It's been a long road, hasn't it? Well, in some respects, it hasn't -- in fact, it's only been about two years since development of Windows Phone 7 as we know it today kicked off -- but when you consider that this product will be replacing Windows Mobile 6.5, that puts things in proper perspective. In fact, even the very latest maintenance releases of good ol' WinMo are based on the same rickety underpinnings as version 5.0 was way back in 2005, at a time when WVGA smartphone displays were science fiction, 4G networks were a good two Gs beyond the average American's comprehension, and Engadget looked like this. Nowadays, it's a very different game; eight year-olds have access to mobile email, your phone understands German, and "Yelp" is a verb (okay, actually Yelp is a verb). Indeed, mobile devices are the new PCs -- and companies like Apple and Google are dominating an industry that had once been practically handed to Microsoft on a silver platter. No one -- either inside or outside of Redmond -- is arguing that change isn't desperately (and quickly) needed, because it simply isn't enough to dominate the desktop anymore.

In light of all that, you could call Windows Phone 7 a desperation move to become relevant in the pocket again. Call it whatever you like, but regardless, brand loyalty isn't going to save this product -- it simply has to be good to sell. Scratch that; it actually has to be nearly flawless in a world where iOS 4 and Gingerbread play. Microsoft still has a few months before it intends to get the first volley of Windows Phone 7-based products to the marketplace, but we've recently been provided with reference hardware -- a not-for-retail Samsung called "Taylor" that's closely modeled on the Symbian-based i8910HD -- to get a feel for where they're at as the clock ticks down. Is this shaping up to be a killer platform for the next generation of high-end smartphones? And more importantly, can it win customers? Read on for our first take.

Overall look and feel

What you've likely already seen of the Windows Phone 7 user interface hasn't changed dramatically in the months since the announcement of the OS, but it has been majorly tightened up and tweaked.

As before the "Metro" UI is in full effect here, meaning lots of very 2D, stark blocks of color and text. Actually, 2D isn't quite right -- the interface utilizes a lot of layers within a single page, so when you're swiping through menus you get a kind of parallax scrolling effect reminiscent of 16 bit side-scrollers (thinkCastlevania for the SNES). It actually works really well here, giving a sense of depth and detail but not detracting from the content Microsoft is putting up front. Of course, the controversial cut-off text is still present, and while we happen to like the way it looks, it's definitely an acquired taste, and there are times when it just doesn't work, like in the Office hub where PowerPoint looks like it reads "PowerPoir."

We were extremely surprised and impressed by the software's touch responsiveness and speed. In fact, this is probably the most accurate and nuanced touch response this side of iOS4. It's kind of stunning how much work Microsoft has done on the user experience since we first saw this interface -- everything now comes off as a tight, cohesive whole. It really put one of our major fears about Windows Phone 7 to rest. We haven't seen any substantial lag while using the device, and the short transitions between applications or pages are well suited to the overall experience.

Getting around the OS really comes down to three main sections: the homepage "tiles," (a list of glanceable information, updates, and favorite apps or people), the application list (an alphabetical list of all your applications), and the "hub" pages (really a kind of in between point that's sandwiched between a full on app and a menu). We found the overall navigation of the UI to be really quite intuitive, despite the fact that a good number of options and in-app menus are accessible only through a long press... something you're not really made aware of in most cases. The long press becomes a bit like the skeleton key of the OS -- you just have to try it and see what kind of functionality it unlocks. Once you get into the habit of holding down on items instead of wildly searching for the next screen or tile, it makes a lot of sense, but it does take some getting used to.

Windows Phone 7 relies on a drop down, Android-like window shade to show when you've got a new SMS message, so Microsoft is already besting Apple there, and if you're playing music in the background, you're able to bring up your controls by tapping one of the volume buttons. Weirdly, that same area up top is used to show your signal, battery, and WiFi status, but it only drops down if you touch or swipe the upper part of the screen. And in some apps (like pictures) it doesn't appear at all. We're not sure why Microsoft doesn't want to make that info consistent, but it seems like wasted effort to have to call it up manually. Oh, and guys, please add a percentage meter to that battery icon.

Other flourishes in the UI come in the form of subtle animations when something is loading or syncing -- a series of tiny dots that appear and coalesce in the upper portion of the screen. A small touch, but it's nice to know the phone is thinking or working. Otherwise, the UI mostly gets out of your way -- is most apps there aren't a plethora of controls or options immediately visible. Just you and your content... and it actually really works here.



There are two big omissions here, in our opinion. The device won't support copy and paste, and won't support third-party multitasking of apps. We knew this would be the case given what we heard at MIX10, but it doesn't stink any less now. The former really doesn't make any sense to us, especially since Microsoft did a good job of nailing text editing and selection (at least in Word, and really... you guys make Word), and it looks like it would only be a short walk to a contextual pop-over for copy and paste functions. The latter is practically inexcusable in this day and age -- even Apple (which has been a complete laggard in this area) now supports basic multitasking. When we heard in our meeting with Microsoft that the phone wouldn't even support something as simple as Pandora background streaming, our minds were a little blown. It's doubly irritating given the fact that just like in iPhone 1.0, the first-party apps are free to background all they want (mail loads, the browser pulls down pages, music plays in the background, etc.), so there isn't any technical reason why they couldn't extend some of this functionality to other applications. We're hoping that by some magical twist of fate these two items get addressed before launch... but we're not holding our breath.

Still, those issues aside, Windows Phone 7 is easily the most unique UI in the smartphone race right now, and the real perk here is that it doesn't just seem like an arbitrary decision to make things look different than other OSs -- there is real purpose and utility to a lot of what Microsoft has come up with.

Keyboard

Let's just put this up front: the keyboard in Windows Phone 7 is really, really good. We're talking nearly as good as the iPhone keyboard, and definitely better than the stock Android option. It's one of the best and most accurate virtual keyboards we've used on any platform -- and that's saying a lot. The phone we had to test with is actually rather narrow despite its screen size (3.7-inches) and resolution (the Windows Phone 7 standard 480 x 800). So while typing was sometimes a little cramped horizontally, it was never a chore.

The WP7 keyboard is as simple and clean as the rest of the OS, showcasing little more than rows of monochromatic keys (white on black or black on white depending on your app), which pop-up a letter above them when depressed. Hold on a key and you get additional options for accents, just as you'd expect. The general layout offers a familiar placement of the shift, return, and number / punctuation keys, but adds an emoticon button as well. Frankly, we could have done with a little more room down there in its place. Still, Microsoft has made some smart decisions here, such as always having the comma and period keys present, double taps for periods, and our personal favorite, mimicking the iPhone's behavior of pressing on the punctuation key and being able to slide your finger to your desired character instead of requiring three presses.

We were surprised at how refined the keyboard is -- when we saw it at MWC and MIX10, things were still quite stuttery and uneven. Those days are certainly gone, and we think Microsoft got this aspect of the phone's UI pitch perfect.

Contact management and social networking

Windows Phone 7 doesn't have "contacts," per se -- it has a People app, and there's quite a difference. This is a thoroughly social platform, and it doesn't really seek to make any sort of differentiation between people you talk to / text / email, those you just casually observe, and those with whom you're "friends" in name only. If that kind of philosophy reeks of Motorola Blur or Palm Synergy, you're on the right track; as soon as you add a Windows Live, Exchange, or Facebook account, it pulls in every contact associated with that account and disperses associated content throughout your entire phone -- there's nothing you can do about it. That means, for example, that your Pictures app could have a bunch of shots of your ex's aunt's new boyfriend's dog in it (more on that in a bit), and there's not a whole lot you can do to stop that behavior without completely removing your Facebook account from the phone.

