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: Samsung Focus
The Focus is a launch device on AT&T. It’s a Windows Phone Galaxy S. The Samsung Focus is incredibly thin and very easy to pocket. It’s very lightweight thanks to its all plastic construction. The Focus doesn’t feel like it’ll fall apart, but it doesn’t inspire the same confidence as the LG Optimus 7.
The screen is the best looking out of the three we’ve got here today. The 4-inch Super AMOLED display delivers vibrant colors (a perfect match for WP7’s color based themes) and perfect black levels. Overall brightness leaves much to be desired. We only measured 234 nits at its brightest setting. Medium is more than bright enough for indoor or use at night (thanks to the excellent contrast ratio), but outdoors during the day you need to leave the device on high.
Battery life is absolutely abysmal, thanks to that Super AMOLED display. We measured 4.6 hours on WiFi, 3.75 hours on 3G but a respectable 6.4 hours of talk time (the display is shut off for our talk tests). This translates into a single charge lasting well under a full day’s worth of heavy use, or just under a day of moderate use.
Personally I prefer the 3.8-inch form factor of the LG to the 4.0-inch Focus. Unlike Android, Windows Phone 7 seems better suited for smaller displays thanks to its very simple UI and the fact that everything you need to tap on is already ginormous.
If you want more of a balance between size, screen and battery life you’ll want to look at the final phone in our trio: the HTC Surround.
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wharris1 - Wednesday, October 20, 2010 - link
Web site is great; now I need to read articledeputc26 - Thursday, October 21, 2010 - link
Where are the actual load times (in seconds) for web pages? Synthetics never tell the whole picture... seems like you might be embarrassed for WP7 on this front ;)GoSharks - Wednesday, October 20, 2010 - link
Are there supposed to be images in this article?jimhsu - Wednesday, October 20, 2010 - link
Article seems to be half done as Anand makes a huge number of edits. Guess that's normal.SelesGames - Wednesday, October 20, 2010 - link
I see images just fine.Btw, I don't know whether any app reviews will be done, but for anyone who has access to a phone, check out some of our apps. Search for "Seles Games" to see all our apps, or check out any of the apps we have demoed here:
http://www.youtube.com/user/aemami99
Mumrik - Saturday, October 23, 2010 - link
So you decided to advertise in the Anandtech comments... Classy move.Termie - Wednesday, October 20, 2010 - link
The HTC Surround page seems to be missing, or at least it's not coming up when I click on the link to that page.Anand Lal Shimpi - Wednesday, October 20, 2010 - link
Images are incoming, please bare with us :)atmartens - Wednesday, October 20, 2010 - link
"please bare with us :)"Skinny dipping? Or just streaking?
Zstream - Wednesday, October 20, 2010 - link
Do you know what the talk time is for the LG? It's not showing on the graph.