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
Microsoft Office for Windows Phone 7
For the most part, Microsoft has always had excellent Office support on its mobile products. It’s been that way since Windows Mobile, and WP7 does a similarly good job keeping basic functionality intact. It isn’t exactly the entire office suite, but enough that you can open, edit and send things along that show up as email attachments.
Word gets you almost the same support as it did on Windows Mobile last I remember it. There’s even formatting support for bold, italics, highlight colors and a few font colors, though no actual fonts can be changed. Text is reflowed regardless of whether you want it to be or not so it can fit, which poses a bit of a challenge. There’s a search and outline view that somewhat mitigate the nightmare of navigating huge documents on a tiny screen. Of huge usefulness is comment and markup support if you’re working with .docx files.
I threw some large excel sheets at WP7 excel which it handled with ease. There are a few oddities about how mobile Excel handles plots, and obviously formatting isn’t perfect, but it does probably the best job I’ve seen on a mobile device. One weird thing is that multitouch zoom on a large number of cells in Excel doesn’t really seem to work properly - it increases text size, but not the cells. The result (at least in my test documents) is that text size increases in the cells, and gets harder to read.
PowerPoint mobile has full edit and notes view support. I honestly don’t remember PowerPoint being this usable on Windows Mobile, nor so compatible. You can’t create a presentation from scratch like you can an Excel or Word document, but editing support and markup is there.
What really got me excited about mobile office, however, wasn’t Word or Excel or PowerPoint. It was OneNote. I’ve been using OneNote religiously my entire time in college. Four years of inking on first a Samsung Q1 Ultra-V, then a Latitude XT, and I’ve amassed a huge quantity of notes. I’ve long proclaimed that OneNote is arguably the best kept and most underrated piece of the entire Office suite, and hoped that WP7 would finally bring the desktop experience to mobile. Being able to view those notes on the go without having to pull out the desktop would be life changing.
Even better, OneNote syncs with SkyDrive so you can always have notes backed up and synced across platforms. It makes sense, and I love the direction that Microsoft is headed here. So, imagine my disappointment when I copied a section of one of my current notebooks up to SkyDrive (I can’t copy my entire notebook up there because there’s a 50 MB limit), get it loaded on the phone, open it up, and see this:
All of my inking is changed to broken file logos.
I guess I can understand what purpose Microsoft wanted OneNote to serve on WP7 - the role of the notes application on iOS, but with a bit more support. There’s audio recording support, images, and list enumeration support (which is excellent, seriously), but what’s lacking is all of the OneNote backwards compatibility with the desktop. The end result is a definite disparity in what you can do on the desktop OneNote 2010 version (which plugs into Live/SkyDrive), and what will actually show up on mobile.
That kind of seamless desktop and mobile interaction would literally be enough to fundamentally change the way I take notes. For now though, it just can’t quite happen. It’s so close though!
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
125 Comments
View All Comments
Crono - Thursday, October 21, 2010 - link
A lot may not have been taken from the Kin One and Kin Two, but the square, multi page Start is the same concept that was implemented in the Kin phones.Looking forward to moving from my Kin One to the Surround. Microsoft is offering 3 months free Zune Pass for those who sign up to be notified about preorders.
heelo - Thursday, October 21, 2010 - link
You might be the only owner of a Surround.That thing has a "value proposition" that I'm really struggling to relate to.
peter7921 - Thursday, October 21, 2010 - link
I have to give recognition to Anandtech for another great review. I have been looking for a detailed review on WP7 and you guys delivered. Not only is it extremely informative but it's also very well written. I read through it all, not once feeling bored or skipping ahead.These types of articles are the reason Anandtech is my first source for all things tech!
Keep up the great work guys!
Confusador - Thursday, October 21, 2010 - link
OK, wow. I mean, even by Anandtech's unusually high standards that was intense. Just one thing I'm not clear on, though... am I reading this correctly?"WP7 calls presents its browser user agent as “Mozilla/4.0 ...""
If that's correct we've come a long way from the days I had to have Firefox masquerade as IE to be effective.
Guspaz - Thursday, October 21, 2010 - link
IE has *always* done this, including on the desktop. IE6 reports as as Mozilla/4.0 too. IE2 also did it (a different version of Mozilla, though). A quick search didn't turn up IE1 user agent strings, but I assume it also did.Spivonious - Thursday, October 21, 2010 - link
Remember back when IE was introduced, Netscape was king. Netscape is based on Mozilla. That's the only reason it's in there - so pages made for Netscape would load correctly in IE.arturnowp - Thursday, October 21, 2010 - link
IT seems strange that WP7 cannot pass test, has very slow JavaScript engine but still pages are fluid and displayed porperly. Maybe Microsoft renders pages remotely and serves them to the phne?UCLAPat - Thursday, October 21, 2010 - link
Wow! After reading this review, it makes all the other reviews look like previews. Definitely going to be considering WP7 when it's time to upgrade my phone. Still have time to burn on my current 2 year contract. By the time it's up, LTE should be up and running and Verizon will probably have a WP7 device for us to consider as well.Apps will come. But they're not a huge part of my life anyway. I want a rock-solid core experience for a phone. A smartphone has to nail the basic experiences first (calls, messaging, calendar, etc). I never liked the main screen completely filled with app icons. That reminded me too much of my old desktop computer before I cleaned up the desktop.
Belard - Thursday, October 21, 2010 - link
But very detailed... tells us pretty much everything anyone can ask.Thanks...
While I'm not exactly PRO-MS... its good to see good design.
I still like Google's a bit more and its shortcoming are easy to spot. Hopefully Android 3.0 will improve on its weaknesses.
The icon / naming is well thought out and is used by others... including Apple, but not on a phone.
silverblue - Thursday, October 21, 2010 - link
"...displays up to 8 tiles of people you’ve either recently communicated with or whose profiles you’ve viewed/stalked."LOL.