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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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