Windows Phone 7 Review

It's a few months now since the release of Windows Phone 7, and after reading initial impressions and seeing the screenshots I was keen to try it out. I had the HTC HD2 believing, rather naively, that HTC Sense could solve the problems of the rapidly aging Windows Mobile platform. After a few months of owning the device I realised it was probably compounding the issues further rather than helping them. At this point I decided to try the fairly new port of Windows Phone 7 to the HD2 and what a difference! I have waited to get a "proper" WP7 device before reviewing though as the workarounds needed to run it on the HD2 did cause some issues that are gone with my LG Optimus 7.

The Good

Although I was keen to try Windows Phone 7, I was still rather skeptical due to the disappointments of the HD2 and realisation that actually, iOS and the iPhone are rather good. There is much goodness in the revitalised Microsoft platform though. It has clearly been redesigned from the ground up, and like Windows 7 runs far more efficiently than it's predecessors. Without running accurate tests I would say it is even ahead of iOS in screen rendering performance, and every transition is smoothed out with animation. Also the Microsoft apps seem to start up rather faster than apps on my iPad, yes it is fast! The simple interface looks great too. I was worried about this after the rounded corners and smooth gradients of iOS, but the flat tiles with clear icons and text work brilliantly, especially when the app has a live tile, which gives an update of the app. For example the WeatherBug app will automatically update the live tile to show the current weather conditions in your selected location. Another area of strong performance is in synchronisation of data - emails, contacts, calendar etc. As with iOS it is silent and effortless, which with previous versions of Windows Mobile, I always found it rather hit and miss, even using Exchange ActiveSync. The killer integration is with Facebook though. If you log into your Facebook account by adding an account, similar to an email account, it will download your friends to your address book (now called People hub) filling in their names, email addresses, phone numbers etc that they have published. It will also automatically link Facebook contacts to those from your email address book, and with a very high accuracy level. Likewise, in the Pictures hub, Facebook photo albums will be synched with your phone. The rumour mill suggests that Twitter will follow in a coming update later this year to further highlight Microsoft's intentions to take a mobile OS to the consumer market. The future for Windows Phone 7 is also very exciting. Having learnt from the good and bad parts of the big players in the smartphone market, Microsoft have managed to launch a unique and slick operating system, which to me beats it's competitors in a few areas hands down. There are still parts to open up for developers to allow them to get even more from the phones, Nokia are yet to produce their Windows Phone 7 devices, and Marketplace (the WP7 app store) has already made it to 10,000 apps available quicker than Apple or Google Android.

The Bad

It's not all plain sailing at the moment though. Microsoft has already stated it's intentions to fix one of my gripes. As a keen amateur photographer the choice of cameras on the phones is poor. In fact it was a deal maker and breaker for my next handset as the Samsung and LG offerings are far ahead of the HTC in the optics department, but the king of cameras is still the iPhone 4 (well of the smartphones with a modern OS i.e. not Symbian). Nokia can't come soon enough to the table to address this in my opinion which they will be doing with the release of their Window Phone 7 devices probably next year.

I am still experiencing an issue with certain apps not connecting over a wi-fi connection which is annoying and although Marketplace does eventually connect, it is far speedier to connect over GPRS or 3G! Unfortunately finding support for this is a nightmare too, with seemingly no way of ringing or filling out a contact form to find out what's going on. Admittedly I haven't tried it on another wireless network, so we will see on this one.