by Matt Buchanan, Gizmodo
“What’s this?” a girl at a party asked, as I handed her my phone. She touched a square, and everything flipped away. “It’s Microsoft’s brand new phone. Kind of like a fresh start,” I explained. “Oh. It’s … neat.”
That’s the most apt way to describe Windows Phone 7, really. It’s a fresh start, and it’s neat. It’s a clean slate that Microsoft can use as a foundation to build something entirely new, and it’s not like any other phone you’ve used. It manages to do something that’s sadly rare for Microsoft, which is to leverage all of these different Microsoft products and services — Bing, Xbox Live, Zune to name a few — and seamlessly bring them together in a single, polished product. Which is exactly what Windows Phone 7 needs to be.
Windows Phone 7 is coming out this year, in the next few months — October, possibly — and the basic rundown of “What is Windows Phone 7?” can be found here and here. The version that I’ve been using for the last few days on prototype hardware (a Samsung phone which will never be sold) has been variously described to me by Microsoft as “beta 2,” a “close-to-release-candidate build” and a “technical preview.” Developers will be getting phones loaded with it shortly in order to have apps ready for launch. It’s representative of what the final Windows Phone 7 interface and experience will be like, though two critical parts were missing, because they’re still under heavy construction: Xbox Live and the Apps Marketplace.
The Interface
The phrase “authentically digital” makes me want to barf rainbow pixels, but Microsoft’s description of the Windows Phone 7 interface is truth: It doesn’t try to feel like anything but a flat, digital interface. There is no attempt to depict three dimensionality or any kind of real-world mimesis. No gradients, shadows, gloss or shading. Everything is crisp and flat. Everything pops, bright primary colors and white text on a black landscape. Touch a tile on the main screen, and the interface flies away like exploding puzzle pieces, revealing the app you wanted to see. Oversized text is the order of the day. (Yes, it still runs off the screen in lots of place.) It feels gloriously modern. I love it. I wonder how gracefully it’ll age.
Microsoft doesn’t treat the main components of the phone — like Music+Video, People, Pictures, Xbox Live — as apps. They’re “hubs.” Which means they’re panoramas with two or three or even four screens that you swipe left or right to move from one screen to another. For instance, in the People hub, one screen is all of my contacts. Flick to the right, and it’s recent contacts. Flick again, and it’s “what’s new,” which is a news feed of my friends’ updates from Facebook and Windows Live. (Well, it would have Windows Live friend updates, if I had any friends that used Windows Live, or the Twitter service was turned on yet — but more on that later.) You can get a sense of how developers will be able to expand on hubs in a way that’s more integrated than separate apps you install. Overall, the concept works really well, once you get it.
Live Tiles are what make the start screen good, and mostly eliminate the need for widgets. They’re the giant squares of, um, stuff that make up the home page. The tile for every application is dynamic, so one for my account mail will show me how many messages I have, while the tile for a person I have pinned to the start screen will show me their latest photo. Unfortunately, weather isn’t a built in app, so you can’t see what’s up at a glance — at least not with the early app that Microsoft made available in the Marketplace. But there’s a lot of potential in this concept, ridding the need to go through the motions of opening an app when all that’s needed is a shot of info.
There are three buttons that’ll be on the front of every Windows Phone 7 phone: Start, Back and Search. Start works just like the home button the iPhone — it takes you back to the start page. Back is much like Android — it shoots you back a screen. Search is contextual, which means sometimes you don’t know what it’ll bring up. In Maps, it looks up where you want to go; in People, it looks through contacts; from the start screen, it’s Bing search, which is comprised of a general web search, local listings, and news.
I didn’t think to use the search button as often as I should have. Like the Zune HD, WP7 is a very list-oriented interface when it comes to displaying a lot of information or options (versus, say, a grid). The main contacts page in the people is a very long list, since it brings in all of your Facebook contacts, without a way to filter them by network. The right side of the start screen is a long list of installed apps — you get the idea. Microsoft wants you to search for things or use voice commands to quickly get to them, but the most natural reaction would be to scroll for a long time.
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 2009, 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. Well. 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. I do. 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.
People and Accounts
People and accounts on Windows Phone 7 is a cross between Android and WebOS. A Microsoft Live ID is the core account that ties everything together. Which theoretically, can be a lot of stuff. It’ll pull in your contacts, Hotmail/Windows Live mail, Office Live, Zune, Xbox Live avatar, Pictures, SkyDrive — pretty much all of Microsoft’s online services are tied in, one way or another, through the Live ID. 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. Most recent contacts get another screen.
There’s no separate Facebook app — instead, all updates, the news feed, if you will, are part of the “what’s new” screen in People. If you click on a contact’s card (which you can pin to the front page for instant access), you get the same kind of experience — “what’s new” will show you everything they’re up to, from all of the services you’re linked to. Some of the Facebook experience is lost in translation, but overall, the People hub concept works. It feels natural and seamless in the way it aggregates info from multiple services. The major missing piece is Twitter, but supposedly, support is on the way via Windows Live, which’ll aggregate Twitter updates and then pipe them down to the phone. It sounds like Google Buzz, but it should be much faster. Twitter support is mission critical for this app-less concept to work — so it has to happen.
