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
Windows Phone Cloud Integration
One of the redeeming features of the failed KIN was its cloud integration. The entirety of your phone, everything from your contacts to your photos were synced with the cloud. If you ever needed to access a photo you took with your phone all you needed was your Live login and you’re good to go. While the KIN was short lived, its cloud integration features live on in Windows Phone, with some enhancements of course.
The hub for all of your Windows Phone cloud interaction is a website Microsoft put together: windowsphone.live.com. You authenticate using your Live login and once in there’s a lot you can do, all for free.
At the top left of your home page is a photo of your phone and your phone number. If you click on the Find My Phone link you’re taken to a page you can use to find your phone on a Bing map, make your phone ring, remotely lock or erase your phone entirely.
The mapping feature works pretty well. Within 30 seconds you’ll get a fairly accurate location of your phone on a map. The site also stores the position of your phone the last time you requested its location. For this feature to work you need to enable it on the phone itself. If you want more instantaneous results you can trade off battery life for location speed, presumably by just leaving the GPS radio on all the time.
Remotely ringing your phone works as advertised. If you have your ringer off or volume turned all the way down the remote ring will still go through, although the actual ring will be quieter if your volume is turned down to 0.
Remote locking works well. You supply a four digit password and optional message to display on the phone. Microsoft won’t let you supply a simple password like 1111 or 1234, you need to be a little more creative than that.
Finally there’s the erase function. The best part of this entire suite of tools is they are all free and they come supported on all Windows Phones.
If you’re not trying to do things remotely to your phone there’s still one very important piece of functionality windowsphone.live.com offers: automatic backup of your photos.
By default any photos you take on your Windows Phone aren’t mirrored in the cloud. However if you’re feeling trusty, you can opt to do just that. There are three levels of sharing options for your photos in the cloud: share with no one, share with friends or share with everyone.
A friend is defined as someone whose information you have in Windows Live either through your address book or Live Messenger. You can also manually add names to your friends list for the purpose of sharing photos.
Microsoft allows Facebook style sharing of photos with not only your friends, but their friends as well. You can even let your friends add their own photos, edit details and delete photos if you’d like.
Photos are uploaded in the background from your phone and they are treated as normal bandwidth usage. That means if you’re on the cellular network and you have a limited data plan, these auto-uploaded bytes count against your monthly limit. AT&T indicated that Windows Phones wouldn’t have any special treatment on the network, so you’ll pay the same rates for data that iPhone users pay.
Uploaded photos reside on your Windows Live SkyDrive account, which is automatically setup for you when you sign up for Windows Live. A single SkyDrive supports up to 25GB of storage for free, presumably you won’t be able to sync photos to the cloud beyond that amount. I say presumably because it’s nearly impossible to test. Windows Phone 7 doesn’t upload full resolution/quality images to your SkyDrive, instead you get a reduced resolution, higher compression version.
All Windows Phones have to sport at least a 5MP sensor, however photos synced to the cloud are stored at 0.3MP - 713 x 539 is what the Samsung Focus’ photos ended up as. File size was always under 90KB. Photos of complex scenes weighed in at around 80KB, while scenes with a lot of easily compressible data (repeated colors, solid backgrounds) were down below 60KB. The resulting image quality is ok but nothing to write home about.
The entire Windows Live web interface desperately needs an overhaul. It’s the one part of the Windows Phone experience that just doesn’t mesh. The functionality is nice but I would like to see higher resolution photos stored online, 0.3MP just isn’t enough. Perhaps when we get more generous data plans from the carriers we’ll see that sort of upgrade on the phone.
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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!