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
Facebook Integration
Windows Phone does the best job of Facebook integration I’ve seen of any smartphone platform.
Palm’s webOS was the first to seamlessly integrate Facebook into a modern day smartphone. Supply it with your Facebook credentials and you saw the entirety of your oversized friends list appear in your phone contacts. Email addresses, IM accounts, phone numbers and more were all automatically populated in your address book. If any of your Facebook friends changed their information, the information updated on its own on your phone. It was the wave of the future.
Spiritually, Microsoft picks up where Palm left off. You can do the same sort of blanket integration that you could with the Pre. Supply your Facebook login information and Microsoft syncs all of your contacts through the cloud. Unlike webOS however, Microsoft gives you an option to not sync all of your Facebook friends. You can choose to only sync those Facebook contacts who are already in your address book (from Google, Hotmail, Exchange or Yahoo).
Microsoft integrates Facebook in more places than just your address book however. Meet the People Hub.
People Hub
For all intents and purposes the People hub is the Facebook app for Windows Phone 7. If you’ve supplied your Facebook login, the default “what’s new” tab will serve as your news feed. It’s not the reduced load Top News feed you get from Facebook, but literally the most recent news from all of your Facebook friends and pages. You get 25 posts by default (non customizable) and there’s a get older posts button at the bottom of the page if you want to see more.
It’s not a total Facebook app replacement as you don’t get non-content updates. Items like who your friends have added to their friends list are absent from the feed. There is also no integration of friend request management. The Facebook integration is mostly for passive consumption with a couple of exceptions. You can view and add comments to posts as well as like posts, however you can’t see who has liked a post (just the number of likes for any given post).
Tapping on anyones name in the what’s new feed brings you to their contact page. You can view their “what’s new” feed and comment on their posts. You can also view their profile which will pull in data from both Facebook and your contacts (e.g. through Google or Live). Microsoft clearly (and cleanly) indicates what sources it is using to pull the profile information from under the contact’s name.
If you really like talking to/keeping tabs on/being creepy to a person, you can pin their profile to your Start screen for easy access.
From the profile tab you can write on their Facebook wall, send an email, make a phone call, send them a text message or even bring up their address on Bing maps.
All of these functions are super fast and seamlessly integrated into the experience. Quickly writing on someone’s wall without having to fire up a separate Facebook app couldn’t be faster. There’s literally a Write on wall screen that quickly appears when you select the option to. Sending an email or text message from the profile screen is a bit slower since you’re technically switching to another app, but it’s near instantaneous.
Here’s where the functionality of the back button really one-ups iOS multitasking. Let’s say I’m viewing a friend’s profile and I want to get directions to his house. I can click on his address on the profile page which will immediately fire up the Maps app. I can use Maps to quickly see where he lives (or eventually get directions) but now when I want to go back to his profile to send him a text message, there’s no double tapping or app selection - I just hit the back button and I’m back at his profile. Had I tried to get directions while at the Maps screen I would’ve tapped the back button twice (once to get out of directions and into the normal map and once again to go back to the profile) but it’s still a snappier process than manually switching between apps in iOS. The advantage is really limited to these types of scenarios however.
There’s still the need for a standalone Facebook app for more of the FB-specific features (gift giving, messaging, apps, chat, etc...), but the People hub gives you access to the most commonly used tasks. Update: A standalone Facebook app is now available for WP7.
While you can exclude Facebook friends who aren’t already in your address book from appearing in your address book, doing so will not keep those friends from appearing in your what’s new feed. The good news is that the what’s new feed will respect your Facebook news feed options. If you’ve removed someone’s updates from appearing in your Facebook news feed, their updates won’t appear in the what’s new tab on Windows Phone 7.
Today Facebook is front and center with Windows Phone, but it would be just as easy for Microsoft to extend the interface to support other social networks or status aggregators. Twitter obviously comes to mind and while Microsoft isn’t officially announcing anything yet, that’s clearly a target that we can expect to see pulled in at some point.
Aside from the news feed, there are two more tabs to the People hub: recent and all. The recent tab is actually a two-page tab that displays up to 8 tiles of people you’ve either recently communicated with or whose profiles you’ve viewed/stalked. The tiles are animated so you’ll see them alternate between a photo, photo + name, or just name.