With Exchange, this strategy is probably fine in most cases -- contact sync is one of the main reasons you use Exchange ActiveSync, really -- but seriously, Facebook is another matter altogether. If you've got a lot of Facebook friends, this renders your People app all but useless as a traditional phone contact list. So, say you're looking for someone's phone number: if you're a normal human being with maybe a couple hundred or fewer actual contacts, you're used to just flicking through your contact list to get to whomever you need. With Windows Phone 7, though, Facebook has puked all over that list, so Microsoft instead recommends you search for what you're looking for (matching names filter as you type), pin extremely frequent contacts as tiles on your home screen, or make use of People's Recent list, which auto-populates with contacts that you've recently used.

We think the solution is pretty simple: Facebook just needs to be sandboxed a little bit more. Optimally, Microsoft would go with the Android philosophy, which allows the user to choose whether to import all their Facebook contacts to their contact list, sync the information for contacts that are already in the local list, or not to sync at all; meanwhile, you've got an actual Facebook app you can go check out if you want to see your full list of friends. Currently, Windows Phone 7 has no dedicated Facebook app, so that's part of the problem -- your Facebook friends simply have no place to live other than your primary contact list. Alternatively, they could do what Blur does and import everything but at least still give you the option of filtering by contact type so you don't need to see the Facebook noise.


What's strangest about all of this, though, is that as socially-aware as Windows Phone 7 seeks to be, there's not a lick of Twitter integration to be found. For some, Twitter is every bit as important as Facebook -- if not more so -- and it seems like a glaring omission (MySpace isn't there either, but we're farmore willing to forgive them for that). All of the UI infrastructure is there to make Twitter an easy addition, because the People app lets you see a stream of status updates from your social networks and tapping on an individual contact gives you access to a stream of their updates alone; plus, the phone comes equipped with a "Me" tile on the home screen that you can tap to update the networks of your choosing (just Windows Live and Facebook for now). Twitter is the perfect fit, they've just got to make it happen.

Email and messaging

As with most smartphones these days, email setup in Windows Phone 7 is relatively automated and painless, and there are plenty of options to go with most people's leanings. When you initially boot the phone, you're asked to provide a Windows Live ID, though it's not necessary to use one. On the email setup screen, you're provided with self-configuring options for the aforementioned Live, Outlook, Yahoo! Mail, and Gmail. You also get options for manual setup of POP or IMAP accounts. As heavy Gmail users, the option was obvious for us, and you'll be happy to know that Microsoft provides full (well, almost full) EAS support for Google accounts. After a little bump in the road caused by our hosted account not having its mobile sync options switched on (a problem on our side), we were off and running. Contacts and calendars came along for the ride, though we noted a problem right off the bat with calendar sync -- only our primary Google calendar was syncing, apparently a limitation which Microsoft says they're working on. The plan is for full EAS calendar syncing, but the company doesn't know if they'll have it in time for launch.

You're provided with a number of sync frequency options, including push, 15 minutes, 30 minutes, hourly, and manual updating. Push seemed to work relatively smoothly, though we can't comment on battery drain because this version of the OS and demo hardware aren't optimized yet.

The email app on the phone is pretty terrific on the whole, providing a clean, clear layout and upfront options for your most-used functions. In the standard inbox view you get your emails with one line of a message preview, and you can swipe right or left for sorting options by unread, flagged, or urgent (on top of the standard folder view). We found the inclusion of the unread view especially helpful when triaging our inbox. What wasn't helpful, however was the lack of threaded messaging. We pretty much expect everyone to have this figured out by now, but somehow Apple slept on it, Palm hasn't stepped up to the plate, and now Microsoft is leaving us high and dry. We pressed the company on whether or not it would be included, and the word was that it was planned for, but there was no telling if it would be happening by launch (our takeaway was pretty much that it wouldn't make the cut). On the bright side, multiple message management is executed here better than most mobile email apps we've used, requiring only that you tap to the far left of a message to engage your checkboxes. It definitely sped up the process of killing or moving mail. Also nice was the fact that in a standard message view, when you delete an email you're kicked back to your inbox -- not to the next message. If you're like us, you don't want to read an email before you're good and ready. Along the bottom of the display you have icons for creating a new message, viewing folders (that mysteriously doesn't display all folder by default), multi-message editing (which seems superfluous), and refresh.

Tapping the search button while in mail gets you to a pretty powerful search which parses subjects, message content, senders, and receivers all at once. It made it astoundingly easy to find what we were looking for with almost no hesitation. Unfortunately, it only searches messages downloaded onto the device, so if you're looking for that long lost password, you're out of luck here. Additionally, you can tell the app to sync individual folders, but it doesn't seem to peer into those during searches anyhow.

Another thing to note -- there's no combined inbox here. In fact, when you create a new mail account, it places what amounts to a separate app for that inbox into your application list. Likewise, to access it from the homescreen you need to pin that separate app to the front page. We would like to see an option to have multiple items inside of one tile (not dissimilar from the iPhone's new folders) where you could bundle things like your mail accounts into one place. Of course, it would be preferable just to have a combined inbox.

Overall, the mail experience is solid, but not best in class. There's a lot here that is laudable (like the sheer snappiness of it), but there's also a fair amount that's missing. We'd really like to see Microsoft strive for threaded messaging, joined inboxes, and an improved server-side search by the time this hits the market, but we're guessing that's asking a lot.

SMS

The SMS / MMS app in Windows Phone 7 is fairly barebones, but it definitely gets the job done, and looks pretty good while doing it. Microsoft has adopted the all-too-familiar speech balloon motif for this view, and while we can't gripe too hard about that, we wish the company would differentiate sender and receiver by color (even lighter and darker shades of the same color). We found that with the same color used for both incoming and outgoing messages, conversations could get a little confusing.

Creating and sending messages is fairly straightforward, and MMS (at least photos) display inline, but can be saved to your phone as well. Long pressing on individual messages gives you the option to delete or forward them, while in the list view of all your conversations, a long press gets you the option to delete the whole thread. There's not much to it, but it works as advertised. We did run into a few problems, however. One of our test units had a persistent display issues which caused lots of text to overlap, while our other unit started taking ages to go back from a conversation view to the list of conversations. We know this is still unfinished software, but this feels like something that should be already squared away.

Browser

For as much crap as Internet Explorer gets (less, admittedly, now that the debacle of IE6 is finally starting to fade), we've got to say that web browsing on Windows Phone 7 is actually a really pleasant experience. Our understanding is that it's essentially using desktop-class code, bits and pieces of Internet Explorer 7 and 8 tossed together and massaged into something that'll look (and work) better on a smaller display with less horsepower.

Loading the desktop version of Engadget was just a hair slower than an iPhone 4, and just as importantly, rendering new parts of the page as you scroll is plenty fast -- not instantaneous, but fast enough so that you never find yourself consciously waiting for it to catch up. Zooming -- which is accomplished with a pinch gesture, of course -- is buttery smooth. The phone accomplishes this in the same way you're probably used to from other devices: when you first zoom in, it uses the same render resolution so that it can at least show yousomething without going blank, then it renders the appropriate level of detail as it catches up (Google Maps works the same way on almost every platform). It works well. Zooming out to see as much of the page as possible isn't quite as pretty; in its current incarnation, the browser seems to be using a pretty awful scaling algorithm, and small text looks like a jumble of jaggy, meaningless blocks without a hint of anti-aliasing. We'll admit, it makes browsing just a little less fun, even though you can't really read anything at those zoom levels regardless.

