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
Themes
Despite Microsoft’s strict UI policies within Windows Phone, you can tweak two parameters to customize your phone: the background color and the theme color. You can choose white or black for the background color, although I’d recommend against white if you have an AMOLED or Super AMOLED phone as it can significantly reduce battery life.
The theme color controls things like the color of your tiles, color of links and even the color of progress bars in IE. The color options are all either bold or vibrant or a little of both, and they dramatically change the look of the device.
I’d say Microsoft got the personalization down just right. You can change the photos on your lock screen but everywhere else the background is either black, white or a picture automatically selected based on the content you’re viewing.
The theme colors are consistent once applied and refreshing to switch between. It’s like getting a case for the inside of your phone.
The UI customizations preserve a standard experience across all Windows Phone devices. Microsoft definitely learned from Windows Mobile.
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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...