The Windows Phone 7 Review
by Anand Lal Shimpi & Brian Klug on October 20, 2010 7:00 PM EST- Posted in
- Smartphones
- Windows Phone 7
- Microsoft
- Mobile
Email and Exchange
Email is one of those things every smartphone has to nail. It’s an absolutely critical part of mobile productivity that there literally is no margin for error, as even small changes can make an experience either completely usable or totally awful depending on the platform. Gmail on Android is so compelling that I know many a person that use it solely because of how nicely integrated it is.
Starting off the email tile shows shows a number that doesn’t correspond to the number of total unread emails in your account, but rather how many have arrived since last you glanced at it. I actually really like this idea. It’s a simple way to notify you that new stuff has arrived since last you checked out the mail application, without overwhelming with some evil gargantuan number of unread messages. Messages read on the desktop or elsewhere still decrement the counter like you’d expect.
Jumping into the mail application itself is a bit of a shocker the first time. While the rest of the WP7 is primarily white text atop black background (unless you changed it in theme settings), the mail application is entirely black text on white background, and there’s no obvious way to change it. Not a huge deal, but it’s a bit strange that mail exists on its own outside those theme settings.
The default view is simply of all your messages in a timeline. The sender’s name is huge, followed by subject and then a one line preview of the message.
Pivoting right brings you to a view with unread messages only, followed by flagged and urgent. Unread view is very useful - I’m honestly shocked other platforms haven’t implemented something similar. Flagged and urgent aren’t as useful, just because starred doesn’t translate to flagged (at least on Google Sync exchange for me), and urgent messages are usually anything but.
Buttons at the bottom compose new email, enable multiple selection, bring up the folders view, or sync respectively. Tapping on the ellipsis for more options lets you get to more settings or add another email account.
Multiple selection on WP7 actually doesn’t require using the button, which makes me wonder - why bother including one? To do it, just tap at the far left of any message, and a small box will glow, letting you know you’re about to enable multiple selections.
Then you can check lots of things and delete, move, mark read or unread, or flag.
There’s also obviously landscape support for everything in the email application. Go back to the normal view, hit folders, and you can view things stored locally on the phone like drafts, or view all the folders on the exchange or IMAP account:
The email compose screen is spartan, but the same can be said for iOS and Android. Start typing a contact’s name or email address, and you’ll get suggestions. Interestingly enough, WP7 does elect to append a default signature to every email - “sent from my Windows Phone.”
You can expand options and set priority (if you like marking everything urgent), and get to BCC and CC fields. There’s also obviously an attach option which right now just lets you attach photos one at a time. Photos get reduced in size to 1630 × 1222, and are compressed to around 350 kilobytes. There aren’t any options to send full size images, unfortunately.
If you close or hit back, you’ll get a save, discard, or cancel dialog. Drafts go into local drafts which you can get to from folders, but not up to a folder of your choice.
All the text composed in the mail application gets typeset in Calibri, whether you like it or not. There’s no formatting options from the email compose screen. Other than that, email is just what you’d expect it to be.
One thing that’s interesting which Anand and I both noticed regarding WP7 mail is that changes like deletion aren’t immediately propagated out. Neither him on IMAP nor me on Exchange saw messages delete immediately. If you want to see those actions reflected on a desktop client, you have to force a sync immediately after making the change. This is somewhat unusual, since everyone else forces those updates to happen immediately instead of later on.
There’s setup support for a variety of common email services, including Windows Live, Outlook (Exchange), Yahoo! Mail, Google, and any POP or IMAP box. Under Exchange you can sync contacts, calendars, and email. Google does the same, and you can specify mandatory SSL. Inside the account options options for grabbing everything or just the past 3 days, 7 days, 2 weeks, or month. Download new content has settings for manually syncing on a schedule or as items arrive (pushed).
The only field I’m uncertain about is logging, which defaults to advanced but has a field marked ‘off (recommended).’ I’m not sure where these logs are going or what they’re used for, but this field is here.