There isn't a lot of bonus functionality, but we appreciated the "pin to start" option that lets you turn a page into a home screen tile, complete with a miniaturized view of the site (of course, there are standard bookmarks available as well). Tabs are also supported; on our test device, they were limited to a maximum of six, which we would assume will be true of all Windows Phone 7 devices -- but let's be honest, you probably don't need more than six open tabs at a time on your phone, and if you do, you should be in front of a laptop anyway. The tabs all continue to load independently regardless of whether they're active or not, which is nice, and doesn't seem to have much of a negative impact on overall browser performance.

Neither Flash nor Silverlight are currently supported on pages, and as anyone with an iPhone can attest, that's generally not a problem (though we'd be curious to see what kind of performance they could achieve). Of course, the real kicker is that you don't get HTML5 support either, which makes the browser situation somewhat painful. There's not even a YouTube app on the phone! Microsoft -- you've got to step it up on the video front if you want to play this game.

One other thing that did concern us was that a number of sites that detect our iPhone and Android devices to show mobile sites don't detect Windows Phone 7 properly -- a key example being Gmail, which shows you a nasty WAP-compatible site designed as the least common denominator for data-capable dumbphones -- but we imagine this will be a quick fix for most publishers if the platform gets enough traction to justify making mobile IE-compatible versions.

Zune

If you know the Zune HD, then there won't be many surprises here (except, of course, this is a real Zune experience on a phone you might actually want to own). The Zune integration is rather seamless on Windows Phone 7, allowing you to browse and play what you have in your library, sync music and video back and forth to your PC, and if you have a Zune Pass subscription, you can grab whatever you like (well, almost) right on the phone without hesitation. In general, we like the combo here, but there were times when the Zune interface was a bit confusing. Sometimes it was hard to know what section of the player you're in -- the line between previewing and listening is very fine here. In fact, you can listen to a preview clip while doing other things on the phone (one of the places you see Microsoft's first-party only multitasking). It doesn't make a huge amount of sense to us -- previews should likely quit when you leave app. Other times, because Zune Pass lets you sample the entire song, you can be streaming a full length preview, which gives you the impression of listening to a piece of music you "own" (or at least have downloaded) when that isn't the case. We also take issue with the lack of a proper jog control to skip into tracks -- holding down the fast forward or rewind button is inconsistent and seems a bit clunky to us.

That said, we love having almost limitless access to new music on a phone, and the Zune Pass subscription certainly adds that capability, though you're adding another $14.95 on top of your existing phone bill if you decide to go that route. Ultimately it's a question of how voracious of a music buyer you are -- but something tells us we're going to see a marked increase in Pass users when these phones hit the market.

One other important aspect to note about Zune and Windows Phone 7 is that the desktop software and these devices are now extremely interconnected. Not only do you use the Zune software to sync your music and videos, but you'll be able to buy apps from the marketplace on your computer, you can sync photos in the Zune application, and your general account and device management is handled through the app now. It's pretty much a similar arrangement to that of the iPhone and iTunes, and we can't really complain about Microsoft taking that page out of Apple's playbook. Microsoft has always been good about syncing, but this makes the process slightly less obtuse than its ActiveSync options from the Windows Mobile heyday.

Camera and photo management

We'd heard before that one of Microsoft's big goals for Windows Phone 7 devices was stellar camera performance -- not just in terms of picture size and quality, but speed, too. After all, if your camera app takes too long to load or you're waiting for five seconds between shots, the phone's utility as an easy way to capture impromptu moments the same way a point-and-shoot can is significantly diminished. Fortunately, it seems like they're making good on the promise so far -- on the Taylor, we were regularly clocking about four seconds from camera button press to the first shot, and around two seconds between shots. We didn't evaluate the pictures or video for quality since we're dealing with hardware that'll never be released, but needless to say, Windows Phone 7's minimum specs should ensure that you're getting at least moderately decent shots no matter what device you choose.


Once you take a shot, something pretty cool happens: it advances to the left, almost as though you're looking at an actual roll of film, and you can see a dimmed sliver of the shot you just took on the left side of your viewfinder. You can then swipe to the right to see shots you've taken in the past, starting with the most recent, and returning to viewfinder (camera mode, as it were) is as simple as swiping all the way to the left again. It's a neat user experience that we suspect novice users will pick up on very quickly. The available camera options and modes can be extended by phone manufacturers, but the default list is pretty impressive and includes configurable white balance, image effects (grayscale, sepia, and the like), saturation, ISO, exposure, and even metering mode -- and most of these options are still available even when capturing video. Naturally, you can also set the flash to fire automatically, always, or never.

Once you've taken your shots, the phone can be configured to automatically upload them to your Windows Live SkyDrive account in the background with your choice of privacy level (private, friends only, or public). You can also zip pictures over to your Facebook account using a menu item in the Pictures app, but interestingly, you have to choose between "upload to SkyDrive" and "upload to Facebook" menu items in the app's settings -- you can't have both. Menus can scroll, so why not?


Speaking of the Pictures app, this is your one-stop shop for imagery on the phone -- both your shots (locally and from supported online services) and those of your friends show up here. You'll come here to view and send pictures, change your lock screen wallpaper, and -- because this hub is extensible -- use any third-party services that developers have plugged into it. In a way, it's kind of the prototypical Windows Phone 7 app "hub" in that it cycles through your own pictures for its background and has some cool time-dependent features; for instance, it adds a "moments" page that summarizes pictures on the phone that were taken in the current month. It's all very pretty, though we wish there was a way to configure the background image -- and as we mentioned before with the People app, the "what's new" page tends to get cluttered with countless updates from Facebook friends you barely know. Instead, we'd love a way to be able to select an inner circle of contacts from whom we wanted to see a photo stream here.

Marketplace

Microsoft has already started handing out prototype Windows Phone 7 devices (the same ones we're reviewing here, actually) to developers, and it's going to continue to do so in liberal quantities as it gets closer to launch -- oh, and the side of the box says "developers. Developers! DEVELOPERS!!" on it. So yeah, you might say that Redmond understands full well how important third-party apps are going to be to the success (or failure) of this platform. Those will end up being exposed through the Marketplace hub, which as you might expect, is a thoroughly different experience than the one you might be used to on Windows Mobile 6.5. Instead, you get something more akin to what Apple and Google are offering -- with a few twists.


The first thing you notice when you open the Marketplace is that you've got music as an available category, whereas iOS breaks it out into a separate iTunes app and Android leaves that to third-party providers like Amazon. It's not quite as integrated as you think, though -- tapping on music just bounces you out to the Zune Marketplace, which is fine since you wouldn't want two disjoint places to purchase tracks anyway. Likewise, hitting the games category sends you over to the Xbox Marketplace, which sadly isn't live yet and wasn't available to test. Swiping to the left takes you to the Featured page of the Marketplace, which interestingly mixes up both music and applications into a single view -- kind of a neat way to keep people interested in everything Microsoft has to sell without trying to send users' attentions to two (or more) completely unrelated places.

That leaves us to the final category: apps. Though there's just a light smattering of Microsoft-built demo apps available in the Marketplace at this point, it was enough for us to get an idea of the purchase process. Tapping on it takes you into a separate marketplace hub that, by swiping around, gives you the typical views you'd expect: newest, most popular, and featured. You can also search by pressing the phone's hardware search button; on the plus side, it searches across all of Microsoft's marketplaces so you get apps, games, and music in your results, and that's kind of cool. On the downside, though, it appears as though there's no search suggestion functionality as you type.

