Eighteen months ago, Microsoft hit the reset button on Windows Mobile, throwing out years of features and applications in favour of a panoramic interface designed for touch, social networks and cloud services.
Instead of a different skin from every phone maker, there’s a single interface with tiles and hubs for integration. Instead of dense screens of information and menus designed for picking at with a stylus, the interface spreads lists and thumbnails over layouts far bigger than the screen size and you spend your time swiping and sliding.
Windows Phone 7 is a world away from any phone we’ve seen from Microsoft before and the design might well delight you – but what can you actually do?
From the moment you turn it on, Windows Phone 7 looks good. Even the lock screen is colourful and useful at the same time, with a photo background you can customise, details of your next appointment and notifications for missed calls and new messages.
Slide the lock screen smoothly out of the way and the Start screen shows you what Microsoft is trying to do with Windows Phone 7.
This is a radically new interface. Neither tiles nor animations are new on mobile, and neither is adding notifications to icons, but the Home screen puts them all together beautifully.
That’s a word we find ourselves wanting to use a lot about the Windows Phone interface, which is vivid and engaging, whether you choose the white theme or the black, which saves power on OLED screens and sets off the ten accent colours well.
Most tiles take up a single space, but Pictures is twice as wide so that the photo it uses is big enough to enjoy, as is the Calendar so you can read your next appointment – and if you pin an artist you get a double tile so you can tell it’s not an album.
Like pretty much any other smartphone, you pick the tiles you want to see all the time, for apps and tools and (more unusually) specific people and music or the six hubs that organise content (Music and video, Pictures, Games, People, Office and Marketplace).
The Home screen, the hubs, the web browser and many of the apps are bigger than the phone, with a visual hint of what’s to the right to encourage you to swipe across and see more.
This is a uniformly fast and responsive experience and it means you don’t feel you’re peering at information through the bottom of a matchbox.
For the Home screen, you swipe across to get a full list of all the apps and tools on the phone, then press and hold to pin an app (or to uninstall it – you can uninstall nearly any app, even ones from the handset maker or the network).
Press and hold again to move a tile about (the other tiles shimmy out the way to make it obvious where you’re dragging to).
And rather than just using them to launch apps, the idea is that tiles give you the same instant hit of information as a travel sign; what you need to know and nothing more.
This works really well in some cases; seeing the time of your next alarm is useful, seeing Facebook updates on the tiles for friends you pin to the start screen does make you feel you’re in touch with them (although it’s a shame you don’t see emails and text messages from them scrolling across the tile as well).
Most of the third-party apps we’ve seen so far don’t do anything clever with tiles; hopefully that will change as developers get used to what Windows Phone can do.
The tiled interface works perfectly for the built-in apps and a few favourite extras. But once you start to pin a lot of apps, the distance you have to scroll to get to the bottom gets long, even with the fast and responsive scrolling.
A long scrolling list has less potential for confusion than Android’s multiple Home screens, but it’s not as efficient once you have a few dozen apps.
It would make sense for a future version to either turn the Start screen into a panorama like the hubs (giving you multiple columns of tiles) or better yet to enable users to create their own custom hubs to group specific apps on.
That would be more complex than the elegant Start screen, but power users are going to need some way to organise large numbers of apps.
We’d also like a way to pin the Wi-Fi settings to the Start screen (maybe there will be an app for that). In fact there are a lot of useful options tucked away in the Settings menu but not everything you might want.
One thing that did irk: it’s disappointing not to be able to set your own tune as a ringtone.
Navigating around Windows Phone is intuitive as well, not least because the lack of full multi-tasking means there aren’t many ways to get lost.
You swipe your way through the hubs (and most apps), tap on almost anything you see to get more information, hit the Back button to go up a level and use the Start button to go all the way back to the Start screen.
If the icons in an app aren’t clear, swipe up from the tool bar or tap the ellipsis (…) to get labels. One thing that’s disconcerting is that although the screen rotates smoothly and swiftly when you turn the phone, not everything will rotate – the Start screen, hubs and some apps don’t, and you just have to learn which do and don’t.
