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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nerdtalker - Sunday, March 21, 2010 - link
Noted and fixed! Thanks!Cheers,
-Brian
StormyParis - Sunday, March 21, 2010 - link
It seems so close to the whole iPhone thing, that if I were MS I'd be embarassed... a lot of pride swallowing must have been going on.My issue is, I can't find a good reason to want these phones. Even Office integration doesn't cut it, because the hardware is so gimped that I'd never, ever, want to do any office work with it. The rest is just regular smartphone stuff. As with Apple, I lose a whole lot of freedom of features (forced to use IE ? IE ??? back to web 0.8, guys). And my personnal guess would be that for the same loss, I get less in exchange, in terms of ease of use and features.
Hopefully Google and Nokia will manage to keep their ecosystems open, because those "censored apps, censored hardware, no extensions nor upgrades" e-dystopias have me worried and slightly despondent.
NJoy - Sunday, March 21, 2010 - link
avid user of WM for last 5 years, now I'm so disappointed, it's even depressing. They just have killed everything what I liked about WinMo. SadCSMR - Sunday, March 21, 2010 - link
Extremely disappointing to be given a locked down system from Microsoft, missing essential capability that's been around for over a decade.Instead of continually expanding features and technology, and providing a better user interface, we have a locked down system with a long list of basic missing features. Windows Mobile has been downgraded from an operating system to firmware with this release.
Even the user interface, supposedly "stylish" is almost everywhere an inefficient use of space to present information. It's fine to pander to customers who want that... but now there's no way to customize it to something better.
Other features removed: No microSD cards, incredible! No file system access! Anyone who understands what a file is should avoid this system.
I can see the benefits for the computer-illiterate, but for us and for business users why not make an open "Windows Mobile 7 Business" version without the limitations?
wolrah - Sunday, March 21, 2010 - link
The carriers need the shiny new phones to attract customers, not the other way around. The consumer cares more about the thing they're carrying rather than the network it's on (see iPhone and AT&T). With that in mind, the experience of a mobile phone OS should be about the user, not the carrier.The ability for carriers to screw with phones is almost universally a bad thing. The CDMA carriers' love of BREW on dumbphones, Verizon's obsession with crippling devices, AT&T's lockdown of the Backflip and the previous heavy limits on "bandwidth intense" iPhone apps, etc. I don't think I need to go on to show that the carriers should never be allowed to influence phones in the slightest. I can not come up with a single example where carrier modifications were a benefit for the end user even on dumbphones, much less on smartphones.
The bit about appeasing carriers worried about becoming "dumb pipes" is the problem in a nutshell. They are dumb pipes, that's the point. They provide the spectrum and backhaul lines that connect my phone to the PSTN and Internet. Saying that telecom carriers don't want to be dumb pipes is like saying that Ford doesn't want to be a car company. It just doesn't make sense, since that's exactly what they are.
trochevs - Sunday, March 21, 2010 - link
I agree with you. Unfortunately we have two serious obstacles here. First is the brainwashed US consumer who thinks he/she is getting better deal by getting locked phone from US carrier for free or discounted price from artificially inflated price of unlocked phone.The US consumer are scripted so well and never stop to think for a minute. Just notice poor sales figures in USA for unlocked phones from Nokia, Sony and Google are.
Second is the monopolistic behavior of US carriers. For many years they did not allowed unlocked phones on their networks. Only when real threat of regulation become evident they start allowing it. But they pile your phone bill with extra fees that makes you think twice. Not only that, but they keep charge you exact same monthly service fee even when everyone knows that this fee includes the price of the phone.
anactoraaron - Sunday, March 21, 2010 - link
not to mention the monopolistic reality of government agencies allowing these carriers to buy out all of the smaller, local companies. There is this trend of broken economics going on here and we, the "end users," are the ones paying for it (literally). Once where I live here there were 4 smaller companies my "unlocked" phone would work on.... now "unlocked" phones are almost all just ATT and T Mobile.trochevs - Sunday, March 21, 2010 - link
Well. Thanks Brian for great article and thanks AnandTech for great coverage of Windows Phone 7 so far.From what I see WP7 is targeted directly against Apple iPhone not Google's Android. Apple is attacking HTC to hurt Android, but looks like Steve jobs did not learn his lesson. The real hit will come from Microsoft again. MS is taking advantage that all mobile operators are not happy with Apple keeping iPhone away from them. It will be slow switch for many iPhone users, but MS has the financial power to keep the WP7 alive for a while.
Google's Android has own problem now. Google compromised their relationship with open source community in order to meet the US mobile operators and handset manufactures demands, but now Android is facing the real possibility that US carriers are going to use Android as bargaining power to get better deal from MS. Just like Asus and other OEM did with early versions of netbooks and using have-baked Linux distributions. So Google needs to decide between Open Source community or discontinue Android in the long run and accept that US carriers will hold the key and can lock out Google if they want to.
So the key would be. How well Mr. Jobs and Mr. Schmidt have learn the lessons form recent and not so recent past. It will be fun watching. And the key player could turn to be Intel with their MeeGo.
FITCamaro - Sunday, March 21, 2010 - link
They're definitely going to have to allow applications like Pandora to run in the background or no one will buy the phone. I use Pandora on my Droid. If it killed Pandora any time I wanted to check my email, send a text message, or browse the web, I'd be be pissed.DigitalFreak - Sunday, March 21, 2010 - link
Unfortunately, it looks like they're going down the iPhone route and locking everything down. App store, no SD cards, etc. Really not surprising I guess when you look at how they handled the Xbox 360.