If you're just browsing, you can delve into the whole list or narrow it down by category; presently they've got Tools, Lifestyle, News & Weather, and Business Center, though we wouldn't be surprised to see this list grow by launch day. Once you've selected a category, the list view is interesting -- it shows you the typical icon, app name, and rating on a five-star scale, but it also shows you a short description of the app directly below the name. Goodness knows not every app has the most descriptive title, so we imagine this feature's going to come in handy fairly frequently. Tapping on an app takes you to its information page, which is pretty much what you'd expect: you've got the price up top (everything appears to be free so far), a full description, screen shots, reviews, version number, supported languages, and a list of phone services that the app needs access to, similar to what you find on Android. The screen shots you see on this page are hilariously small, so you need to tap 'em to get an idea of what's going on -- not a big deal, though this would be a pretty easy one to solve by showing two or three thumbnails at a time rather than four.


Once you've decided to buy, the entire process happens in the background -- just as it should -- and after a few moments, you'll find the app has been added to your applications list. We'd like some sort of unobtrusive notification when the app's installed, though, because as it stands now, it seems to be a guessing game -- you just have to keep checking until it shows up. Microsoft's sample apps are quite small, but with bigger items that third parties will undoubtedly be developing, this could become more of an annoyance.

Office

Tight Office integration, complete with an awesome on-phone document and viewing experience, stands to be one of the biggest differentiators for Windows Phone 7 -- a feature that could almost singlehandedly make these devices impossible to ignore for serious business users regardless of their seemingly consumer-centric slant.


Instead, we came away feeling that Microsoft may have spent too much effort focusing on the collaborative side of Office and not enough time on the actual document editors themselves. Though Word seems to do a decent job rendering pages onto the small display, the editing capabilities are weak at best -- you can't change fonts, for example, and you can only choose from four font colors: orange, green, red, and black. Though there's a spell-checker (you'll recognize the familiar red squiggly lines), there's no copy / paste capability -- and in an app like this, it's hard to imagine being too productive without any sort of clipboard whatsoever. Excel seems similarly gimped, though it's got a pretty solid set of built-in functions; we don't know what percentage of the full app's functions are supported, but it's a long list.

PowerPoint documents, meanwhile, can't be created on the phone at all. And really, that's totally fine -- if you're creating your presentation that you have to give in half an hour on your phone during your train ride into the city, you've probably already blown it. The important thing with PowerPoint is probably the slide show capability -- especially for retail devices that have TV-out -- and in that regard, it seems to do just fine (cheesy transitions and all).


We mentioned collaboration -- indeed, Windows Phone 7 supports SharePoint servers, which'll undoubtedly come in handy for some business users. There's also OneNote, which in many ways is simply Word by another name; Microsoft gears it toward freeform note-taking by making it easy to attach pictures and voice recordings, but really, you should be able to do this from Word just as easily (spoiler: you can't). You can configure it to automatically synchronize to your Windows Live SkyDrive account any time you make a change, which basically means your up-to-date notes are accessible from any computer with an internet connection -- you know, that whole "cloud" thing. Magic!

Xbox Live

As we stated above, there really isn't much in the way of Xbox integration on the device right now. You can add your Live account and you get your avatar into the phone... and that's about the extent of it. We're hoping that before long Microsoft shows off just what these devices will be capable of. We were told by Joe Belfiore during a meeting that there would be two kinds of games on Windows Phone 7 devices -- turn based, "app" games, and Xbox Live content which would be full-on arcade experiences. We're dying to get our hands on something more than just a brief demo of The Harvest, but that's not possible yet.

Maps

Though it's not quite as full-featured as the latest renditions of Google Maps on Android have been, Microsoft's Bing Maps implementation on Windows Phone 7 is pretty great -- they've done a fantastic job of blending the experience of using a mapping app into their so-called Metro design language. You've got access to satellite imagery and real-time traffic information; location fixes happen quickly, though we found that they tended to be a little less accurate than Google's when indoors and out of GPS reception. Pinch-to-zoom is smooth and fast, and we liked the almost ethereal appearance of the map tiles as they loaded after panning or zooming in -- it's hard to describe, but it's a pretty neat (though admittedly unnecessary) effect. Likewise, we liked the zoom-out, zoom-back-in effect when locating your position on the map while a different area is being displayed, which gives you a better idea of your relative position than the iPhone's rapid scroll.

Since this is straight-up Bing Maps on the back end, you can expect the same database of locations here that you get when you search for stuff from your computer. On the phone, you can search either by text or voice (more on this later), which will call up pushpins for matches near your map view. As you'd expect, tapping a pin brings up the name of the result; a second tap calls up a page of information where you can find a phone number, URL, average rating, and even hours if they're available -- this is extremely handy for restaurants since it can save you an awkward trip to the business' inevitably non-mobile-friendly website. Swiping around calls up a screen with nearby points of interest, and another screen with individual reviews; Microsoft is aggregating several sites for these, and we regularly found entries from both Citysearch and JudysBook. No Yelp, it seems.


Our favorite part of Maps, though, has to be the directions list when navigating to a destination. It's no voice-guided turn-by-turn navigation, of course, but the app has a cool split-screen mode that shows the list at the bottom and the map corresponding to the currently-selected list item at the top. As you swipe through the list and highlight different items, the map moves around -- in other words, you can quickly see where (and how) you need to turn. Both pedestrian and car modes are available, but no mass transit, which -- when you're living in a big city, anyhow -- is a feature we'd definitely miss coming from Google Maps.

Search

Like Maps, Windows Phone 7's search capabilities are naturally powered by Bing. Microsoft has done a neat job translating Bing's well-known home page layout to the small screen, complete with gorgeous rotating imagery and hotspots that reveal factoids when you tap them. There's a mic to the right side of the text box that lets you conduct a voice search, and while we wouldn't bother trying to find anything with an odd name this way, common mobile searches (think "burritos") worked really well. Once you run your search, you get not just web hits, but also news (burritos come up in the news more often than you may think) and local results -- basically a tie-in to Bing Maps that uses your location to find stuff nearby.

Though it's a great search app at its core, the details of the implementation fail on two levels. First, accessing it is somewhat arbitrary -- you can get to it by pressing the phone's hardware search button, but not always. Apps can override that key's functionality (People, Maps, and Marketplace all do this, just to name a few), but if they don't, you fall through to Bing -- so there are times when you really have no idea what's going to happen when you press it that button. Secondly, the Bing app isn't a universal search, and that's a huge misstep in an age when smartphone users can easily have fifty or more apps and thousands contacts and tracks of music installed.

Wrap-up

What we've been presented with here doesn't exactly feel like a complete mobile operating system in many ways. Some parts of Windows Phone 7 are more like a wireframe -- an interesting design study, an example of what a next-gen phone platform could be. That's both good and bad. On one side, we're still really excited by the prospect of Metro as a viable, clean-slate approach to the mobile user experience, and there are lots of smart moves being made that could lead to greatness. On the other side, Microsoft has to turn this into a viable retail product that can hang with the fiercest competition in the history of the cellphone in just a few months' time, and there are some serious issues that need to be addressed. Frankly, it's a little scary.

By any measure, Microsoft's got its back against the wall in the mobile game, and becoming competitive quickly is vital to the company's success -- and in that regard, we understand why they've been so adamant about getting Windows Phone 7 on shelves in time for Holiday 2010. The thing is, putting out a product that's half-baked risks alienating early adopters at the worst possible time, especially considering that we see a clear-cut (and pretty painless) path to fixing the most egregious shortcomings. Seriously, if the WP7 team put their heads down and added a clipboard and some rudimentary multitasking, Microsoft could have an exceptionally solid version-one product in Windows Phone 7 -- especially when coupled with the company's fierce outreach to developers.

