Roundup: Windows Phone 7 Gets Previewed

Back in February, Microsoft announced its new consumer mobile OS– Windows Phone 7– to much praise and excitement. It’s not slated to reach consumers’ hands until the holiday time frame, though, so since its first appearance it’s had plenty of time to gestate.

While Windows Phone 7 hasn’t reached its final stage, it’s almost there. Microsoft just announced that the OS has reached the penultimate Technical Preview Stage, and a handful of our colleagues in the blogosphere got hands on with it (it was running on a not-for-sale Samsung handset that won’t be available to consumers).

After reading a half-dozen in-depth preview posts, you’ll notice certain points appear over and over again. The distinctive interface, composed of “tiles,” a blend between widgets and icons, and “hubs,” which let you view your content myriad ways, is simple, fast, and refreshing. Its onscreen keyboard, which conveniently keeps the period and comma visible at all times, rivals the iPhone’s in the ease of use department. The browser, while not as fast as the iPhone or Android’s, is nevertheless the best Microsoft has created to date.

And yet, a range of shortcomings left multiple previewers worried that the OS would feel disappointing, half-baked at launch time, a throw-back to the first-gen iPhone OS. These include its well-publicized lack of copy-and-paste and multitasking for third-party applications, a complicated phone app, too-basic Gmail support, SMS exchanges in which both parties’ texts appear in same-colored talk bubbles, an inability to search e-mails stored on, say, Gmail’s server, and a dearth of editing tools in the Office Hub.

Does Microsoft’s ability to build an attractive OS from scratch outweigh its imperfections? Click through to see highlights from the previewers’ posts, and find links to the original hands-on as well.

Engadget:

“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.”

Gizmodo:

“Making Windows Phone something that people want to buy is going to require the most herculean effort the company’s made in a long, long time. Windows Vista and 7 style onslaughts for mindshare. It has to snag developers and users, by the screaming bucketful. Microsoft has to want it bad enough. Fortunately, Windows Phone 7 might just be good enough.”

Slashgear:

“We’ve handed the phone to several people, and there’s a worrying sign that people just don’t “get it”.  In fact, after a few basic questions – ‘are there apps?’; ‘can I play games?’; ‘can I Twitter?’ – we generally got the Windows Phone 7 device back after a minute or two, often with the comparison that it felt like “a first-gen iPhone.’ “

MobileCrunch:

“Windows Phone 7 is actually really, really pretty. It’s not pretty in the same sense as the iPhone, where its beauty comes from order — and it’s not pretty in the same sense as webOS, where its beauty comes from gradients, translucency, and rounded corners. It’s pretty in its own, intensely-minimalist way. It is, as everyone says when they first see it, very Zune-esque.

Screenshots don’t do it justice, primarily because everything is animated. Tap an icon, and it floats in the air as the other applications glide out of view. Click into a date on the calendar, and the camera zooms through it like it’s a rabbit hole, emerging in front of the respective day’s agenda. There’s a fine line between animations adding to the experience and animations being so overly flashy that they make the entire thing seem unresponsive, and Microsoft is tiptoeing it well.”

Boy Genius Report:

“There’s practically no real innovation we can see with Windows Phone 7. It’s a decent mashup of some already pioneered features like aggregated status updates linked with your contacts, customizable homescreens, and a mobile apps and music marketplace, but we’re not sure that’s enough to push WP7 ahead of the three big juggernauts. It’s a fantastic featurephone, but as a truly competitive smartphone platform, we’re just not sure at this point in time.”

ZDNet:

“I will definitely be purchasing a device as soon as I can.”