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
The Windows Phone 7 Connector for OS X
Every huge company goes through the same motions when a smaller competitor starts making waves. Initially it’s always denial. The competitor doesn’t exist, they have no marketshare, why bother supporting them, etc... Then it’s mild recognition. The competitor exists but who cares, they make stupid products, our next version will assuage all fears. The next stage is depression, and the final stage (if the company survives) is outright competition. Microsoft is at that stage today.
Microsoft recognizes that a sizable portion of the market runs OS X, and it doesn’t want to leave them out of the fun. At launch Microsoft will deliver a beta version of OS X sync software called the Windows Phone 7 Connector.
The connector application doesn’t mimic the functionality of the Zune Sync software for the PC. You don’t get any access to the Zune Marketplace, you can’t download apps, there’s no WiFi syncing support and (today) there’s no system update support. What the Connector is designed to do is get your non-DRM iTunes and iPhoto content from your Mac to your Windows Phone. Nothing more, nothing less.
I was supplied with an alpha of the Connector and despite fairly regular crashes (thankfully not while syncing), I’m happy to say it works. You get a very Apple-like interface. Just check the movies, music and photos you want and hit sync and you’re good to go.
The options are minimal. You can’t tell the Connector software to fill all available storage space on the phone with extra music or photos. You have to be very deliberate with what you want to put on the device.
The Connector will insert photos taken on the phone into iPhoto, unfortunately it puts them into albums (roughly one per day it seems) all named after your phone. In my case after a couple of syncs I had a lot of Anand’s Windows Phone albums in iPhoto.
Music downloaded from the Zune Marketplace will also attempt to sync, but it’ll fail miserably. For some reason the Connector tries to put downloaded music in iPhoto, which will of course throw an error:
There’s no way around it and unfortunately that means any music you buy in the Zune Marketplace can’t be put on your Mac. Thankfully it seems like a quick fix and we’ve alerted Microsoft to the problem.
There’s also no support for contact or calendar syncing, that’s done through the cloud. You can sync your address book in OS X with Google Contacts and keep your phone synced that way, but you can’t do it over the USB cable.
You can view all of the content on your device but you can’t manage any of it (short of erasing it all). You can’t add/remove email accounts or do any of the things you can do with an iPhone in iTunes. Microsoft’s Windows Phone 7 Connector software is good enough to get the job done, but it’s far from a full fledged OS X client.
The first major update to Windows Phone 7 will come sometime early next year. It’ll bring copy & paste support along with other things. Microsoft plans to have OS update support enabled in the Connector by the time that update rolls around. Assuming all goes according to plan, you should be able to have a pretty decent experience as a Mac user with a Windows Phone. You won’t get the full monty, but you’ll have enough to get by.
Microsoft needs to, as quickly as it can, bring all of the features of the Zune Sync client on the PC to OS X. WiFi syncing, marketplace access - everything. The fact that Microsoft is even providing this option is enough to convince me that it’s serious about being successful here. Windows Phone isn’t just here to offer an alternative, it’s here to take away market share from Apple. To make that happen, Microsoft needs to at least offer feature parity with its sync software for OS X users.