This tab is effectively your favorites as there is no such functionality in the Phone app. You don’t get one touch dialing or emailing unfortunately, you’ll need one tap to select the contact and one more to choose your communication method.
The all tab is exactly what it sounds like - a list of all of your contacts. The topmost contact? A big link to your own profile of course, which you can use to provide status updates on your Facebook wall.
The search button will let you search through the all people tab. Results are narrowed down/highlighted as you type.
Tapping on any of the highlighted headers brings you to this screen, which you can use to jump to any other header in the list. I feel like the Android/iOS scrolling widget makes more sense but the Microsoft approach does work.
Facebook Photo Integration
What I was more impressed by was the Facebook integration in the Pictures hub. Your profile pictures and mobile uploads are both listed as albums when looking through all of your photos by date. Browsing photos you’ve synced, photos you’ve stored in the cloud and photos you’ve uploaded to Facebook is not only possible, but done sensibly. On top of all of that, there’s also a what’s new tab in the Pictures hub that just gives you a feed of all of the photos your Facebook friends have posted recently. It’s a great way to photo stalk if that’s what you ultimately end up doing on Facebook anyway.
While Palm used Facebook as a way to integrate contacts, other companies have since tried to pull status updates and photos from the service to populate your phone. Microsoft now joins the list of those who have tried, and while the integration isn’t perfect, it’s quite possibly the best attempt yet.
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Kentcomp - Friday, October 22, 2010 - link
I really appreciate you guys so thoroughly reviewing WP7. Your review was like reading a really well illustrated, yet candid owner's manual. Thank you!PS I find the home screen to be kind of boring too but I'll choose functionality over style 99% of the time. After all, the homescreen is just there to get you to where you really want to be.
Riccardo - Friday, October 22, 2010 - link
That's a remarkably in-depth review. Thanks guys!rye222 - Friday, October 22, 2010 - link
amazingly thorough article. i've been eagerly awaiting these phones ever since i bought the Zune HD and thought, "if MS made this into a phone, they would own". thanks Anand, great job as usual on your articles!lewchenko74 - Friday, October 22, 2010 - link
The interface is too minimalistic. Hate the massive two color icons. Just looks ugly.. and really not that functional if you have a lot of these 'icons' to wade through.Then there are the limitations that mean it isnt quite as feature rich as an iphone or Android in certain areas.
There is absolutely nothing compelling to sway me to this phone (at all).
Anyone with an app library (android or iOS) is hardly gonna part with their spent money on a new device and lose that investment... plus it barely has an app library yet.
I wish MS well as competition is important... but it really doesnt give an iOS / Android owner anything new, plus if I was buying fresh... I think that the iOS / Android phones and app-sphere etc are just more compelling.
Nice thorough review though.... just read a little too enthusiastically MS focussed at times, but a good read.
hakime - Friday, October 22, 2010 - link
"The UI is a thing of beauty. Microsoft got the style, customization and performance one hundred percent right on this thing. It makes iOS feel old and utilitarian. It’s funny to think that Microsoft was the one to out-simplify Apple in the UI department."This sentence summarize by itself how not objective and professional this review is. I mean no one on Earth being a little bit rational can think that this Metro interface is beautiful let alone functional or easy to use. I mean how a hell can a text based interface with half displayed text all around and ugly flat colors on top of black background can be called beautiful? This interface just lacks taste, it is different yes, but it is bad, it lacks interaction. You are so Microsft driven that you come to think that a different interface is necessarily easy to use and functional. Nothing is right here, the theme, the colors are ugly with little sense for giving some wish for the user to use the phone, there are too many steps needed to go to what the user wants to do, the tiles are a mess as they can be anything and hubs are an obscure UI concept that serve little interest. You want to browse through your apps, you are presented with only a list view and good luck with that. The calendar and SMS apps are a horrible vision for the users, they are just ugly. The email app looks like it was design by a bunch of students in GUI design with no clue on how to present the information to users. And everything else is just a mess in itself hidden behind a ton of useless animations.
In contrary, iOS just looks easy to use, clean, beautiful. You have your phone and that's it, not extra useless UI concepts and distractions. They are nice for a demo, but for daily usage, they rapidly get useless.
