Windows Phone 7: The AnandTech Guide
by Brian Klug on March 21, 2010 12:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Smartphones
- Windows Phone 7
- Mobile
The Browser: Somewhere Between IE7 and IE8
I mentioned earlier that there were a ton of different builds of the WP7S running around on the ASUS-built phone hardware during MIX10. I think that's almost an understatement; I can mentally count at least three different builds from visual clues alone. If you watched the videos, you likely heard me allude to the "squeeze" effect that's been added to the tiles in the newer builds of the phone I saw on Monday. In these, the tiles compress like a spring, slightly, when you reach the end of the stacked list. The hardware demo I got hands-on with was a game demo phone, not an overall UI demo phone. This explains why it lacks the newer squeeze effect in the UI and was just a tad rougher around the edges in some places, but had all the game demos installed.
The other unfortunate consequence of this hardware being a game demo phone was that it lacked a SIM. Undeterred, I hastily popped the SIM out of my phone, which Andre graciously (and surprisingly) installed for me.
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A paperclip, a paperclip, my kingdom for a paperclip!
I wasn't allowed to grab any photos of the phone with its battery cover off, though there's probably not much to be learned except for this phone's IMEI.
A few seconds later, and we had signal and were on AT&T's network. I fired up the browser first. WP7S ironically chose nyt.com as the default start page, likely a nod to Apple's prodigious use of the New York Times webpage in early iPhone marketing to demonstrate that it had a real browser. Initially, all of the status icons at the very top are hidden except for the current time. They gracefully slide down when this upper region is tapped. This is just another example of Microsoft's "Metro" less-is-more philosophy at work. Note the G to the right of the two signal bars; I'm speculating that G stands for GPRS, which partially explains why cellular data was so slow. I should note that AT&T's 3G and EDGE services were extremely slow in Las Vegas the entire time, and even worse at the conference venue. I rarely saw speeds above 150 kilobits/s on 3G or EDGE, if at all. I fully attribute the browser loading slowness to network connectivity.
It's difficult to get a good feel for the browser without a better network connection. There was also a bit of difficulty getting the screen to register my zoom out gesture. Throughout the conference, false touches on the demo hardware abounded. I did notice that this demo device had a plastic film atop the screen, which could have been a contributing factor. Whatever the case, touch recognition still needs - and likely will get - tweaking across the platform.
We eventually gave up doing a lot of things I wanted to do online because of how slow the network connectivity was. I didn't get a chance to run any browser standards compliance tests in person, however the emulator includes Internet Explorer. Sadly, WP7S' browser still doesn't pass the Acid2 or Acid3 tests:
Acid2 and Acid3 tests, respectively
I pulled the user agent out, which is: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows Phone OS 7.0; Trident/3.1; IEMobile/7.0). Picking this apart, we can see that it's reporting itself as Trident/3.1, which is essentially Internet Explorer 7.0. This mirrors what I was told by some of the Microsoft engineers in-person, that the browser was somewhere between IE 7 and IE 8.
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PsychoPif - Monday, March 22, 2010 - link
MS will push the upgrades, not the carriers.shady28 - Sunday, March 21, 2010 - link
Wow, you know there are (were) really only 5 platforms in the smartphone space - Windows Mobile, Palm WebOS, Blackberry RIM, iPhone, and Android. All of them were unique in their own way and had their own 'fanbase'.
Now MS has removed their uniqueness. Rather than improving on WinMo, they've decided to try to go head to head against the iPhone by attempting to match up against the iPhone's strengths (ie, interface, ease of use, MP3 player integration, app store, etc).
Naturally they've failed to best the iPhone in those categories by a long shot. Instead they essentially have made a device that is 'less than an iPhone' rather than a better WinMO device. I'd say this is the move that will kill off WinMo.
Johnmcl7 - Sunday, March 21, 2010 - link
Whatever you think of S60 and Maemo, Nokia still have a large share of the smartphone marketAzsen - Sunday, March 21, 2010 - link
Does Microsoft seriously think that home screen user interface looks good? It looks flippen hideous!! Give me iPhone UI any day.straubs - Monday, March 22, 2010 - link
No kiddding! Look at the Pre and then look at WP7S and tell me that doesn't look like something someone drew up in their basement in 1978. The single color and square corners are awful, not too mention huge amounts of wasted space everywhere.melgross - Sunday, March 21, 2010 - link
One thing that wasn't clear to me is whether or not music and books will be available without going through the marketplace. Apps can only be gotten there, so ok. The same thing is true for my iPhone. But I can get books, video and music onto the phone that weren't bought through the App Store or iTunes. Would that be possible here as well?The article didn't touch on that from what I saw. Anyone know?
nerdtalker - Sunday, March 21, 2010 - link
I touched on it, but only very briefly ;) partly because it's, you guessed it, not totally finalized. Microsoft wants everything to go through the marketplace, so that means yes, music, videos, and games are all marketplace purchases.A lot of developers were asking whether there was any API for them to do in-application commerce, and the answer was that this was still being worked on. Think the same way you can buy additional levels or addons in-game on the iPhone that are billed through the App Store. It isn't present in the builds of WP7S - yet.
It's another one of those things they haven't fully fleshed out yet, and haven't decided whether they can finish in time for release.
I didn't hear any mention of books at all, that's a great point. I'm not sure whether there's any strategy there.
Cheers,
Brian
CSMR - Sunday, March 21, 2010 - link
It looks like there is some complex sync process to transfer special types of file.You can't just plug in the phone, open it up as a storage device and drag files to and fro, as you can now.
Instead you probably need to install special sync software.
My advice: avoid and get a phone that is recognized as a storage device and has a usable file system.
MGSsancho - Monday, March 22, 2010 - link
Maybe it behaves like my ZuneHD. i just put music and audio books into my music folder and videos into my video folder. then it shows up in the Zune app. if i want to auto sync pics, vids, podcats and music it can or I can manually drag stuff the the ZuneHD device icon. oh you can either encode videos yourself or the app will do it for youMrPIppy - Sunday, March 21, 2010 - link
iPhone apps are sandboxed, but they are *not* managed code. Objective-C is compiled into ARM binaries, and garbage collection is not available on iPhone.