Unlike the iPhone, Windows Mobile devices often had a hardware camera button; the one on all Windows Phone 7 handsets launches the camera – even if the phone is locked with the screen off.
That gets you to the live camera screen ready to take a photo remarkably fast; about as fast as on most digital cameras.
The interface is nice and simple, but there’s an excellent set of manual controls (white balance, auto focus, effects, ISO controls, exposure compensation, dynamic range, saturation levels and more). Being able to swipe back from the viewfinder to see your recent pictures in the camera roll is a nice timesaver and sharing photos onto SkyDrive or Facebook is simple.
You can record video from the same screen, with a similar number of manual controls, but you can’t share or upload video directly from the phone.
The hardware volume keys also bring up a toolbar where you can switch the ringer to vibrate; and if you’re playing music (one of the things you can leave running in the background) this also has media controls.
This is similar to the controls on the Zune HD media player, although not quite the same (and to save battery you don’t get the stylish screensavers of the Zune HD – Windows Phone 7 has many elements of Zune HD but it’s not the same experience).
There’s also a hard search key on all Windows Phone handsets. The Bing search app may even win over Google diehards (you can’t replace it, though you can set other search engines as the default in the browser).
It makes good use of search suggestions and prioritises local results – which include a map, phone numbers, opening times, ratings and the options to pin the result to the Start screen (so you can look back at the map easily) or send the details as an email or SMS.
You can swipe to web and news results, which come with enough of an excerpt for you to know if they’re useful before you waste time and data clicking through to them.
Maps give you navigation (although not turn-by-turn like on Google Maps), and the single button to get satellite views makes it easier to spot the building you need.
You also get Bing’s instant answers; enough detail for searches like weather, stocks and flight numbers that you don’t need to click through to a web page at all.
But there’s one problem; if you press the search button in an app, if there’s a search option in the app it opens that – and if there isn’t it opens the main Bing search.
And that means you switch away from the app you were running and – if you actually did want to find something inside the app itself – you have to wait to switch back, and because third-party apps can’t multitask you have to wait for it to resume.
Press and hold the Start menu and you get another type of search: voice search. Although Microsoft has demonstrated using this to search Bing – including ‘instant answers’ like flight status and stock prices – in the UK it doesn’t seem to work for anything except voice dialling and opening apps (which is one way to deal with having too many apps to scroll through comfortably).
The recognition is excellent, but the dialling can seem a little trigger happy; if you say ‘call Tim’ it will immediately dial any contact that’s just named Tim rather than giving you a list of the 10 other Tims in your address book with surnames.
The excellent touch keyboard makes that almost redundant. It’s one of the best we’ve used on any touchscreen, detecting key presses as fast as you can type, correcting words accurately pretty nearly every time even if you only hit a couple of the correct letters.
The size of keys doesn’t change as you type, but the touch area assigned to a key gets bigger if it’s one you’re more likely to type next, which increases accuracy.
You can go back and correct a word even if you’ve typed another few sentences after it; tap and you get alternates, press and hold and you get a cursor for precise editing.
Unusually and cleverly, this appears not under your finger but some way above it – where you can see it. Once you see it’s active you just drag it into place, you can position it with complete accuracy (something that’s hard on many Android phones, for example).
The predictive text and corrections have an impressively wide vocabulary (including acronyms like NDA and AMD), and it’s nice to get alternatives that are designed to save you having to switch to the number screen for punctuation (type something that could be ill or I’ll and it will change it to I’ll because it’s harder to type – tap to choose the former).
You get a different keyboard depending on what you’re doing, and usually that’s a good thing: if you’re typing in a URL or email field, .com appears; if you’re filling in a password field there’s no auto correction; and you want emoticons when you’re writing a message or sending a comment but not when you’re editing a contact.
It’s a puzzle why you get the red underline for misspellings in email but not in the SMS tools or most apps, where it would be just as useful to know you’ve made a mistake.
After years of waiting, Microsoft’s online calendar and contacts services finally sync to a Microsoft mobile phone along with email; in fact all the main webmail services sync calendar and contacts too, using the increasingly common Exchange ActiveSync for push email as well as older POP and IMAP connections.