Of course, that's a big "if" -- the clock is ticking on Windows Phone 7, and the industry has already proven that it won't wait around for companies to play catch-up. It's not about lapping the competition at this point, it's about just being in the race -- and if Microsoft doesn't know that by now, it may already be too late.

After Windows Phone 7 Series' grand unveiling at Barcelona's Mobile World Congress last month, Microsoft has circled back over the last several days during GDC and its own MIX10 conference to fill in many of the holes in this story -- in particular, details around the app development ecosystem and how third parties can take full advantage of it have been focal points. Of course, it makes sense: a modern smartphone is only as good as its software catalog, and Redmond's clearly keen to show that it knows how very true that is. XNA -- the technology that underpins Zune games and a host of Xbox content -- figures prominently into the equation, but Silverlight is a huge, unavoidable component as well, making development for WP7S devices a starkly different experience for studios and independent code monkeys than in versions prior. We're going to be periodically updating this post as we get new info on the platform, but for now, follow the break for everything you need to know -- so far -- about Microsoft's latest and greatest mobile platform.

The basic facts

Windows Phone 7 Series is the successor to Microsoft's line of Windows Mobile phone operating systems. It's based on the Windows CE 6 kernel, like the Zune HD, while current versions of Windows Mobile are based on Windows CE 5. Microsoft announced the new OS at Mobile World Congress 2010 in Barcelona, and says that the first handsets to run it are supposed to be released by the holiday shopping season of this year -- and the company is emphatic in saying that it doesn't mean December 24th -- you'll have time to place your order.

The visual and underlying differences in the operating system are almost too numerous to mention, including a completely (and we do mean completely) upended user interface, an emphasis on finger-based touchscreen input, deep social networking integration, fully branded and expansive Zune and Xbox components, and extremely strict hardware requirements for partners. A couple familiar touchstones from the past include plans for Outlook and Office support, as well as licensing to a wide variety of third party hardware vendors -- despite the name change, Microsoft still isn't building any phones itself. Microsoft says it's aiming the platform at "life maximizers," and it's come up with a fictitious 38 year-old couple named Anna and Miles who represent the target end users: people who need to get work done on their phones but still want to play games and don't want to fiddle around with settings. It's cute, we'll give them that.

 

 

 

 

Hardware

Part of what makes Windows Phone 7 Series a departure for Microsoft is that the company is taking a much bigger role in dictating what hardware is allowed to run the OS. While we still haven't seen a retail-quality device (the demo unit being used for testing internally is a prototype slab made by Garmin-Asus and won't ever come to market), Microsoft has a very clear picture of what they want these units to be built like, and both LG and Samsung have come to the table with prototypes that approximate what we might see on store shelves this year. Still, while the company is laying down the ground rules in an attempt to create a more consistent experience across phones, it doesn't mean there won't be variety. Different devices will have different features, like hardware keyboards and front-facing cameras, but overall there will be a much more steady tone in the nature of Windows Phone 7 Series handsets.


Here's a look at the specs detailed to us thus far:

• At first, only large 800 x 480 (WVGA) touchscreens will be permitted, but 480 x 320 (HVGA) devices will make an appearance "later."


• Five specific hardware buttons are required: Start, back, search (which integrates with Bing services where appropriate), camera button, and power. Some devices might have more, but these are the baseline. Apps aren't generally allowed to override these buttons -- it's an offense that could result in being rejected from the Marketplace.


• Capacitive multitouch with support for a minimum of four contact points, though no more than two are used by any of the platform's six native gestures (developers are welcome to use as many as they like).


• A Qualcomm Snapdragon CPU with DirectX 9 graphics support. Microsoft says the platform is flexible enough to expand to other chips in the future, but right now it's all Qualcomm.


• 256MB of RAM or more


• 8GB of internal Flash storage or more


• No support for microSD cards, though that's partially offset by the requirement for capacious internal storage. Some phones might implement the required internal storage on a microSD card, but it's not supposed to be user-swappable, and if you do switch it out, you'll reset the phone and lose all your data -- but you should be able to get most of it back when you sync with the cloud.


• WiFi


• AGPS


• Accelerometer


• FM radio


• 5 megapixel camera or better with flash

As we said, Microsoft is primarily showing the OS off on unbranded prototype hardware. It's a simplistic slate phone with a 3.7-inch capacitive touchscreen, what appears to be a front-facing camera... and not much else. We've also been up close and personal with an LG slider QWERTY prototype on The Engadget Show, and we've seen fleeting glimpses of a Samsung slate prototype that's apparently just a hacked-up Omnia i8910, but we haven't been given any hard specs or even confirmed that either device will ever be sold. We've also been told that HTC is working on several devices, although there's been no official announcement. We're sure there will be tons of other hardware partners in the future as well.

As an aside, Microsoft tells us that right now they're only building this OS for phones -- we're sure there are implications here for the Zune platform, but don't expect any new devices there for a while.

What's the software like?

So, how exactly is Windows Phone 7 Series different than previous versions of Windows Mobile? The question is probably better phrased as "how isn't Windows Phone 7 Series different than previous versions of Windows Mobile?" This isn't a coat of paint or a touch up -- this is a full-scale nuclear assault on everything you knew about Windows on phones. Basically, every interface paradigm you've seen in earlier versions is obliterated here, and the design has been utterly decimated, in a very, very good way. There's no longer a Start menu, drop downs, check boxes, radio buttons, windows, lists of icons... we could go on and on, but suffice to say this thing is just a totally different beast altogether. Microsoft clearly worked long and hard developing new ways to navigate a phone, and this doesn't even bear a resemblance to other phones currently on the market. There are no icon grids, no pull down menus, no card view, and no task manager (more on that in a moment).



So what is it actually like? Well, it's a lot like the Zune HD. In fact -- it's just like the Zune HD... but more. Microsoft says it's drawn on its Zune and Windows Media Center UI concepts and come up with something it calls "Metro," a type-and-motion heavy interface based on primary colors and lots of minimal, negative space. Whatever you call it, however, it should be very familiar to anyone who's ever glanced at a Zune HD, because it incorporates all those weird interface tweaks that made it so distinct, like large, bold text that trails off the screen, menus which move dimensionally in and out instead of just side to side, and the sense that you're panning over long, single pages of information, rather than a set of separate panels. Another way Microsoft refers to the look is "chromeless," which can best be witnessed in the clean, sharp "tiles" which dominate the home screen, completely lacking in any real world-inspired bevels, drop shadows, curves or textures, or the Tron-like calendar app, dialer, and alphabetical contact search grid, which look like they've been built out of spare parts from Tempest. There are two "themes" for the OS, which basically boil down to light text on a black screen (the default) or dark text on a white screen, and you can pick your choice of four accent colors: red, orange, blue and green. Obviously we're hoping this is expanded in the future.

The OS's unlock screen is similar to the Zune's; a large photo that can be dragged upward to unlock the device, though it also includes time, date, upcoming calendar items, number of unread messages, and number of missed calls (imagine that -- information on a lock screen!). Behind the unlock is the Start screen, which is composed of user-configurable and movable "tiles" in a somewhat narrow strip down the middle of the screen, either in sets of two across, or longer single tiles. Tiles can be linked to an app (like Internet Explorer), a specific contact or website, a photo gallery, playlist, can function as a standalone widget, or reach out to one of the "hubs" which comprise the majority of the phone's functionality. In fact, there seems to be no end to what you might be able to link the tiles to, apart from the creativity of app developers. Tiles are live and animated, with changes coming in the form of status updates from friends, new photos, new messages, upcoming calendar events, and so forth. Your most used or best loved tiles can be "promoted" to the top of this list, meaning that what you are most likely to reach for is easily accessible, but as your habits or use change, so does the arrangement of your Start screen, and the list of tiles is infinitely long, as far as we can tell.









