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.
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Hrel - Friday, December 3, 2010 - link
Am I the only one who sees that the "brown" option for the UI color is red? Am I losing my sight? My tv is adjusted perfectly to THX standards. All the other colors look right. Or is it just the camera you used to take the shot?Hrel - Saturday, December 4, 2010 - link
As far as I'm concerned any phone that doesn't have a "fine me" feature with the ability to lock it doesn't even exist. Seriously, why has it taken SOOO long to have this? It should be standard on all phones. Now I want to be able to make my phone the key for my car.Hrel - Sunday, December 5, 2010 - link
I'm the same as your dad. I mean I want to view everything is the proper aspect ratio; but I also REALLY want usefull pixels filling the whole screen. That's why I wish everything was just filmed in 16:9. I mean, that's plenty wide. When I want movies on DVD I just zoom in once so the whole screen is filled and with the exception of far right/left text in some movies I honestly don't miss out on anything. It doesn't cut off very much on the sides and really when you're filming who's gonna point the camera so where you're supposed to be looking is at the edge of view? No one. 16:9 is the only aspect ratio visual media should be in. That way everything is uniform and just fits.Hrel - Sunday, December 5, 2010 - link
ie no trade offsnatewaddoups - Friday, December 23, 2011 - link
The article mentioned the confusing behavior of IE's back button... The confusion starts when you open IE from the start menu, because at that point IE throws away your browsing history, so that the back-button will return you to the start menu. It makes sense if you were opening IE to look at a new web page, but it's maddening if you were opening IE to resume a browsing session that had useful stuff in the web navigation history.The workaround is to switch to IE by holding down the back-button and selecting IE from the list of running apps. That opens IE without throwing away your browsing history, so that the back-button continues to work for web navigation.
I actually removed the IE tile from the start menu, just to prevent myself from accidentally throwing out the browser history. I've always got two or three tabs open in IE, with meaningful history in each tab, so it was always aggravating to press the back button and get kicked back to the start menu.
If you'd like to see this fixed in a future version of Windows Phone, please vote for it here:
http://windowsphone.uservoice.com/forums/101801-fe...