Alex Stone

A while back, when Microsoft announced Windows Phone 7, I said this.

Well, now the thing exists and I picked one up. Whether not this was a wise decision or not, time will tell.

Here’s what I’m liking

• Microsoft totally stuck to their guns and learned from Android’s mistakes and is forcing handset makers to stick to a set of guidelines to keep all of the devices the same at their core. This means that you can’t really buy a bad Windows Phone 7 phone and that even the low-end model (if there is one) will be a very nice handset that will likely last a while.
• The interface is incredibly slick. Much more so than what was originally shown. A lot of thought went into the animations and how things move around the screen. I can’t believe I’m saying this but Microsoft did an amazing job on the UI. The UI is not just different than Android and iOS for the sake of being different, but there is a great amount of thought put into the functionality of the UI. It works great for a phone.
• The commercials aren’t kidding. Because of the UI, you are literally in and out of the phone incredibly quick. Most of the information you need or want can be placed on the home screen, much like widgets, but much less ugly.
• Live Tiles! I’m loving Live Tiles. Live Tiles are these tiles on the home screen that update in real time to show you various information
• While there are few apps, the few apps that exist are very well done. If the Facebook for WP7 had Facebook Places, it’d be my favorite mobile client of all of the platforms.
• The integration is impressive. After plugging in my Facebook and Google accounts, I went to get a glass of tea and came back to find my phone completely set up and totally integrated, intelligently. The address book becomes so much more, as you can select a contact and see their recent updates, photos, etc. alongside their contact information.
• It’s fast. The whole thing feels incredibly responsive and snappy. This makes the overall usage experience much nicer than anticipated, after being on the Galaxy S (Captivate) for the last few months.

Here’s what I’m not liking at all:

• Not a lot of apps. This will likely change over the next few months, but right now, the selection is pretty sparse. On the upside, though, the apps that are there are very well done. Twitter and Facebook have apps, as well as other large companies like Netflix (who’s app is amazing, btw).
• No Multitasking. To be honest, I don’t really care about multitasking on my phone(s). You can only do one thing at a time, anyway, so what’s the rush in trying to run several processes at the same time. What you actually want is fast-switching with apps that can access each other’s systems. For example, you want Twitter to send YouTube links to the YouTube app rather than YouTube and Twitter running at the same time.
• No Copy & Paste. This isn’t really a deal breaker, but it’s a nice feature to have. Especially since there’s a mobile Office suite on the phone.
• Home screen tiles feel like I’m wasting a lot of space. On the home screen, tiles are shown 2x2 all the way down. There’s a huge gap of space on the right side that makes me feel like there should be something there. It makes sense visually, but starts to bug you after a while.
• Low customization. No home screen wallpaper, no custom ringtones, and no custom alerts (although it comes with a lot of really awesome stock sounds). You can re-arrange the home screen tiles and change the “theme” color, but that’s about it, for now.
• The Browser! The browser needs work. According to Wikipedia, the WP7 browser is “somewhere in between IE7 and IE8”. There doesn’t seem to be any location support, so using m.check.in or m.gowalla.com is out, for now. I tried loading several mobile web apps and they all managed to not load completely. Not happy about that.
• Not enough Live Tiles. Not sure if this is because of the SDK and the APIs currently available, or just developers not wanting to add Live Tiles to their app, but static tiles are kind of a bummer. Especially for apps like Foursquare, Twitter, or Facebook. Like other things, I expect this to change soon.

All in all, Windows Phone 7 is extremely nice. I can see it finding it’s place alongside Android and HP/Palm, but not quite an iPhone competitor, yet. Definitely more promising than RIM’s BlackBerry OS 6.

If you haven’t checked out Windows Phone 7, it’s definitely worth checking out next time you’re in a phone store. The Windows Phone 7 website does a pretty good job of telling you what’s what, as well.