The large font means you only see five messages on screen at once, but swiping down is fast and the unread, flagged and urgent tabs make it easier to sort mail out. HTML email is generally very readable; it wraps text and fits tables to the screen size when possible, so you can read more easily.
The animation as you delete mail is cute, although we’re not sure if it will still be cute in six months or if we’ll wish it deleted faster without the animation.
The calendar has day and month views, colour-coded to different calendar sources and an agenda view that scrolls for as long as you have appointments (more useful than a week view on a small screen).
You can accept invitations from your inbox, and we like the way it warns you of conflicts with a link that shows you the right day in the calendar; there’s isn’t a map link (few meetings have an address a search engine can deal with in the location field) but you get images of who’s coming to the meeting – and a rather cheeky ‘I’ll be late button’ that sends a message to everyone.
The pictures of people in meetings come from the People hub, which grabs photos from every contact source you have. It also connects different contact entries for the same people, which minimises the clutter in your address book.
We found the People hub to be very accurate, matching people across Facebook, Exchange, Windows Live and Gmail; it also suggests contact matches it’s not sure about and enables you to link contacts yourself.
Along with all the details you have about someone, from addresses to birthdays to significant others, profiles show updates from Facebook, Windows Live, and any social networks you have connected to Windows Live, which covers just about everything but Twitter.
Blame that on the fact that Microsoft and Twitter can’t seem to do a deal, but it is a deficiency in so social a phone. There will be plenty of Twitter clients, but this is where the lack of multitasking may be an issue.
Even with a 1GHz processor, if Twitter apps don’t use the Windows Phone notification service (which the official Twitter app doesn’t) then you have to wait to see messages when you launch the app.
Apps have to start within five seconds, but if it takes another five seconds to show the interface and another ten to download messages, this starts feeling slow compared to phones that can grab content in the background; we’re hoping well-written apps will avoid this.
The People hub acts as your call log (for email, text messages and social networks as well as phone calls), as well as your address book and social news page. Similarly, you get recent photos from friends on Facebook and other sites like Flickr (through Windows Live) alongside your own images in the Pictures hub – and you can comment on them directly, or scroll through all their online photos just by swiping.
The Music and video hub shows content you’ve synced with Zune software, but third-party apps like YouTube integrate here as well. New content and stuff you’ve played recently shows up in the same lists here, wherever it came from.
This is where Windows Phone 7 really shines; instead of jumping from app to app, looking for what you want, content and information is all together where it belongs.
A lot of smartphones have promised this kind of integration, but Windows Phone is the first to deliver it in a way that doesn’t overwhelm you.
We’re not sure what third-party apps can plug into the Office hub, but it already combines the business apps of Windows Phone – Word, Excel, PowerPoint, the excellent and underrated OneNote (which records voice notes and pictures as well as text) and a SharePoint client with Office Live.
You can work with local documents or download documents you’ve stored on Office Live, but you can’t edit an Office Live document directly in Mobile Office from the web (unless it’s a OneNote note), and you open and edit a document from Office Live you might lose some formatting (you do get a warning).
Being able to jump directly to tables in Excel or sections in Word, using the contents list Mobile Office builds automatically is certainly useful but we’d really like to see the other apps work more like OneNote, enabling you to have notes on your phone that sync to the Web and to the PC version of the app as well.
Mobile browsing has come a long way since Windows Mobile and Windows Phone 7 keeps up reasonably well.
What you don’t get: Flash – although YouTube videos are automatically sent to the YouTube player – Silverlight in web sites, or HTML 5.
What you do get is tabbed browsing with six tabs and a very clear thumbnail interface; like Marketplace downloads, web pages stay around in the background and the thumbnails are there even after you restart the phone (although the pages do have to reload).
Pinch to zoom and double-tapping to zoom to a column are both fluid and responsive and we like the way the address bar and toolbar at the bottom vanish to give you more space when you turn the phone sideways into landscape view.
The browser itself is no slouch. We timed it on three hefty pages (BBC News, a Flickr photostream and the TechRadar home page), over Wi-Fi and 3G and while there’s the usual variability in 3G network speeds, the time it takes to load a web page is comparable with iPhone 4 and a Google Nexus One running Android 2.2 for most pages although at times pages took a little longer in Internet Explorer to render full content.