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Shadowmaster625 - Friday, October 22, 2010 - link
It cant play avi files? What do you call a $500 device that cant play avi files? FAIL.beefnot - Friday, October 22, 2010 - link
I'm so sick of seeing "fail" in user comments. 99% of the time, it follows a point or points being made that wouldn't have swayed them to deem it worthy anyway. YAWN.mutatio - Friday, October 22, 2010 - link
I'm glad you guys found it to be as smooth and useful as you did. Based on what you described and the corresponding pictures, however, I'm having a hard time understanding something "just works" when the UI looks like a crap sandwich and almost makes my eyes bleed. "No, we don't use those oh-so-80's icons that graphically represent what the App does. We're much too posh for that, minimalist traffic signs for everything! Brilliant!" Maybe it'll be different with hands on, but it looks like MS went out of their way to try and make this thing look clever and almost abstract. Think myspace made into a smartphone, and if you're like me and think that myspace pages more often look like pop culture chewed up, swallowed, and thrown up onto a web page, then you get where I'm coming from. If that is the case when I get my hands on one of these, I can't see how MS can get any significant traction in the smartphone market. They might get some young emo hipsters who dig the abstract layout, but the appeal thus far of iOS and Android is the overall ease of use. My impression from your review, despite your reassurances, is that MS has again made a product much more complicated than it needs to be. I hope for MS' sake that is not the case when actually using the phone.MacGyver85 - Saturday, October 23, 2010 - link
You'll just have to try it to appreciate it I guess.I can understand people when they say the interface looks bland or overly simplistic based on "screenshots" of the UI. But when you see it in person it's so much better. Really.
Likewise with how you navigate around it. It's just so intuitive you don't for a second have to think how to do something. Every time someone asks me if what it's like I always respond that they'll have to use it themselves. And everyone that does loves it. Seriously :)
Dare I use it but what the hell: it just works!
DJJoeJoe - Saturday, October 23, 2010 - link
I don't think any OS at this point can grab a drastic number of market share like we see in the phone space obviously, or even the slightly slower moving browser space. Modern Operating Systems are so mature at this point that there is really little you can do, both Win7 and Snow Leopard were just small refinements to their previous versions.I think it's doubtful that even something as force-ably drastic as Chrome OS will do anything to the landscape either, even if Google bucketed down and really nailed it. Sadly the market share is ruled by the people going to costco and grabbing up a pre made pc, or large corps running xp, and I can't see something drastic being sold to either groups in the next handful of years.
tis all in the phones these days, and I wish I had a time machine so I could get the second wave of hopefully nicer wp7 handsets and maybe a good update to the os itself. Don't got the money to spend on a 'amazing start'.
Sabresiberian - Monday, October 25, 2010 - link
Looks to me like Vista's bad press helped Apple reach 9% market share, but that's as far as they've moved up. Win 7 is sweet and everyone knows it so Apple is no longer making headway.I don't want Microsoft execs to think that way though - like was written in the article, I think Microsoft performs better as an underdog, and if they think more in terms of being threatened by Apple or someone else then perhaps they'll be more inclined to put a shining example of what they can do out on the market.
Glad to see Microsoft did produce a product with some shine.
;)
dotroy - Thursday, October 28, 2010 - link
Windows 7 phone is good ...umm ..some things not as good ..but win7 phone is good, there are somethings done better by others OS but win 7 phone is good. I never felt like this before. This is a paid advertising. Anand is making good money.pete2s - Thursday, October 28, 2010 - link
Will Windows 7 Phone store apps on the ROM partition? If so, this severely limits the number and size of apps as well as their quality.Although Android is evolving past this limitation, Android, Blackberry and Palm phones store the OS and all apps on an encrypted partition referred to in the specs as the ROM. Usually, this ROM is 512MB. After the OS is installed, the phone has less than 300MB for apps.
Initially, I thought Windows 7 Phone would not store apps on the ROM because of its unified storage system that creates a single volume. If this were the case, however, there'd be no point in having a larger ROM because the ROM would only be holding the OS + the 60MB limit of pre-installed software. Some phones, like the Samsung Focus, do have larger ROMs though (1GB compared to 512MB). The only point of having a larger ROM would be to store more apps because apps are installed to the ROM.
If the above is true, Windows 7 Phone will be severely limited in app size and thus development.
drwho9437 - Monday, November 1, 2010 - link
"It’s almost as if Microsoft is taking Apple’s approach and simply letting everyone build iPhones."Exactly and it is genius, it means the cost margin will vanish and the experience will still be as the software people want, people won't think poorly of these phones just because of a few badly designed devices they used. Let's hope it works out.
owbert - Monday, November 1, 2010 - link
best review of win7 phone amongst others. great work!