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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lifeblood - Sunday, March 21, 2010 - link
" Each time you run the application, WP7S will check that application's signature against the marketplace, both to check that it's valid, and that hasn't been revoked. Yes, marketplace has an application kill-switch."So if I'm out of range of a cell tower and I try to launch a app, it won't run because it can't call home? That's not very helpful, especially if it's a GPS app that I want to use to find my way back home.
erple2 - Sunday, March 21, 2010 - link
I suspect that they'll use a similar route to how the Zune works for its subscription based music. You can still play those songs for a while (a few days?) before having to connect the Zune to a WiFi network.cditty - Sunday, March 21, 2010 - link
I'm sure it will launch the app if it can't make contact. No doubt that they thought of this.at80eighty - Sunday, March 21, 2010 - link
good catch - hope it's not true, because win7 phone had all the trappings of a promising platform & they seem to be castrating it steadily with every press releaseJohnmcl7 - Sunday, March 21, 2010 - link
"There's also the fact that existing SoCs are barely powerful enough to make running a single application feel quick. It won't be until we get multicore Cortex A9 or Intel Moorestown class hardware before we have the horsepower to multitask without a tangible performance impact."
Maybe that's what Microsoft/Apple would like to think but it's clearly not the case at all with several current phones having no problems supporting multitasking without performance issues. There are limits to the number of apps that can be handled simultaneously before it impacts performance but my current phone can easily handle 5 to 6 apps with no impact to the current app in use.
The lack of SD card slot is concerning as it removes an easy way to back up on the move, while it's easy to have plenty of onboard memory it can be a pain in the neck if the device dies as you lose access to it. Of course you can still back up to a PC but with the increasing capabilities of smartphones, they're generally moving away from being connected to the PC.
John
fcx56 - Tuesday, March 23, 2010 - link
Microsoft wants (for better or worse) your information backed up in the cloud. If you re-read the bit about the SMS app it gives a cloud backup error message.darwinosx - Sunday, March 21, 2010 - link
As usual Microsoft interface design is different for no reason other than to be different. They are also too little too late. So the choice remains to either get an iPhone and put up with AT&T or Android. Android is a lame copy of the iPhone with crap hardware and if Apple wins the lawsuit or an injunction then Android becomes an even poorer copy of the iPhone.zinfamous - Sunday, March 21, 2010 - link
come on, reader1/perks! couldn't you just use the same username here as you do in DailyTech? It makes it easier for the rest of us to know the content of your post rather than having to waste our precious 20 seconds reading them, when all it will be is yet another baitish, everything-but-Apple, FUD-ridden marketing ploy.FITCamaro - Sunday, March 21, 2010 - link
So the fact that the Droid shares much of the same hardware as the iPhone and that there are other Android phones with even more powerful hardware than the iPhone makes it crap?at80eighty - Sunday, March 21, 2010 - link
Android is a lame copy of the iPhone with crap hardwarewell alright then - looks like the Brainwash2000 MAChinery did a good job with you