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
Notifications
Notifications are still a sore spot for iOS users. Thankfully, Microsoft did a good job with notifications in Windows Phone. In general WP7 uses a small slice of the top of the screen real estate to deliver both the kind of information about phones that users need (signal, battery, and status), and also deliver ‘toast’ notifications.
I’ve shown some of that before already. Incoming messages show up and have the contact’s name or number (depending on whether you have a contact card for them), and a snippet of the message. You can tap on that and dive into the messaging application, or swipe the message off to the side and ignore it:
It’s sort of a hybrid combination of WebOS’ notification system. The only small concern I have is that after a toast fades away, there’s no way to see it again. If you’re browsing and want to finish reading a paragraph before responding, you’ll probably miss the message toast. Then you’re forced to hop out of IE, hop into messaging, and get back. You end up missing out on the otherwise excellent IE -> messaging -> back to IE workflow enabled by the back button. It’s a tremendously minor gripe, but it’s important to differentiate that WebOS keeps those notifications at the bottom until they’re dismissed, WP7 dismisses them for you after a few seconds.
Voicemails also result in a notification the same way, popping up a simple new voicemail toast when something is incoming:
On WP7, there really are about 4 different ways to get notified about messages, missed calls, and voicemails. With toasts directly like I’ve already shown, with tiles on the start page that change and show a simple counter, and at the bottom of the lock screen:
Push notifications from applications will also show up as toasts, and there’s an in-application notification system as well. I’ve yet to encounter either of these two, but they’ll definitely be leveraged at one point or another.
I’d say in general that WP7 has struck a balance with its notification system that puts it some place inbetween the competition. iOS either freezes whatever you’re doing and pops up a big bubble right in the middle of your screen, or you can turn that off and get nothing at all. Android sticks everything in the notifications bar at the top and expects users to check that by dragging down. The result is that one gives you a ton of information at the cost of being annoying, the other keeps it all hidden away. Again, it’s obvious that WP7 takes nods from WebOS.
As we already mentioned, the top of the screen isn’t just used for toasts however. WP7 still needs to deliver basic information critical to the operation of the phone. Information like signal strength, network status, vibration status, and battery level. WP7 will drop down status indicators as appropriate, but only when it’s relevant. In a call, signal bars will drop down, but nothing else. When you’re hopping on or jumping off of WiFi, the wireless indicator will animate appropriately. It’s an interesting way of keeping the interface clean. I still prefer seeing all this information all the time, but I understand what the WP7 team was going for here.
Tap volume, and you’ll bring up another toast-like notification where you can toggle vibrate/ring and change the current volume level:
When playing music, there’s a similar kind of notification toast, except now you can skip tracks and pause:
There’s also a black on white version of all these if you change your theme settings:
Though the toasts remain the solid accent color set in themes.
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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 !