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!
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Lapoki - Thursday, October 21, 2010 - link
I think WP7 has potential and could very well be my next purchase. Great article guys, it was long but very detailed.. got me through a boring afternoon.One thing seems missing though... the infamous signal strength comparison that you have been doing for all other phones ever since iPhone 4.
wht1986 - Thursday, October 21, 2010 - link
One of the most informative WP7 reviews I have read. I actually didn't skip to the end just to read the conclusions. I read it all and enjoyed every page. Well done.epyon96 - Thursday, October 21, 2010 - link
Did I read that right?Only Mp4 and WMVsupport?
strikeback03 - Friday, October 22, 2010 - link
I'm guessing that is the audio codecs allowed for videosTanclearas - Thursday, October 21, 2010 - link
"When Apple introduced the iPhone, Steve Jobs made the point that a virtual keyboard was preferable to a fixed keyboard because you shouldn’t always be stuck with the same keyboard layout. Some applications would require a slightly different layout and other applications wouldn’t need it entirely. A physical keyboard requires you to pay the space penalty regardless of what you’re doing with the phone."Really? So, by that argument, Google/Android is the better choice of phone. You shouldn't always be stuck with a single choice of phone layout. I use my hardware keyboard regularly on my G1. As for "applications requiring a slightly different layout", that's a load of crap. When typing, I always want letters and numbers, and I want QWERTY with number keys above. I don't want an on-screen QWERTY with a separate button to press to switch back-and-forth between letters and numbers.
The "applications that require a slightly different layout", perhaps like the phone keypad, can still use an on-screen keypad when necessary.
DP-16D - Thursday, October 21, 2010 - link
Windows 7 Phone must be absolutely phenomenal given the writers' incredible Mac-centric slant (especially with the Windows 7 desktop non-sequitor at the end of the review). Furthermore: The e-mail and messaging pages don't include comparisons to Blackberry, the de-facto standard for communication on smartphones. In fact, I cannot recall that line of phones being mentioned at all. As an existing Blackberry user considering a switch to Windows 7 Phone your review is nearly worthless, because 99% of my phone experience is about functionality and not whether or not my handset can sing and dance better or worse than iOS and Android.Normally I enjoy reading Anand for very thorough reviews, but this review's omission of the essential and inclusion of the irrelevant will make me reconsider reading any future submissions by these two writers.
beefnot - Thursday, October 21, 2010 - link
C'mon man, although Blackberry is a mkt share leader, it is a 20th century platform with very little innovation. It is walking dead with respect to consumer devices, which is the segment that Windows Phone 7 is currently targeting. I own a blackberry for work, but there is no way in hell I would consider it for my personal mobile device, and I don't give a rat's ass that it is excluded from comparison.Reven - Thursday, October 21, 2010 - link
I'm happy with my iphone 4 for now, but I will seriously consider getting the next generation of Windows Mobile phones when I eventually upgrade.anona6 - Thursday, October 21, 2010 - link
Hey I live in Tucson, and I was wondering if anandtech was based out of Tucson or something.This article made it a little more exciting for me just because it was local to me, and you have
one of my favorite coffee shops there that's nearby my University.
Zstream - Thursday, October 21, 2010 - link
Do you know what the talk time is for the LG? It's not showing on the graph