Why You Can Trust CNET Windows Phone 7 review: Windows Phone 7
Windows Phone 7 is a fresh start, and if previous Microsoft-powered phones have left a bad taste in your mouth, then it's time to let go of the grudge and take another look.
It's been a long time since Microsoft could even be considered a contender in the mobile space. Windows Mobile 6, 6.1 and 6.5 struggled to shrug off years of legacy code and offered users a smartphone experience considerably slower and more complex than the alternatives offered by Apple and Nokia.
Windows Phone 7
The Good
The Bad
The Bottom Line
Windows Phone 7 is a fresh start, and if previous Microsoft-powered phones have left a bad taste in your mouth, then it's time to let go of the grudge and take another look. There is nothing obvious to the end user in this operating system, which has been carried over from Windows Mobile 6.5. WP7 is far leaner, simpler and, for better or worse, it has a renewed focus on the consumer market rather than the business sector.
We'll keep this review short and sweet, focusing on pros and cons rather than the full experience. For a complete guide to the out-of-the-box experience we invite you to take a look at our Guide to Windows Phone 7, which will act as a companion piece.
What we love
Design
You've seen the screenshots and you may have already decided whether you love or hate the aesthetic — we love it. It's clean, it's bold and we love the layout of the core apps, like the People app, with its "full bleed" headings and clean borderless table layout.
Speed
This is the most significant change for people who used old versions of Windows Mobile. Windows Phone 7 is fast, blisteringly fast. The combination of the OS design and the hardware requirements set out by Microsoft should mean that regardless of which phone brand you choose, you should enjoy the same silky smooth menu navigation.
Email
Though every smartphone ships with some form of email client, they are not all created equal. We want an email tool that is easy to read and that makes identifying important messages as simple as it is to delete the rest. The WP7 email tool is easily among the best currently on the market, where it feels effortless to manage the inbox, and the design is a pleasure to look at.
Some of the standout aspects of this client are the ability to enter "mark-mode" (where you check the mail to move or delete) by simply touching the left-hand side of any message. We were also impressed with the apps ability to recreate our Google Apps label structure as folders.
Facebook integration
We've always thought that phone manufacturers were wrong when they lumped Facebook and Twitter in the same app. Microsoft takes a different and more successful approach, combining Facebook updates with your phone contacts. This offers a limited view of Facebook, for sure, with scope only to reply to updates or post a new update of your own, but it's an excellent and quick way to stay in touch.
WP7 integrates Facebook updates with your address book.
(Credit: Microsoft)
Browser
Among the slew of issues with Windows Mobile 6.5, the Internet Explorer browser was towards the top of our must-fix list. Microsoft has listened to the criticisms and has delivered an excellent mobile equivalent to its desktop product. The new IE Mobile loads quickly and pans and zooms as well as the Safari browser on iPhone. It's a little light on features — there's no Flash or HTML5 support for starters — but for everyday browsing, this browser is a winner.
Intuitive navigation
Windows Mobile was a labyrinth of menus and sub-menus. Trying to achieve even a simple task like switch ringtones or wallpapers required half a dozen steps. WP7 is much, much simpler. The home screen is divided into two: Live Tiles and a complete list of apps, which you swipe left and right to move between these two menus. Almost all settings associated with apps is found under the "Settings" menu, unless the options are specific to an item within an app (like a contact in your address book) in which case you press and hold on the item to show a drop-down menu.
The camera and gallery
It's obvious the goal of the Windows Phone development team was to develop a class-leading camera phone, and we love what they have come up with. The camera app is fast to open and to shoot images, and the gallery is easy to browse through swiftly. It's also simple to upload images to a variety of services, including Facebook and SkyDrive.
What needs work
Multitasking
We thought we could live without multitasking, but alas we cannot. Microsoft grants multitasking privileges to core applications, allowing the browser to stay open on the page you were reading or the Zune music player to play in the background, but this is not the case for any apps you download through the Marketplace. This also means there is no task switcher at all in WP7, so you will have to exit to the home screen before launching any new apps.
Mobile broadband tethering
In a way, we could create a whole "changes that need to be made for business users" section to this review, but tethering stands out as a pretty obvious and much needed fix we can only assume Microsoft will implement soon.
Copy and paste
Another overlooked smartphone feature, but we have on good authority that this will be changed shortly.
Empty settings menus
Though we like the central settings menu, the options available to the user are pretty sparse. The settings for Internet Explorer, for example, include whether to save cookies, whether to use Bing search, whether to display pages in desktop mode or mobile mode, and a button to delete the browsing history. There isn't an option to not display images, or anywhere to indicate that you do or don't want the browser to save log-in information.
Useless Live Tiles
The Live Tiles are a colourful and sometimes animated view of the apps installed on your phone, but we wish Microsoft would take the concept further. We were disappointed when we downloaded the Microsoft-developed Weather app and saw that its Live Tiles didn't update with the latest weather. These tiles have a lot of potential that we hope is taken advantage of in future firmware.
More customisation
Being able to change the background from black to white and choosing from 10 different accent colours simply isn't enough. Even if you don't want to display an image behind the tiles it would be nice to be able to choose any colour imaginable for the home screen — using a colour slider perhaps.
"View" settings in contacts
If you were to combine all of your saved contacts from work, Gmail, Windows Live, Yahoo and Facebook, would you be looking at a list of several hundred names? This is exactly what we were looking at when we logged into our various accounts on WP7 and were genuinely alarmed when we couldn't filter our contacts based on filters we've set up in these accounts, and worse yet, we couldn't block all of our Windows Live contacts from coming across at all.
No VPN
This will be something that affects a small percentage of people reading this review, but there will be many people who will see this as the deal-breaker. Like all settings on the phone, the settings that govern wireless networking are fairly rudimentary, and in this first release there is no way to connect to an intranet via a virtual private netowrk (VPN). We know Microsoft is planning a business-focused firmware update in the not too distant future and we can only hope this issue is addressed then.
No expandable memory
Microsoft has told us that the decision to leave SD card support out of WP7 comes down to protecting the work of developers who are creating software for the system. While we agree the investment of developers needs protection, we'd also like to see some flexibility in the storage options we have on our phones.
Bluetooth file sharing
Seriously, did Microsoft learn nothing from the first few years of Apple's iPhone? To be honest, something tells us this has something to do with protecting app developers as well.
Xbox Live tracks your achievements but lacks true multiplayer gaming.
(Credit: Microsoft)
True Xbox Live multiplayer
For all of Microsoft's bluster about its Xbox Live integration in WP7, the service is pretty featureless. Sure you can log into your account and see your avatar, and sure, you can add achievements to your profile through the games you play on the phone, but without a true multiplayer service this is a pretty shallow offering.
PowerPoint editing
We were a bit shocked to discover that PowerPoint was view-only. Surely this is an Ace up the Microsoft sleeve for a future release.
Better maps
In truth, the Bing Maps in WP7 need a lot of work. Aesthetically they are well designed, but they are virtually unusable. As a test we typed "Pizza" into the search bar while hovering over Sydney's CBD and were promptly taken to Pizhma, Russia. We dipped into the menu to see if there was an option we were overlooking and saw that the only input we could make was to clear our browsing history and tell the app to stop using our location.