A brief look at Windows Phone 7

Filed under: Others, Windows Phone A brief look at Windows Phone 7

by Nithin Ramesh on Feb 16th, 2010

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Microsoft has finally unveiled the long awaited Windows Phone 7 at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. The initial reception was very positive from almost all big tech sites such as Ars technica, Neowin and Gizmodo. Now lets look a bit more closely and find out whether the OS has lived up to its expectations.

windows phone 7 ars intro A brief look at Windows Phone 7 The interface is similar to Zune HD as expected. We now have a tiled interface with square and rectangular tiles. You can customize the home screen as you like using these tiles. For example take a look at the picture on left. We can see 7 tiles, a phone tile that shows number of calls, a message tile, an email tile, people tile, pictures tile, Xbox tile and Me.

As you can see the text and icons are over sized and doesn’t fit the screen fully but somehow it looks pretty good. It is certain that you would be using the flipping, scrolling etc quite often.

The sections in WP7 are known are known as hubs. There are different hubs such as People, Pictures, Games, Music + Video, Marketplace, and Office.

People

People hub is something very similar to contacts. What’s new is that you can see the updates of these contacts from various sources such as Windows live and facebook in real time. Right now it doesn’t show twitter feed but that could be added later.

winphone7 people A brief look at Windows Phone 7

Pictures

You can view your photos and also share them using social networking sites such as facebook via pictures hub.

500x pictureshub A brief look at Windows Phone 7

Music + Video

It can be described as Zune HD in phone. You can view all of the multimeda files and play it using a Zune HD like interface. It can be synced with the Zune software as well.

winphone7 music video A brief look at Windows Phone 7

Xbox

Windows Phone 7 is integrated with Xbox for the first time. It uses your original Xbox profile with Rewards and Achievements. We have to wait and see whether it will be a portable Xbox and how well it does in the portable gaming market.

windowsphone7 games A brief look at Windows Phone 7

Office

You can access office documents and sharepoint services through office hub. Also the Outlook email app is also very good with large easy to read text.

500x officephone A brief look at Windows Phone 7

Hardware requirements and other stuff

The hardware requirements are pretty stringent this time. A phone needs touchscreen, a high-resolution screen, accelerometer, 5MP camera, FM and GPS to run Windows Mobile 7. The processor and the GPU has to meet certain standards as well to ensure the smooth running of the OS.

Other details are – it will have IE as browser and will be available by the end of 2010 during the holiday season. The multitasking capabilities are yet to be known. It doesn’t come with Flash but could be added later at any time. To know anything more we will have to wait till MIX conference next month.