Microsoft hinted that the Zune and Windows Mobile teams were working closely and you can definitely see this relationship in Series 7. The Quick Launch screen is a far-cry from the old Windows Mobile start screen. Large, colorful tiles serve as shortcuts to your most-used or favorite apps or Web sites.
You can also place live tiles on the screen with links to your Facebook profile or friends. These tiles are live, meaning if the content of the app or site is updated, the tile will update on your screen. With a tap and drag, you can easily move them around in any order you like or press a broken heart icon to remove them from the screen. Notifications, like for text messages, unobtrusively show up at the top of the screen, where you can ignore them or act on them.
It's how notifications should be. Pressing the volume key neatly brings up Zune player controls too at the top of the screen too.
There's a few other quirks to Windows Phone 7's deliberately windowless interface. The cell signal typically isn't visible; you have to tap the top of the screen to make it pop up. The indication that it's syncing or updating is subtle, a series of dots running across the top of the screen. The app bar, seen here, is exemplary of Windows Phone 7's most aggressively iconographic tendencies. It's a small menu bar that runs alongside the bottom of many, if not most apps; it's where the buttons to do things are often located, like composing a new message in Outlook.
The buttons have no labels, just hieroglyphs. There's an ellipsis in the top right hand corner of the bar — it's supposed to indicate "press here, or drag up," which will reveal the app bar in its full glory, with text labels for the buttons, along with a list of other things you can do, like access settings. While app bar's behavior will be consistent across every app — kind of like a more obvious, onscreen version of Android's menu button — it's something people will definitely have to learn to use.
The major issue is that it doesn't eliminate the need for long presses — pressing and holding down, like on a picture in the gallery app, is still the only way to trigger certain things, and you can never quite tell when to use it.
The touch keyboard looks stark, almost advertising that it's a crappy experience. Tiny little letters set against unforgivingly pointy little rectangles. It's deceptive, since in terms of typing ease, it's second to the iPhone.
It's a wonderful keyboard: fast, smooth, intuitive and totally natural, even this phone's narrowish screen. Text selection is weird, but workable — pressing and holding over editable text brings up a fat green text cursor that you can slide between the letters, sticking it wherever you need it. Given that it's a beta OS running on prototype hardware, the interface's speed was impressive.
It's exactly like a Zune HD. No stuttering or slowdown, just zoomy flips and swoops, back and forth between apps and the start screen.
Of course, it needs this kind of speed, since it like's a return to iPhone pre-iOS4—there's no multitasking for third-party apps. No, not even Pandora will run in the background.
It seems appropriate to mention now that there's no copy and paste. A throwback to the halcyon days of , Windows Phone 7 is the only modern smartphone that'll be left in this position.
It's clearly going to be painful. Maybe agonizing. The price of Windows Phone 7's modernity, its difference , is something of a learning curve — or at least, that impression was more solidified after I handed the phone to a half dozen or so people over the weekend. All of them were lost, at least for a few minutes.
Then I explained things. Then most of them said some variation of, "It's cool, I guess. But, day to day, Windows Phone 7's interface does work. It's quick, fluid, clean, modern. It's not perfect. It'll take a day to get used to. But I think most people will like it, if not love it. The question is what it'll be like in a year, or two years, when it's more complete and filled out, less of a clean slate. A Microsoft Live ID is the core account that ties everything together.
Which theoretically, can be a lot of stuff. The iPhone feels archaic in this regard. Like a lot of people, I don't use Live except for Xbox and Zune. Fortunately, Microsoft's support for other services, like Google and Facebook is solid. Particularly Facebook, which is the privileged secondary account here. I signed in to Google and Facebook, and magically, the People hub was populated with all of my contacts from both services, neatly linked with profile pictures from Facebook.
The result it's a epic list of people, which you can jump between using letters, like in the Zune HD interface, but if you've got a ton of Facebook contacts, you're either going to be tapping search a lot, pinning people to the start menu, or you're screwed. I was able to download both text and image attachments from my e-mails with no issues.
Windows Phone 7 also displays a single color-coded view of multiple calendars, which is a useful feature if you have both a social and work calendar set up.
If you have an upcoming appointment, the Calendar app will push that info to the Calendar tile as well as the Lock screen so you have no excuse for forgetting meetings. The Office Hub, as to be expected, is better on Windows Phones than any other mobile operating system. You can view, edit and create documents in Word and Excel. Stay tuned for a more in-depth review of Office Hub coming later this week.
Overall, Microsoft has done a good job with this version of Internet Explorer. Internet Explorer supports tabbed browsing up to 6 open windows. In the Settings menu, you can specify whether you want the browser to load mobile or full sites. You can also bookmark pages or pin pages to your Start screen for easy access. Adobe has said that it is working with Microsoft to deliver Flash to Internet Explorer, but neither company has commented on when that will be rolling out.
It is also unclear whether Microsoft will allow consumers to use third-party browsers. Microsoft has done an excellent job with Windows Phone 7 when it comes to user interface, performance and functionality. It is a bit on the small side, but it had good travel and feedback. The lock key and camera key are on the right side of the phone. They are also both a bit small, but travel and feedback was good. The 3. As for the operating system, well, it didn't feel all that different from Samsung's current crop of TouchWiz phones.
Bada is a new platform that Samsung created to compete with the likes of Android and perhaps Symbian. We really can't say straight up what native Bada feels or looks like, however, because the Wave runs TouchWiz 3. TW3 has been improved a lot when compared to TouchWiz 2.
TW3 has multiple home screens and supports up to 10 of them. The home screens can be populated with widgets, links, bookmarks, shortcuts or other apps for quicker access. The dock that hides in TW2 appears to be gone in favor of the multiple home screens. The main menu is accessed by pressing a button on the home screen. It is laid out in a grid exactly like the iPhone, and swipes from screen to screen exactly like the iPhone.
It is blazingly fast. The Wave is powered by a 1GHz processor made by Samsung and it is one of the faster phones I've used. Much of the software is an obvious evolutionary update of the TW2 software, especially applications such as the music player and camera.
The browser is Samsung's own Dolfin browser. When it worked which was rare it actually loaded the WAP version of Phone Scoop rather than the html version. That's pretty weak. The best feature of TouchWiz 3. It combines all messaging and social networking messages into threaded conversations that are visible from each individual contact. So, for example, if you look up John Smith in your contacts database, you'll see all the recent calls, SMS, emails, IMs, Twitter posts, Facebook posts and shared pictures on John's contact detail page.
You can also look at a master inbox that shows all messaging in one stream. The Wave crashed several times while we were using it. Once it required a battery pull. The second time it gave us a memory error, but eventually it recovered. We were told that the software is still pretty early in the development cycle. What's perhaps most disappointing is that Bada and TouchWiz 3. Granted, we only spent a few moments with it and didn't get to play with every feature, but it simply felt like the OS didn't do all that much.
In all, there's no denying that it is a slick phone.
0コメント