Hubs are where things really get interesting, however. Microsoft described the hubs to us as an "app that makes sense of your apps." Instead of icon screens or just the applications themselves, Microsoft offers a weird kind of middle ground -- sections of the phone where further action can be taken. You're not diving down into obscure menus here; rather, you're interacting with a subset of functionality within the OS or applications. When you jump into a hub, you land in a horizontal-scrolling interface, with a series of scrollable data streams and views in parallel that you can "pivot" to. Again, this should be very familiar to Zune users. The content in a hub is composed of both locally-stored data and cloud-sourced information such as photos, contacts and so forth, and each hub has its own particular emphasis. The cloud-connected content is interesting, because ideally it means you'll be able to browse both locally stored data (such as a photo gallery) or a server-side collection in exactly the same way, with no break in the user experience or separate action required. Unfortunately, Microsoft says there's no way to order the data sources feeding the hubs by priority or preference -- if you're Facebook friends with someone who's constantly uploading photos you might find that the "new" view in the Photos hub is a little less than useful. We'll have to see how this one plays out in practice; it's definitely a problem on similar platforms like MOTOBLUR.

Core-functionality applications have a similar but more minimal interface, centered around a single task like SMS or email, while still relying on the swipe (or pan or pivot, whichever term you refer) motion to switch between views. At the bottom of the screen is an "app bar" that has a few icon shortcuts to common commands (like add calendar item or back and forward in the browser), but which also can be pulled up like a drawer to reveal further commands available to the user. Additionally, the search button is contextual, meaning that depending on where you're located on the device it can have slight variations on behavior. For instance, when you're in your contact list, tapping search will call up a contact search, as opposed to dropping you into a web or device search. Make no mistake about it though, Bing is your main avenue of search with this device, and Microsoft is pushing its engine hard, making it a central part of the user experience for both local (that is, local to the phone) and external content.



Also present in Windows Phone 7 Series is an all-new touchscreen keyboard, somewhat similar to its Zune HD counterpart, but with some significant auto-correction, along with the ability to tap a word you've already typed and select or type a correction for it. Unlike previous versions of Windows Mobile, Microsoft is taking direct ownership of the touch keyboard experience here, and the results are seemingly quite good -- although, to be fair, we've seen more than one Microsoft employee struggle with it during demos. There's even a dedicated button to reveal a bevy of emoticons when updating your status, though this isn't unheard of -- Android features a similar set.

Multitasking and notifications

There's no traditional multitasking in Windows Phone 7 Series -- although media / email sync and some of the built-in apps like Zune and the browser can run in the background, in general most apps won't simply be able to carry on when you switch away from them. We were initially told 7 Series might eventually allow some apps to provide certain capabilities (music streaming, for example) while they're not visible to the user through the use of background services, but Microsoft has backed down from that recently, and even that wouldn't be anything like multitasking as we now know it. While that's the status of things right now, there's a small chance things could change, as these details haven't yet been fully fleshed out -- and we suspect Microsoft doesn't even know all the answers yet.

Apps aren't simply killed off after the user stops using them, though. The platform supports "page states," which Microsoft equates to cookies on websites -- they're lightweight packages that can easily be kept in memory to preserve the look, feel, and data of an app while discarding the memory-heavy UI elements. When a user navigates away from a screen within an app, the page state is committed to memory; when it's needed again, the UI is reconstructed from the state, a process cleverly called "dehydration" and "rehydration."

Speaking of multitasking, Microsoft will be offering a system called the Microsoft Notification Service for pushing app notifications to devices in real time without the apps needing to be open. The notifications appear as a bar at the top of the screen that can be tapped to take you into the relevant application; the system is halfway between Apple's annoying modal dialog box and Palm's unobtrusive webOS notifications. Apps can also use the push system while they're running to refresh content instead of having to constantly fetch new data themselves -- it's an interesting tactic to save battery life.


Copy and paste: conspicuously missing

Beyond the lack of true multitasking, Microsoft has another notably absent headline feature that'll undoubtedly ruffle some feathers: copy and paste. In light of the flak Apple took for leaving copy and paste out of the initial releases of the iPhone's OS, you'd think Microsoft would've taken the plunge and made this happen, but we get the impression it's all about time constraints here and they simply prioritized a real clipboard too low on the list to make the cut for the first release of the platform. Instead, they're offering up some supposedly rich data-detection services that will sniff out phone numbers from messages and documents and the like, which cuts the pain a tad -- but it's certainly no replacement, and the company's lines about end-users not actually needing a clipboard system ring a little hollow to our ears.

Overall feel

So how does Windows Phone 7 Series feel? Well, right now it's rough -- we've now seen multiple different builds of the software running on three different devices, and it's obvious that things are changing rapidly. Some things seem solid and connected, but there are clearly holes where this software is unfinished, and components of the interface that still require some serious debugging, and we've seen these early builds crash a lot. The touchscreen in particular troubled us, as we saw inconsistent results from scrolling and tapping: sometimes there was no reaction at all, sometimes it went a bit crazy. We have reservations about other things as well, like the time it takes to jump from one task to another -- we're hoping that the company gives us options to tweak animations and interface settings to some extent. Microsoft has to take the next six months or so to complete this really fresh OS concept and then put a serious amount of polish on it -- it's going to be a lot of work, but the raw materials are really impressive. You can't completely get a feel for something as complex as a modern smartphone OS in a couple of minutes or even hours of use -- it's the kind of thing you need to live with. We're hopeful about what Microsoft has shown us, and think that as long as they stay as aware and realistic as they've been so far with Windows Phone 7, the possibilities for success are strikingly high.

 

 

 

 

Hubs and first-party apps

Hubs are the clearinghouses for the phone's core functionality, broken down by genre -- it's a unique (and rather intuitive) concept unlike anything we've seen on other mobile platforms. Third-party developers will be able to tap into these hubs to enhance them; an example given at MIX10 was a photo retouching app that plugs into the Pictures hub and lets users open and modify their images directly from there. We haven't seen everything from Windows Phone 7 yet -- particularly in the application department -- but here's a look at what we have been given access to, and brief descriptions of the software's functionality:

People hub: Pulls in contacts from Gmail, Exchange, Facebook, Twitter, Windows Live and others, aggregating contact information, status updates, and contact images into a single view (or views, really). The main view of this hub keeps your most recently or heavily contacted people in first view dynamically (though this can be customized as well), and allows you to quickly jump to feeds of your recent updates from social networks aggregated by Windows Live. There's also a section here called "me" where you can view and edit your own statuses within your networks.

And all the rest...

Email: Relies on swipes to switch between message views (unread / flagged / etc.), and has a color-coded system for differentiating between work and personal messages. We're hopeful there's an option to un-mix multiple inboxes as well, but it's unclear so far. Microsoft's focused the app on mobile "triaging" of email, so there are robust tools to manage multiple messages, but there's also a lot of negative space in the app, which is a bit of a concerning (if beautiful) trend throughout the UI. We don't expect any deep integration with services like Gmail beyond the contact syncing... though if Microsoft could pull labeling, archiving, and threaded messages off here, we can think of at least one editor who would be seriously inclined to switch to this platform.


