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
Pictures Hub
While you can view photos in a somewhat ad-hoc manner from within the camera application, there’s a much better photo viewer tucked into the aptly named pictures hub. Unfortunately however, WP7 makes the same mistake that Apple does, tossing videos inside under the domain of pictures as well. Oh well.
Fire it up and you’ll get three options - all, date, and favorites. You can pivot right and see some random thumbnails of favorite photos and recently captured media, and pivot one more to see photos from facebook under what’s new. Tap all, and you’ll get transported into a gallery listing which includes your camera roll on the device, as well as all your associated facebook galleries.
Inside the camera roll gallery, you get just what you’d expect - a grid of photos. Unfortunately, this doesn’t work in landscape. It’s portrait only here.
Viewing photos is a landscape or portrait experience, and thankfully the grid view and photo viewer are both incredibly speedy. Hit the ellipsis to expand options, and you get the same options I mentioned earlier for sharing to SkyDrive, Facebook, marking as favorite, or deletion. Videos however only show up in landscape, and again can only offer deletion from the device. Getting those movies off-phone requires a desktop sync.
The interface is definitely pretty though:
As Anand mentioned, all your facebook albums are treated like they’re stored locally. What’s really well done here is that all the photos come down with comments and captions completely intact.
Photos works well, but it’s still missing some obvious functionality the competition has. There’s no ability to select multiple photos in the grid view and send all those to the cloud, delete, or email them off. After shooting a ton of photos in quick succession to make sure the camera app didn’t slow down, I was then forced to delete individually - bleh. The other missing thing is slideshow functionality which is occasionally handy but not critically important. Honestly, both of these are things that are easily fixed with a software update.
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Hrel - Friday, December 3, 2010 - link
Am I the only one who sees that the "brown" option for the UI color is red? Am I losing my sight? My tv is adjusted perfectly to THX standards. All the other colors look right. Or is it just the camera you used to take the shot?Hrel - Saturday, December 4, 2010 - link
As far as I'm concerned any phone that doesn't have a "fine me" feature with the ability to lock it doesn't even exist. Seriously, why has it taken SOOO long to have this? It should be standard on all phones. Now I want to be able to make my phone the key for my car.Hrel - Sunday, December 5, 2010 - link
I'm the same as your dad. I mean I want to view everything is the proper aspect ratio; but I also REALLY want usefull pixels filling the whole screen. That's why I wish everything was just filmed in 16:9. I mean, that's plenty wide. When I want movies on DVD I just zoom in once so the whole screen is filled and with the exception of far right/left text in some movies I honestly don't miss out on anything. It doesn't cut off very much on the sides and really when you're filming who's gonna point the camera so where you're supposed to be looking is at the edge of view? No one. 16:9 is the only aspect ratio visual media should be in. That way everything is uniform and just fits.Hrel - Sunday, December 5, 2010 - link
ie no trade offsnatewaddoups - Friday, December 23, 2011 - link
The article mentioned the confusing behavior of IE's back button... The confusion starts when you open IE from the start menu, because at that point IE throws away your browsing history, so that the back-button will return you to the start menu. It makes sense if you were opening IE to look at a new web page, but it's maddening if you were opening IE to resume a browsing session that had useful stuff in the web navigation history.The workaround is to switch to IE by holding down the back-button and selecting IE from the list of running apps. That opens IE without throwing away your browsing history, so that the back-button continues to work for web navigation.
I actually removed the IE tile from the start menu, just to prevent myself from accidentally throwing out the browser history. I've always got two or three tabs open in IE, with meaningful history in each tab, so it was always aggravating to press the back button and get kicked back to the start menu.
If you'd like to see this fixed in a future version of Windows Phone, please vote for it here:
http://windowsphone.uservoice.com/forums/101801-fe...