Windows Phone 7: A First Look

After months of anticipation, Microsoft has finally launched Windows Phone 7 and to many people’s surprise, gained approval from smartphone lover Stephen Fry. What is it actually like to play with the new OS, though?

The first thing to say about Windows Phone 7 is it potentially ends the dominance of the app. The way Apple allowed users to fill a grid of icons, each leading to a different app was revolutionary, and has been copied by Android and most other phone OSs since then. Even the current look of Symbian is edging towards that look.

‘Fun to use’

Microsoft has thrown that out, and grouped the phone’s functions by, well, function. There are up to eight tiles or “hubs” on the home screen, and as many more as you like if you scroll down. Each one includes live updates, and links to a group of applications, according to what you want to do.

In practice this means a tile for “People”, which looks at your contacts regardless of whether you interacted with them by Facebook, email, text or other means, a tile for “Email”, which links to calendar items, and other tiles such as “Pictures”.

The email tile is particularly well thought out, and includes the ability to “triage” mail – selecting items for deletion or archiving, and allowing the user to slide to the right to get other views, such as unread mail, urgent mail etc. This looks so much nicer than the awfulness of Outlook. I can see people moving straight to their phone for email in future. Microsoft says this includes integration with cloud email services such as Google Mail, but we expect it to function better with Microsoft’s own email software.

Sliding and scrolling on the phone are very smooth, and it is easy to agree with Stephen Fry that this will be a fun phone to use.

Documents on the phone

Microsoft has clearly gone all out to make this phone attractive to consumers – and taken the major step of abandoning compatibility with Windows Mobile 6.5. However, it has kept the business-oriented functions of earlier operating systems and improved on them.

Windows Phone 7 includes viewers and editors for Microsoft Office documents. These are tailored for the mobile experience. As one spokesman said, “every Windows Phone 7 device will ship with Office,” which is more than can be said for Windows 7, as we all know.

The mobile viewers recognise that scrolling inside the documents will be difficult, so long Word files can be viewed with an outline view, and each part of the document then displays as it would on a PC. Similarly, spreadsheets can be shunk and enlarged with pinching movements.

Editing is also possible along with annotations, where comments from different editors appear as word bubbles – apparently a mode that makes it easier to respond effectively to documents when away from a screen and keyboard.

This is a far more powerful mode of working with online documents than I have seen on any other phone as yet. The drawback here, of course, is that the viewer/editor only appears to work with specific Microsoft formats – the XML versions of Office documents, which appear in the latest versions of the applications. More details on this will emerge.

Customisation might kill this

The danger is that this might be killed by limitations, either imposed by Microsoft, or by operators, who might insist that only their chosen social media pipes are integrated, or push everything through some kind of portal like Vodafone Live.

At the London launch there was little evidence of any of this sort of foul play on the part of operators. Any customisation seemed to be very light, and the OS has a pleasing uniformity on the devices we saw.