Calendar: One of the odder apps visually, it almost looks like a DOS UI, with a white-on-black / primary color presentation. There are differentiations for specific types of data, such as red and blue notation for personal items and work. As we said earlier, this is weirdly one of the most striking applications on the phone, with lots of interesting functionality tied to its visual elements, like little lines in the day boxes which represent appointments when you're zoomed out to a month view. There's also a cool little "I'll be late" button, which automatically sends messages to meeting participants when... you'll be late.


SMS: It's barebones so far, but supports SMS and MMS, and it appears that the keyboard can be rotated to landscape for text entry.

Phone: Even barer bones -- chromeless is in full effect here. The UI isn't nearly done yet -- the white arrow is supposed to bring up call options, but it doesn't do anything at the moment.

Internet Explorer: This is a big one, and Microsoft claims to have something newer and more based on the desktop IE than the current Windows Mobile / Zune browser. Features include multitouch pinch-to-zoom, "tabbed" browsing, and a new text rendering engine that brings supports sub pixel positioning for text. It's not as fast as we'd like just yet, but Microsoft has more than half a year to work out the kinks, and at least the page rendering is accurate. Apps can call upon the IE engine internally to render pages as well, and pass data back and forth with web pages using Javascript.

Bing search: Search has contextual use in most apps, but from the Start menu it pulls up a separate, dedicated Bing app. When you search, Bing will try to decide what sort of search you're doing and present an appropriate set of results -- local results instead of web pages if you're looking for sushi, for instance. You can pivot between views, naturally, and the results are presented in the standard Windows Phone UI instead of just a mobile browser version of Bing.

Bing Maps: Addresses throughout the phone are turned into hyperlinks that can pull up Bing maps (phone numbers and email addresses are also intelligently discovered by the OS and made linkable), which includes pinch to zoom navigation and an auto-switch from map to satellite view at a certain zoom level. Microsoft is really pushing geolocation here, though we assume users will be given an option on whether or not they want to be found.

"Delighters": What you see here isn't the full list of functionality and features -- Microsoft has said it'll be rolling out "delighters" over time that extend the platform in unique and interesting ways. We don't know exactly what they'll be, but we were flat-out told that copy / paste support isn't among the group, so that's that.

Third-party apps

Though there are countless huge changes for manufacturers, developers, and users alike in Windows Phone 7 Series, one of the largest is going to be the third-party app ecosystem: you must get your content from the Marketplace, a far cry from the Wild West attitude of the WinMo 6 days. In fact, you could even argue that it's a little bit more restrictive than Apple's already-draconian app distribution policy in that there won't initially be any provision for an ad hoc distribution mode that allows you to bypass the Marketplace and distribute your app (say, to a small company or for beta testing) to a limited number of users; Microsoft says that they're keenly aware that there's interest in such a feature, but they simply weren't able to target it for the first release, along with a full-featured app distribution solution for large enterprise customers. The company is promising a "predictable and transparent" process for app approvals based on constantly-evolving "business, technology, and content" policies, and the final versions of those policies are expected to be detailed for developers in May 2010. We can tell you that there won't be any silly "duplication of functionality" rejections: Microsoft says it won't reject a Google Maps or Google Voice app, or replacement email clients -- or even browsers, if some dev manages to code one up in Sliverlight or XNA.

Marketplace's pricing policies are pretty similar to Apple's in many ways: 70 / 30 revenue split between the developer and Microsoft, $99 a year for a developer program membership which currently allows 5 apps per account (that may change prior to launch), and there's no ongoing cost to the developer for publishing free apps, which can be ad-supported if the developer so chooses -- although the ads will be subject to the same content guidelines as the apps themselves. We've already seen one obtrusive pop-up ad in the Associated Press app, and we're hoping the platform's Silverlight foundations don't encourage annoying and overbearing animated ads in free apps.

It's a fine promise overall, but Microsoft has its hands full here, especially since it's trying to enforce the same moral standards globally -- we have no doubt that the company has only the best intentions in mind, but we can guarantee we'll see at least one or two App Store-style PR disasters with rejected Marketplace apps. It's just the nature of subjective regulation like this.

Development for Windows Phone 7 Series takes place using a toolkit that Microsoft provides for free, consisting primarily of phone-centric editions of Expression Blend and Visual Studio 2010. Most applications will be developed entirely in Silverlight -- a technology that's been billed as a Flash competitor, though Microsoft and Adobe have both said that they're planning on adding Flash support to the platform sometime after the initial launch. WP7S supports what Microsoft describes as "full Silverlight," touting that existing Silverlight developers will have an incredibly easy time porting their apps to the platform, though complying with the look and feel of the Metro UI will naturally require some tweaking. We've seen some seriously impressive demos of Silverlight development -- we watched a Microsoft dev code up a bare-bones Twitter client in under 10 minutes, and the Seesmic team said they reused the majority of the code that powers Seesmic Desktop on the Mac and PC.

Game developers, meanwhile, will take advantage of the platform's support for XNA, the same ecosystem used by the Zune HD and the Xbox 360. Apart from a handful of shared APIs, Microsoft says that devs will need to basically choose Silverlight or XNA and run with it when creating a new app, but that the long-term goal is to merge the platforms in a meaningful way. For what it's worth, Microsoft has committed to bringing Silverlight support to Xbox -- and the company's strategy strongly suggests that future Zune iterations will support it as well -- so it should eventually be a fairly trivial matter for a studio to bring the same app to the PC, PMP, console, and phone with relatively little pain.

Microsoft is spending a great deal of time chatting up the development advantages of having a very stringent, narrow set of target hardware specs; we've certainly seen software fragmentation on other platforms (Android in particular) as a direct result of vast differences in hardware and software capability that make it difficult for some apps to run seamlessly across every device. One fragmentation point in WP7S, though, is the display -- though 800 x 480 is the only resolution at launch, 480 x 320 will be added later. To ease the pain, Microsoft is including software scaling capabilities out of the box that will allow the same apps to run on either display with little or no modification (and they're actually encouraging game developers to consider falling back to 480 x 320 or even 400 x 200 for higher performance -- the system can change on the fly).











Here's a quick look at some of the apps and games that have been demoed so far:

Associated Press: AP's mobile apps have become mainstays for many folks, so it's no surprise that Microsoft was keen to show this one off. It makes full use of Windows Phone 7 Series' "panorama" view, which serves to make it a distinctly different experience than you'll find on the iPhone or Android versions. There's also a nifty photo browsing tool that flips out images in a fan -- it's very trick. The AP app is a great showcase for what devs can do if they fully engage the Metro UI -- something that not every app we've seen does well.


Netflix: This is more than your average Netflix queue manager -- the company's prototype WP7S app actually bundles Watch Instantly functionality, meaning it becomes a source of entertainment on the road. Interestingly, Netflix is emphatic that they haven't "announced" a Windows Phone 7 Series-compatible app, they've merely prototyped one; that being said, we'd be shocked (and saddened) if this didn't become available at or near the platform's retail launch.


Hush Hush: WP7S apps aren't required to live and breathe the Metro UI style, and Hush Hush is a perfect example of that. This diary app looks... well, like a diary, which should function pretty well on the large WVGA displays that these devices will have out of the gate. Neat little feature here: you can bypass the lock by "smashing" the phone.


MLS: This is an official app developed in cooperation with Major League Soccer -- it's the usual stats-and-video-clips affair, but it served as Microsoft's first official demo of the so-called Microsoft Notification Service that pushes notifications to WP7S devices in much the same way that Apple's system does. The app doesn't need to be running in order for users to receive alerts.


