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
WP7 vs. iOS4: Multitasking, Copy & Paste, Suspend
If you’re looking for app switching in the manner supported by iOS 4.0, Windows Phone will disappoint. There’s no Apple-like multitasking supported by the OS at launch. Windows Phone 7 doesn’t totally regress in this regard. This is where the back button comes in.
The back button in Android literally takes you back screens until you land at your home screen, at which point it stops functioning. In Windows Phone, the back button is more like the back button in a web browser - it takes you back, in order, through every app/window you’ve visited.
Let’s say you’re typing a text message and you want to double check something you received in an email. There’s no conventional multitasking support so while you’re in the messaging app you’ll hit the Start button, and tap the email tile to find the message you were looking for. Now to get back to your text message, in a conventional smartphone OS without multitasking you’d hit the home/start button, and launch the messaging app again. That’s how it used to work in iOS. In Windows Phone however, hitting the back button will take you out of the email app and back to the last app you were in. In this case, that would be the messaging app.
There are rules for how the back button works. First, never use it after midnight. The history removes almost all references back to the Start screen with the exception of the most recent one. For example, if this is the path you took:
Messaging -> Start -> Email -> Start -> IE -> Start -> Zune
Continuously hitting the back button would take you to those screens in this order:
Zune -> Start -> IE -> Email -> Messaging
You always get the most recent Start screen in your history in case you, literally want to go back to the screen you were just at. Everything else however assumes that you’ll just hit the Start button if you want to go home and you’ll just traverse through apps you’ve visited.
The history doesn’t grow by using the back button. For example, if you launch the messaging app, hit back and then launch your email, hitting the back button will only get you back to the Start screen.
It sounds like a complex series of rules but honestly it just works for the most part. The back button really shines when you launch an app from within another app. Then there’s no going back to the Start screen, you just switch between the app you’re currently at and the one you were at prior to it. It’s like a one-tap task switcher.
The back button doesn’t completely negate the need for iOS style multitasking, but it gets you around 90% of the way there. Copy & paste is the other glaring omission, but Microsoft has already committed to deliver clipboard functionality in early 2011. We’ve privately seen a demo of the feature working, Microsoft is still ironing out the best way to make it happen within the Metro UI.
Windows Phone does support suspend/resume of apps. When you switch away from an app and later return back to it, the app will pick up where you left off - similar to what iOS4 enabled. All that’s really missing is the ability for 3rd party developers to have portions of their code run in the background and some sort of task switching mechanism.
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x0rg - Wednesday, November 3, 2010 - link
To me it looks like Microsoft just needed to release something ASAP. Later they can work on interface improvement, I mean fonts, sizes, blocks, text location, easy shortcut access, backups, etc. There are tons of things to improve.landswipe - Thursday, November 4, 2010 - link
"The downside to this layout is that every time you want to enter a different URL, you’ll have to rotate to portrait, enter it, and then swap back. Same if you want to change tabs or use a favorite. That can get a bit frustrating if you’re used to viewing pages in landscape, but not totally killer. There’s an impressively fluid rotation transition between portrait and landscape, however."Same theme through the whole article...
Little Upside... bit more downside... a little frustrated?... but HEY come on we are friends!!! there is some cool animation by our designers to make up for it all :D <cheesy grin>
It stinks of slight of hand, and overall sounds like an epic fail waiting to happen... This just won't compete.
As a developer, I don't think the apps/games produced are going to cut it... With Android and iPhone you can at least write cross platform opengl games in C++. dotNet is just pure lock-in.
I hope they sell just enough of these things to put an early end to it... I have a feeling a lot of people are going to get fooled.
jeans_xp - Sunday, November 7, 2010 - link
It's bad news for us, AMOLED is not used.www.mobilegoing.com
vhx - Tuesday, November 9, 2010 - link
Only problems I have are no custom ring tones (really now...). No messenger support yet. No clue about 3rd party apps, no one is talking about it. Will it be like Android or the tight control Apple has? I couldn't find any article talking about this.DKant - Saturday, November 13, 2010 - link
I got through 15 pages and that was it. I have already decided this is my next mobile-platform anyway (unless I start hearing rumors of a hologram-projecting iPhone 5), no point reading the remaining 200. I can't imagine the amount of patience it must have taken to WRITE this behemoth! :) Of course it's your job, you've been doing this forever etc, but still.Man, finally. A "proper" competitor to iOS, which was getting a little stale. And I have too many issues with Google's approach to consider any of the quadrillion models on offer.
Well. I do hope WP7 sells and lives longer than the Palm. :_(
(And I'd never imagined I'd finish a post with this..)
To Microsoft!!
CSMR - Saturday, November 13, 2010 - link
Very informative review, but shouldn't this site be serving people who are technically minded rather than the average consumer?There is no question WP7 has a lot of excellent points.
But I'm not sure how you can accept a system that does away with files, and uses a limited sync system to move content around in approved ways.
Or call software "The Best Smartphone for Music Lovers" when:
- it believes that music consists of "songs" written by "artists" and put into "albums", when only a minor part of the history of western music is of this form
- it does not allow a folder structure for navigation, only limited tags of the above form
- gapless playback is incomplete
Microsoft needs prodding to update the system in a way that retains the new features and GUI but also implements the basic features. If it doesn't get this from tech sites, where are we left? Perhaps Windows 8 will decide Turing completeness is no longer important, people just need to be able to do x, y, and z as simply as possible. I'm sure there are a lot of people at Microsoft who want WP7 to be a real OS - without changing usability. They just need a bit of support.
Millsington - Tuesday, November 16, 2010 - link
Excellent point about folder navigation, I had forgotten about that. It is sorely missed in modern music players.Sadly, I don't see the issues you raised being addressed for some time unless WP7 really takes off.
billybarker - Tuesday, November 16, 2010 - link
Check out these Windows Phone 7 Application Icons - there are 350 icons in the set. http://goo.gl/rMk08warden6 - Friday, November 19, 2010 - link
I've had my HTC 7 Mozart for a fortnight. I like it. I like the big square icons on the Start screen (although I've toned down the colour as much as possible); I like the integration with Google Mail, Contacts and Calendar (yes it does work, set it up as an Exchange server); I like the threaded conversations for texts like the iPhone; the music player is good; oh, and it's not a bad phone either.There are some issues -- there's no Messenger client, gapless track playback is haphazard to say the least, there's a limited range of alerts/ringtones and you can't add more, and battery life is a bit short. Especially with push email. Hopefully some of those can be fixed, but they're definitely not deal-breakers for me.
What I can't figure out is how to do "Inverse" on the scientific view of the calculator. No inverse-sin, inverse-log, etc. That's not a deal-breaker either, I don't use those very often! But it's an odd omission.
anistoona - Sunday, November 21, 2010 - link
" but while home I don’t use those apps as much. Instead my smartphone behaves more like an SMS, phone, email, camera and web browsing device, and it’s in those areas that Windows Phone is easily just as good as the competition."With all my respect: If I need only the SmS, phone, email, Camera and web borwisng things form my handheld device, I would like to buy a 150$ Symbian phone, I don't need to buy an up to 700$ smartphone to do that things!!
WinMob 5, 6.x was the system which puts the definition of what " Smart Phones" should capable of, and disappointingly Microsoft chose to give up that system and replaced with a modified copy of Old, aged and discontinued competitors system ( I mean first generation of iOS ) ..
Really good choice Microsoft !