP7 searches use, of course, Bing. Microsoft made a neat Bing search page for a small screen, similar to a page from a site. On the right side of the input field there is a microphone enable icon for voice search. It really works if you do not want to find something with a strange name. After starting the search, in addition to the list of web pages, you get a list of news and search results for places.
Search is, in fact, a large application that can be accessed by pressing the hardware search button. But not always - applications during their work can replace this search (for example, “People”, “Maps”, “Marketplace”).
Summary
What we were shown so far does not look like a complete mobile operating system. Some parts of the system are more like some kind of frame - an example of how the platform of the new generation phones should look. This is both good and bad. On the one hand, we are still very excited about the viability of the Metro interface and some smart solutions in WP7. On the other hand, Microsoft in just a few months should turn this into a viable product that can endure fierce competition, and there are some serious issues that need to be addressed. Honestly, this is a little scary.
If the WP7 team adds a clipboard and some elements of multitasking, Microsoft can get a pretty solid debut version of WP7, especially in combination with a fierce propaganda campaign for developers.
Of course, this is a big “if” - time is running out, and the market has already proved that it will not wait for the company to play catch-up. And the speech at the moment is not about victory, but about participation in the race, and if Microsoft does not know this, then it may be too late.