Seesmic: This is more or less a straight port of the same experience Seesmic offers on Windows on Mac, a testament to how easily they were able to port their Silverlight-based client.

Shazam: Shazam's been pretty great at making sure that it has presence on every mobile platform of note, and Windows Phone 7 Series is no exception -- they took the stage at MIX10 to commit to the platform, so you can rest easy knowing that you'll have no trouble identifying songs with your shiny new WP7S handset.

Goo Splat, Battle Punks, and The Harvest: These games come from different backgrounds -- Goo Splat's an XNA game on Zune HD that shows off how quick and easy it is for studios to port their existing stuff, while Battle Punks and The Harvest are 3D games capable of showing off Windows Phone 7 Series' deep Xbox Live integration.

Windows Mobile legacy

Microsoft has stated very clearly that Windows Phone 7 Series represents a complete and total clean break for the platform -- in other words, your legacy Windows Mobile applications will definitely not work out of the box. There are a variety of valid technical reasons for that, none bigger than the fact that WP7S is based on a very specific set of Microsoft developer tools; you simply can't go outside of the XNA / Silverlight sandbox. The company hasn't committed to offering developers any specific tools geared at helping them migrate old apps, but the user interface best practices and underlying architectures are so starkly different that it might not even be technically possible to offer such a tool -- in other words, developers can and should expect to rewrite their apps from the ground up, just has Microsoft has done with the platform itself.

That also means existing Windows Mobile 6.x-based devices won't get official upgrades to Windows Phone 7 Series. Microsoft and its hardware partners were initially less than forthcoming on that issue, giving a series of non-answers that merely muddied the issue -- especially in regard to the HTC HD2, which features a Qualcomm Snapdragon processor and very large capacitive 800 x 480 display, specs that match Microsoft's 7 Series requirements. However, we were finally told at MIX10 that an update wouldn't happen because the HD2 is "not compliant" with the WP7S hardware requirements. If we had to guess, the HD2's old-style button layout is the problem, though we may never get a straight answer from either Microsoft or HTC on the matter. Regardless, the HD2 was the high-water mark for Window Mobile 6.5, and if it isn't making the cut, we doubt any other currently available device is going to either.

So, where does this leave existing Windows Mobile users? Well, your phone still works, and since Microsoft has eliminated any sort of upgrade path, we're guessing there will be a pretty vibrant community of non-upgraders who will develop for and support existing Windows Mobile devices for years to come. And let's not forget, the HD2 is a pretty amazing device -- if you need Windows Mobile, it'll be more than enough phone for several years to come. What's more, Microsoft is positioning Windows Phone 7 Series primarily for consumers right now, which means it has an interest in keeping Windows Mobile alive and well supported for the enterprise -- and there's a slew of new Windows Mobile 6.5.3 devices that are on the market. Any reports of the death of Windows Mobile are greatly exaggerated, but it's also not an exaggeration to say that Microsoft has gone "scorched earth" in developing toward its primary future in phones.

Perhaps one of Windows Mobile's most stand-out features in recent years has been its customizability -- rarely have partners left Microsoft's default skin untouched, replacing it with variants of TouchFLO / Sense, TouchWiz, Spb, and so on depending on the manufacturer and model. Windows Phone 7 Series puts a strict ban on those replacement skins, instead demanding that products ship with the standard experience -- so it'll be considerably more difficult for HTC, Samsung, and others to differentiate themselves. Manufacturers have the option of adding features to the platform's standard hubs and bundling apps, but otherwise, we haven't gotten any indication that one phone's build of WP7S will look much different from any other's.

Partners and developers

Naturally, there are plenty of companies -- both on the hardware and carrier front -- on board for Windows Phone 7 Series, and so far support has been pledged by Dell, Garmin-Asus, HTC, HP, LG (rumored to have a device ready by September), Samsung, Sony Ericsson, and Toshiba on the hardware end. When it comes to carriers, the list is even longer, including AT&T, Deutsche Telekom AG, Orange, SFR, Sprint, Telecom Italia, Telefónica, Telstra, T-Mobile USA, Verizon Wireless and Vodafone. Needless to say, there will be no shortage of availability when WP7 comes to market.

On the developer side, Microsoft seems to be acutely aware of how badly it needs to come big on the app and software front. One thing Microsoft has always prided itself on was developer love (c'mon, we've all seen the video), but in recent years the company seems to have taken a backseat while Apple has been blowing everyone away with its easy-to-code, easy-to-market solution for software on the iPhone and iPod touch. For better or worse, Microsoft seems to be emulating part of Apple's strategy with its curated Marketplace, but with potentially even lower barriers to entry, since the basic elements of developing for Windows Phone 7 Series are all built on extremely familiar foundations and the same code can be deployed on Windows and the Xbox. That's great, but it's how developers take advantage of the new Metro UI and the deeper concepts of 7 Series that will make all the difference -- we've already seen some apps that really run with it to achieve spectacular results, like the AP app, and other apps that deliver a more modest experience that's very similar to other platforms, like Shazam. It's up to Microsoft to define expectations for the platform and really encourage developers to explore new ways of doing things -- not an impossible challenge, but not a walk in the park, either.

In its first week of software partner announcements, Microsoft has compiled a healthy list of companies -- both large and small -- that have thrown their weight behind the platform:

• The Associated Press


• Archetype International


• AWS Convergence Technologies -- Weatherbug


• Citrix Systems


• Clarity Consulting


• Cypress Consulting


• EA Mobile


• Fandango


• Foursquare


• frog design


• Glu Mobile


• Graphic.ly


• Hudson Entertainment


• IdentityMine


• IMDB


• Larva Labs


• Match.com


• Matchbox Mobile


• Microsoft Game Studios


• Namco


• Oberon Media


• Pageonce


• Pandora


• Photobucket


• PopCap Games


• Seesmic


• Shazam


• Sling Media


• SPB Software


• Stimulant


• TeleCommunications Systems


• Touchality


• Vertigo Software

Consumer experience aside, Microsoft is also stepping up its game with its developer tools, committing to deliver everything a coder needs to take an app from concept to reality for free (which is exactly how it should be -- developers are a platform's best allies, after all). The tools seem extremely slick, too -- perhaps not as ridiculously effortless as Palm's Ares SDK, but certainly a walk in the park for seasoned Microsoft developers coming from other segments of the business. We were struck, for example, by the fact that you don't need to compile an app to run it as you're developing it -- you just hit "play to device" and your little creation is running on an attached handset a moment later.

What's next?

As much as Microsoft's revealed, it's still leaving plenty of questions about its Windows Phone 7 Series strategy unanswered; in some cases, we think they're simply being careful to release a steady stream of information as the company and its partners get closer to launch, but in others, it's evident that the team simply doesn't yet know. Mass storage -- the lack of support for microSD expansion and file management, for instance -- and Marketplace content control are a couple big examples of areas where clarification and further development are undoubtedly needed, and we're looking forward to seeing this all develop over the course of the year.

Ultimately, Microsoft needs buy-in not just from carriers, manufacturers, and users, but also from third-party developers -- the Marketplace needs to be bursting with great content to legitimately go up against the like of Android and the iPhone, both of which have had a strong head start in putting vibrant ecosystems together. Concerns aside, though, we're extremely excited by what Microsoft has done so far, and it's hard not to catch a bit of their enthusiasm along the way -- they're proud of how definitively they've thrown away the shackles of Windows Mobile's legacy. Now, it's time to deliver on the promise.

Additional reporting and research by Paul Miller, Nilay Patel, and Joshua Topolsky