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 First Phones: LG Optimus 7
We will have full reviews of all of these devices in the coming days, but we didn’t want to leave you with nothing on the hardware at launch so here are some brief thoughts on the three Windows Phones we’ve been playing with.
The LG Optimus 7 isn’t actually destined for US sale, it’ll be available tomorrow in Europe and Asia. The phone sports a 3.8” 480 x 800 TN LCD and unfortunately that’s both its biggest asset and its biggest weakness. The LCD sips power compared to the Super AMOLED in the Samsung Focus, but LG also sacrificed quality. Viewing angles and black levels just aren’t very good. The orange theme looks yellow on the phone when viewed at an angle.
The display is bright but it lacks the integrated design that you get from the iPhone 4 or Samsung’s Focus. There’s a perceivable gap between the touch screen and the LCD beneath it.
The display is the biggest problem, the rest is smooth sailing. The form factor is great, albeit a little thick. LG opted for quality materials including a brushed aluminum battery cover. The device is heavy compared to other WP7 phones but it’s a luxurious sort of heavy, not a brick-like heavy.
The Optimus 7 comes with 16GB of NAND on board with an empty microSD slot for future expansion. Remember the rules though, you need to perform a factory restore on the phone with the microSD installed to use it.
LG preloads the device with three apps: Play to, Panorama shot and ScanSearch.
The Play to app is the most interesting as it supports streaming of all of your non-HDCP content to DLNA devices.
The Panoramic photo stitching app is super easy to use and works well in practice. My only complaint is the live view frame rate leaves a lot to be desired.
ScanSearch is a location based augmented reality app for Windows Phone 7. Eventually it'll be able to identify products but today all it can do is point out nearby locations of points of interests using your GPS and WiFi.
Battery life is the best out of the three phones we tested here today. We got over 7 hours in our WiFi browsing test and just over 5 hours on 3G. We’re still running talk time tests.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
125 Comments
View All Comments
x0rg - Wednesday, November 3, 2010 - link
To me it looks like Microsoft just needed to release something ASAP. Later they can work on interface improvement, I mean fonts, sizes, blocks, text location, easy shortcut access, backups, etc. There are tons of things to improve.landswipe - Thursday, November 4, 2010 - link
"The downside to this layout is that every time you want to enter a different URL, you’ll have to rotate to portrait, enter it, and then swap back. Same if you want to change tabs or use a favorite. That can get a bit frustrating if you’re used to viewing pages in landscape, but not totally killer. There’s an impressively fluid rotation transition between portrait and landscape, however."Same theme through the whole article...
Little Upside... bit more downside... a little frustrated?... but HEY come on we are friends!!! there is some cool animation by our designers to make up for it all :D <cheesy grin>
It stinks of slight of hand, and overall sounds like an epic fail waiting to happen... This just won't compete.
As a developer, I don't think the apps/games produced are going to cut it... With Android and iPhone you can at least write cross platform opengl games in C++. dotNet is just pure lock-in.
I hope they sell just enough of these things to put an early end to it... I have a feeling a lot of people are going to get fooled.
jeans_xp - Sunday, November 7, 2010 - link
It's bad news for us, AMOLED is not used.www.mobilegoing.com
vhx - Tuesday, November 9, 2010 - link
Only problems I have are no custom ring tones (really now...). No messenger support yet. No clue about 3rd party apps, no one is talking about it. Will it be like Android or the tight control Apple has? I couldn't find any article talking about this.DKant - Saturday, November 13, 2010 - link
I got through 15 pages and that was it. I have already decided this is my next mobile-platform anyway (unless I start hearing rumors of a hologram-projecting iPhone 5), no point reading the remaining 200. I can't imagine the amount of patience it must have taken to WRITE this behemoth! :) Of course it's your job, you've been doing this forever etc, but still.Man, finally. A "proper" competitor to iOS, which was getting a little stale. And I have too many issues with Google's approach to consider any of the quadrillion models on offer.
Well. I do hope WP7 sells and lives longer than the Palm. :_(
(And I'd never imagined I'd finish a post with this..)
To Microsoft!!
CSMR - Saturday, November 13, 2010 - link
Very informative review, but shouldn't this site be serving people who are technically minded rather than the average consumer?There is no question WP7 has a lot of excellent points.
But I'm not sure how you can accept a system that does away with files, and uses a limited sync system to move content around in approved ways.
Or call software "The Best Smartphone for Music Lovers" when:
- it believes that music consists of "songs" written by "artists" and put into "albums", when only a minor part of the history of western music is of this form
- it does not allow a folder structure for navigation, only limited tags of the above form
- gapless playback is incomplete
Microsoft needs prodding to update the system in a way that retains the new features and GUI but also implements the basic features. If it doesn't get this from tech sites, where are we left? Perhaps Windows 8 will decide Turing completeness is no longer important, people just need to be able to do x, y, and z as simply as possible. I'm sure there are a lot of people at Microsoft who want WP7 to be a real OS - without changing usability. They just need a bit of support.
Millsington - Tuesday, November 16, 2010 - link
Excellent point about folder navigation, I had forgotten about that. It is sorely missed in modern music players.Sadly, I don't see the issues you raised being addressed for some time unless WP7 really takes off.
billybarker - Tuesday, November 16, 2010 - link
Check out these Windows Phone 7 Application Icons - there are 350 icons in the set. http://goo.gl/rMk08warden6 - Friday, November 19, 2010 - link
I've had my HTC 7 Mozart for a fortnight. I like it. I like the big square icons on the Start screen (although I've toned down the colour as much as possible); I like the integration with Google Mail, Contacts and Calendar (yes it does work, set it up as an Exchange server); I like the threaded conversations for texts like the iPhone; the music player is good; oh, and it's not a bad phone either.There are some issues -- there's no Messenger client, gapless track playback is haphazard to say the least, there's a limited range of alerts/ringtones and you can't add more, and battery life is a bit short. Especially with push email. Hopefully some of those can be fixed, but they're definitely not deal-breakers for me.
What I can't figure out is how to do "Inverse" on the scientific view of the calculator. No inverse-sin, inverse-log, etc. That's not a deal-breaker either, I don't use those very often! But it's an odd omission.
anistoona - Sunday, November 21, 2010 - link
" but while home I don’t use those apps as much. Instead my smartphone behaves more like an SMS, phone, email, camera and web browsing device, and it’s in those areas that Windows Phone is easily just as good as the competition."With all my respect: If I need only the SmS, phone, email, Camera and web borwisng things form my handheld device, I would like to buy a 150$ Symbian phone, I don't need to buy an up to 700$ smartphone to do that things!!
WinMob 5, 6.x was the system which puts the definition of what " Smart Phones" should capable of, and disappointingly Microsoft chose to give up that system and replaced with a modified copy of Old, aged and discontinued competitors system ( I mean first generation of iOS ) ..
Really good choice Microsoft !