Searching inside pages is useful and the URL suggestions from Bing save you typing, but there are some frustrations.
You can pin a website to the Start screen as well as save it as a bookmark, and you can save images and email or SMS a site to a friend, but you can’t share a page on Facebook or Windows Live or save it to OneNote, let alone Twitter (and you can’t copy the URL out or grab text from the page in this version, of course).
Anyone who remembers ActiveSync with loathing will be delighted by the Zune software you use to sync content from your PC to a Windows Phone (there’s a Windows Phone Connector coming for Mac soon).
This is an excellent and underrated media app for exploring your own music and the comprehensive Zune Marketplace for music, podcasts (and a reasonable selection of videos); the unlimited £8.99 a month Zune Pass that enables you to stream content from your PC or on your phone is a bargain (however the US gets to keep 10 tracks a month – no such luck for the UK, despite the same price tag of circa £26 for three months’ use.)
Plug in a Windows Phone and the Zune app gets a new Phone option that enables you to pick music, videos, photos and podcasts to transfer (individually or via smart playlists and sync groups for photo folders, artists or TV series).
You can see how much space you have on the phone and choose whether to transfer music at the original quality or convert them to a lower bitrate to save space (video is automatically transcoded, which is thoroughly irritating because it requires ages to get the most simple of files on there).
The Zune heritage means you can also enable Wi-Fi syncing; it only works on your home network and when your phone is plugged into the mains, but it’s hands down the least fiddly way to get music onto any smartphone or media player.
What you can’t do is see your phone as a drive in Explorer, so you can’t copy arbitrary files – like Office documents, irritatingly – but you can drag content off your phone onto the PC it’s connected to, even if it’s not your main PC.
Zune is also one way to get apps onto your phone, although don’t think of desktop installers from the Windows Mobile days; this is just another way of browsing the same Marketplace that you see on the phone itself (pick Marketplace and then Apps in Zune and you can browse, buy and send apps to the phone from a bigger screen).
This can be more convenient and it’s great to have the option (this is one of the strengths of BlackBerry App World and it’s still surprising and disappointing that Android Marketplace doesn’t have it).
Marketplace on the phone is another panoramic hub, covering applications, games, music and tools specifically for your make of phone.
You can search or browse all the ways you’d expect; by new, featured and top apps or in categories (and each category has lists of top, new and free apps).
It’s too soon to tell about the quality and breadth of the marketplace, but it’s an easy app to work with.
Games look set to be one of the strengths of Windows Phone; the combination of the fast processor and hardware graphics acceleration, the responsive touch interface and familiar development tools mean it can cope with more than casual games (and it’s absurdly satisfying to see your Xbox Live achievements and avatar here).
One note about apps and content; you can’t just add a microSD card to a Windows Phone handset, even if it has a slot.
The OS uses microSD cards for extra storage but it extends its file system across the SD card and built-in flash together; only certified high-speed cards are fast enough for that and if you pull a card out to replace it the phone will reset – because it can’t tell which content will be missing.
Get in, get out, get back to your life is Microsoft’s mantra here. It’s pitching Windows Phone 7 as the phone you’ll love – but not so much that you’ll be glued to it when you want to be doing other things.
This works to a certain extent, with tiles that show detailed notifications and with the hubs and the apps that plug into them. Once you’re into other apps, or browsing or media or games, you’re going to spend as much time absorbed in Windows Phone 7 as any other smartphone.
Despite the lack of power user features like replaceable storage and true multitasking, the quality of what is included is very good.
Microsoft has delivered what it set out to do: a refreshingly different, truly engaging mobile OS. The user interface delights and there are standout innovations such as linking multiple contacts.
The problem is that there are already other strong smartphone platforms on the market – Windows Phone 7 doesn’t beat them hands down but it’s a strong challenger that’s only going to get better (especially because Microsoft will be sending updates out to all phones regularly, whatever the network or manufacturer) and you’ll want to try it out to see if it suits you.
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