To make a short story shorter: for the last three days, I’ve been one of but a handful of people carrying around a handset running Microsoft’s unreleased Windows Phone 7 operating system. This specific handset isn’t one that’s ever intended for release, and, while it’s looking pretty close to done, the build running on the handset is by no means finalized.
With these bits in mind along with my new personal policy of not reviewing big-ticket items until I’ve really lived with them (even if that means not being first out of the gate with a review; for logic, see here), I present our pre-review of Windows Phone 7 in its nascent state.
The Handset:As mentioned, the handset I’ve been carrying isn’t something that’s ever intended to go on sale. Codenamed the Samsung “Taylor”, it’s one of three handsets given to select developers and partners to get a feel for Windows Phone 7 as development is underway. This review is in no way about the handset itself, but for those wondering: for a mostly-internal prototype never intended to hit the shelves, this thing is actually pretty dang decent. Chunky? Yes. Original in its design? Heck no. Would I be ashamed to pull it from my pocket? Not one bit.
The Disclaimer: It’s an early build:
As is to be expected from an Operating System still months from release, there are lots of things that.. well.. don’t work. In the sense of fairness in reviewing this crazy early, we won’t be railing too much on the things that are obviously just unfinished. That’d be like walking in on a sculptor five minutes after they began their latest work only to yell “Hey! This is crap! It’s just a block of cement with dents in it!”
With all that said, lets begin..
The General Rundown:
You tap the power button. A lockscreen appears; a picture of a meadow fills the background, and icons at the bottom tell you that new e-mails and text messages await. There’s no immediate indication as to how to go about unlocking it — but touch it any way but the right way, and it bounces up and down as a way of saying, “Hey. Slide me up.”
Once unlocked, the home screen is two separate entities, represented as separate pages: on the left is your “Start” screen; on the right is the full list of applications installed on the device. If we’re using Windows as an analogy here, the left page is like your desktop, while the right page is like the Start Menu’s “All Programs” option.
The left page is where any applications or contacts you’ve chosen to “pin” show as tiles. These tiles, either one or two squares wide, can be as basic as text and an icon, or as complex as an animated patchwork of profile photos pulled down from Facebook. Microsoft tells us these tiles can display just about whatever a developer wants, and can be updated on the fly with push messages.
Some applications — the alarm, maps, calculator, etc — are just that: applications, with whatever single purpose their name implies. Others, however, are what Microsoft calls “Hubs”. Hubs are centralized places where you can go to find the content pertaining to that given subject, spread out across a seamless series of horizontally scrolling views. The “Games” hub, for example, dedicates one view to my Xbox Live profile/avatar, one to any incoming game invites, one to a list of all the games on my device, and one to show off new games on the platform. Developers can also tie their applications into hubs (Pandora adding radio stations to the music hub was given as an example). We’ll talk more about hubs later.
The Looks – Stunning, yet depressing:
hmmm!!!
