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
WP7 vs. iOS4: Multitasking, Copy & Paste, Suspend
If you’re looking for app switching in the manner supported by iOS 4.0, Windows Phone will disappoint. There’s no Apple-like multitasking supported by the OS at launch. Windows Phone 7 doesn’t totally regress in this regard. This is where the back button comes in.
The back button in Android literally takes you back screens until you land at your home screen, at which point it stops functioning. In Windows Phone, the back button is more like the back button in a web browser - it takes you back, in order, through every app/window you’ve visited.
Let’s say you’re typing a text message and you want to double check something you received in an email. There’s no conventional multitasking support so while you’re in the messaging app you’ll hit the Start button, and tap the email tile to find the message you were looking for. Now to get back to your text message, in a conventional smartphone OS without multitasking you’d hit the home/start button, and launch the messaging app again. That’s how it used to work in iOS. In Windows Phone however, hitting the back button will take you out of the email app and back to the last app you were in. In this case, that would be the messaging app.
There are rules for how the back button works. First, never use it after midnight. The history removes almost all references back to the Start screen with the exception of the most recent one. For example, if this is the path you took:
Messaging -> Start -> Email -> Start -> IE -> Start -> Zune
Continuously hitting the back button would take you to those screens in this order:
Zune -> Start -> IE -> Email -> Messaging
You always get the most recent Start screen in your history in case you, literally want to go back to the screen you were just at. Everything else however assumes that you’ll just hit the Start button if you want to go home and you’ll just traverse through apps you’ve visited.
The history doesn’t grow by using the back button. For example, if you launch the messaging app, hit back and then launch your email, hitting the back button will only get you back to the Start screen.
It sounds like a complex series of rules but honestly it just works for the most part. The back button really shines when you launch an app from within another app. Then there’s no going back to the Start screen, you just switch between the app you’re currently at and the one you were at prior to it. It’s like a one-tap task switcher.
The back button doesn’t completely negate the need for iOS style multitasking, but it gets you around 90% of the way there. Copy & paste is the other glaring omission, but Microsoft has already committed to deliver clipboard functionality in early 2011. We’ve privately seen a demo of the feature working, Microsoft is still ironing out the best way to make it happen within the Metro UI.
Windows Phone does support suspend/resume of apps. When you switch away from an app and later return back to it, the app will pick up where you left off - similar to what iOS4 enabled. All that’s really missing is the ability for 3rd party developers to have portions of their code run in the background and some sort of task switching mechanism.
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AstroGuardian - Thursday, October 21, 2010 - link
Everything is displayed fine. Dunno what to tell younumberoneoppa - Thursday, October 21, 2010 - link
Could have something to do with your reply coming a day after the article was posted. :PKashmire - Wednesday, October 20, 2010 - link
Hardware review website goes political? Good way to irritate your viewers by sneaking in the Obama advertisement (phone's screen on AnandTech homepage). Why make your readers suffer through your political statement to read tech hardware reviews? Wrong place for this.bdattilo - Wednesday, October 20, 2010 - link
That is a Pepsi billboard...dreamlane - Wednesday, October 20, 2010 - link
BeautifulDonkey2008 - Thursday, October 21, 2010 - link
LOL. Seriously, just ROLMAO.earthzero - Thursday, October 21, 2010 - link
Are you serious? You know that is a Pepsi Cola "get out and vote" ad, right? That's a Pepsi logo.lwatcdr - Thursday, October 21, 2010 - link
I also thought that was a Pepsi bill board.Welcome to the polarization of America.
fernando.gomes@ydreams.com - Thursday, October 21, 2010 - link
Geez... I'm guessing you're the only one who noticed it, and I'm betting you're the only one who gives a crap, let alone accusing the authores of political biasing. Get a life, will ya?Smilin - Thursday, October 21, 2010 - link
BWAAHAHA. Oh boy what a tool you just made yourself out to be. Do you really hate Obama so much that you have PTSD like flashbacks of him everywhere? You see "hope" symbols where others see "pepsi".