Then you continue with the Zune pass, noting that it is better than iTunes, but in what regard? You are strange enough to like the Zune pass, that does not make it better than the iTunes model. Again non objective argument.
Best integration of Facebook in WP7? Is it a big deal or even a nice feature? The question is if it is really a good thing. Why should I have all my contact and photos all mixed up in an almost uncontrollable mess? Someone objective would surely recognize that such exaggerated integration of Facebook just makes little sense. A well designed app is more than enough to access the Facebook content without having to have all the time friends and non-friends popping up with messages and photos. Distractive and useless like the UI of WP7.
And what about not being more reserved with the major shortcomings of WP7. How many times we have been told about the lack of multitasking in iOS? And now an os comes to a market where all the other mobiles os have multitasking and this is not called a deal breaker! It is a deal breaker, not having multitasking on WP7 is just inexcusable from Microsoft.
Same thing with copy and paste, in 2010 an smart phone should have an efficient copy and past implemented, and WP7 not having it is a total shame. Sure, most implementation out there sucks, and only the iOS has a real efficient and easy to use implementation, but that does not forgive Microsoft for that.
What about also the significant lack of unified mail box in the email app, the lack of robust security features, the lack of tethering, the clumsy Exchange support, the pour performing third party apps, the lack of universal search, the excessive $14.99 for zune pass, the inexcusable lack for support of HTML5 which is even more unacceptable as the os does not support flash either, no YouTube app, weird interface concept when you need to long press to reach some options and in-app menus, etc...
The list is long, WP7 is surely full of animations but it is little functional. And the authors fail to give an objective review of this system which is new but far behind the competition. Having a different UI style does not make this os more functional or even attractive. It just sacrifices too much on real usability for bringing useless UI concepts. The authors wishing so much that their lovely Microsoft brings something to save itself from the mobile market that they have forgotten what objectivity means.
dustcrusher - Friday, October 22, 2010 - link
It's a review. Reviews are inherently subjective. The only parts that aren't are the benchmarks, and even those are arguably not 100% objective. I think at points they were gushing over what worked well but there were other points where they did bring up some valid objections, even if they tinted them a little with rose-colored glasses.Thanks to this review, I learned enough to realize I'm probably better off going to an Android phone when I am able (disclosure: I'm on WinMo 6 right now). Android simply fits my wants and needs better. I don't see WP7 taking giant chunks of market share from Apple or Android, but I think it will do better than WinMo did.
Microsoft is trying to do something different; seems like they are trying to make a smartphone that is as easy to use as a featurephone. It's risky but it could pay off big time. If their sole intention was to cram all of Android and iOS's features into their new OS, it'd be closer to WinMo 6.6 w/HTC's UI shell on top.
A couple of reviewers decided they like the way WP7 does some things. You are clearly happy with your iPhone, so why are you letting it bother you so much? Do you really want to come off as a trollish fanboy?
cjl - Friday, October 22, 2010 - link
Have you read any of Anand's Iphone reviews? If anything, Anand is biased towards the iphone at the expense of pretty much anything else, so the fact that this review is so positive speaks volumes about the phone.Also, to everyone complaining about the interface, you should really try using a Zune HD sometime. It's amazing how natural the interface is.
headrush69 - Sunday, October 24, 2010 - link
There is a big difference between saying an interface is natural to use over saying it is a thing of beauty.Frankly many of the screen shots make elements of the interface look very basic, dated and rushed.
Example: plain square flat buttons on call screen, on/off toggles in setting screen.
Of course these things are pretty trivial to improve and I'm sure they will, but statements like this in the article
"The UI is a thing of beauty. Microsoft got the style, customization and performance one hundred percent right on this thing. It makes iOS feel old and utilitarian."
I just can't agree with and believe exactly the opposite.
Smilin - Monday, October 25, 2010 - link
Have YOU seen the UI? Not screenshot of it. Have you seen it? Used it?Your opinion is worthless.
Smilin - Monday, October 25, 2010 - link
smells like hater in here.Sorry man but this is the most comprehensive and *objective* review I've seen yet. Most of the things you're griping about are IN the article. Did you read it?