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Shadowmaster625 - Friday, October 22, 2010 - link
It cant play avi files? What do you call a $500 device that cant play avi files? FAIL.beefnot - Friday, October 22, 2010 - link
I'm so sick of seeing "fail" in user comments. 99% of the time, it follows a point or points being made that wouldn't have swayed them to deem it worthy anyway. YAWN.mutatio - Friday, October 22, 2010 - link
I'm glad you guys found it to be as smooth and useful as you did. Based on what you described and the corresponding pictures, however, I'm having a hard time understanding something "just works" when the UI looks like a crap sandwich and almost makes my eyes bleed. "No, we don't use those oh-so-80's icons that graphically represent what the App does. We're much too posh for that, minimalist traffic signs for everything! Brilliant!" Maybe it'll be different with hands on, but it looks like MS went out of their way to try and make this thing look clever and almost abstract. Think myspace made into a smartphone, and if you're like me and think that myspace pages more often look like pop culture chewed up, swallowed, and thrown up onto a web page, then you get where I'm coming from. If that is the case when I get my hands on one of these, I can't see how MS can get any significant traction in the smartphone market. They might get some young emo hipsters who dig the abstract layout, but the appeal thus far of iOS and Android is the overall ease of use. My impression from your review, despite your reassurances, is that MS has again made a product much more complicated than it needs to be. I hope for MS' sake that is not the case when actually using the phone.MacGyver85 - Saturday, October 23, 2010 - link
You'll just have to try it to appreciate it I guess.I can understand people when they say the interface looks bland or overly simplistic based on "screenshots" of the UI. But when you see it in person it's so much better. Really.
Likewise with how you navigate around it. It's just so intuitive you don't for a second have to think how to do something. Every time someone asks me if what it's like I always respond that they'll have to use it themselves. And everyone that does loves it. Seriously :)
Dare I use it but what the hell: it just works!
DJJoeJoe - Saturday, October 23, 2010 - link
I don't think any OS at this point can grab a drastic number of market share like we see in the phone space obviously, or even the slightly slower moving browser space. Modern Operating Systems are so mature at this point that there is really little you can do, both Win7 and Snow Leopard were just small refinements to their previous versions.I think it's doubtful that even something as force-ably drastic as Chrome OS will do anything to the landscape either, even if Google bucketed down and really nailed it. Sadly the market share is ruled by the people going to costco and grabbing up a pre made pc, or large corps running xp, and I can't see something drastic being sold to either groups in the next handful of years.
tis all in the phones these days, and I wish I had a time machine so I could get the second wave of hopefully nicer wp7 handsets and maybe a good update to the os itself. Don't got the money to spend on a 'amazing start'.
Sabresiberian - Monday, October 25, 2010 - link
Looks to me like Vista's bad press helped Apple reach 9% market share, but that's as far as they've moved up. Win 7 is sweet and everyone knows it so Apple is no longer making headway.I don't want Microsoft execs to think that way though - like was written in the article, I think Microsoft performs better as an underdog, and if they think more in terms of being threatened by Apple or someone else then perhaps they'll be more inclined to put a shining example of what they can do out on the market.
Glad to see Microsoft did produce a product with some shine.
;)
dotroy - Thursday, October 28, 2010 - link
Windows 7 phone is good ...umm ..some things not as good ..but win7 phone is good, there are somethings done better by others OS but win 7 phone is good. I never felt like this before. This is a paid advertising. Anand is making good money.pete2s - Thursday, October 28, 2010 - link
Will Windows 7 Phone store apps on the ROM partition? If so, this severely limits the number and size of apps as well as their quality.Although Android is evolving past this limitation, Android, Blackberry and Palm phones store the OS and all apps on an encrypted partition referred to in the specs as the ROM. Usually, this ROM is 512MB. After the OS is installed, the phone has less than 300MB for apps.
Initially, I thought Windows 7 Phone would not store apps on the ROM because of its unified storage system that creates a single volume. If this were the case, however, there'd be no point in having a larger ROM because the ROM would only be holding the OS + the 60MB limit of pre-installed software. Some phones, like the Samsung Focus, do have larger ROMs though (1GB compared to 512MB). The only point of having a larger ROM would be to store more apps because apps are installed to the ROM.
If the above is true, Windows 7 Phone will be severely limited in app size and thus development.
drwho9437 - Monday, November 1, 2010 - link
"It’s almost as if Microsoft is taking Apple’s approach and simply letting everyone build iPhones."Exactly and it is genius, it means the cost margin will vanish and the experience will still be as the software people want, people won't think poorly of these phones just because of a few badly designed devices they used. Let's hope it works out.
owbert - Monday, November 1, 2010 - link
best review of win7 phone amongst others. great work!