The Windows Phone 7 Review

Settings

WP7 has a strong emphasis on keeping everything simple and largely abstracted away, and settings is no  exception. It’s nicely Metro themed, and provides a unique combination of options and glanceability. Categories appear up top in larger white font, but what’s unique here is that the major setting appears down below. Under Wi-Fi for example, you get the name of the AP you’re currently connected to, under airplane mode ‘turned off.’

It makes it very simple to glance and change settings accordingly without diving deep into each category. I’ve gone through and taken photos of almost every setting and menu item inside, and for the large part there’s enough control so that nobody will be disappointed.

One of the few things I think users would really like is better cellular data control. I’m not talking about enabling or disabling data or roaming, but rather the ability to selectively enable 2G only data, 3G data, or both. Users that have security concerns about 2G GSM only want to transact data over 3G, and others that want to save on battery life only want to use 2G. Unfortunately, there’s no way to set a preference for either on WP7.

In other areas, I’d hazard an opinion that WP7 might expose too much. It’s cool that you can configure APNs directly and the SMSC number for messaging pretty quickly, but the majority of users don’t know what these are and don’t care, so why confuse? It just feels like some areas have tons of options, while others are overly minimalist.

There are two pivots in settings, one for applications, one for system. Under applications, most of the WP7 applications that are core parts of the OS have their settings duplicated here. Photos and camera is the one exceptions, with settings for sky drive and GPS tagging only existing here.

I’ve put together a gallery above with all of the settings menus, which you can check out if you want to see just what all you can change.