{"id":321628,"date":"2010-02-15T09:00:34","date_gmt":"2010-02-15T14:00:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mobilecrunch.com\/?p=26323"},"modified":"2010-02-15T09:00:34","modified_gmt":"2010-02-15T14:00:34","slug":"first-impressions-windows-mobile-7-now-known-as-windows-phone","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/321628","title":{"rendered":"First Impressions: Windows Mobile 7, now known as Windows Phone"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/www.mobilecrunch.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2010\/02\/22178_347853999347_306470884347_4901596_4795518_n-1-218x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" title=\"22178_347853999347_306470884347_4901596_4795518_n-1\" width=\"218\" height=\"300\" class=\"alignright size-medium wp-image-26327\" \/><\/p>\n<p>We&#8217;re not allowed to say much about it, so we&#8217;ll leave it at this: I got a bit of hands-on time with Windows Phone (the official name for what was previously known as Windows Mobile 7) prior to its announcement. I&#8217;ll have a bunch more to say about it once I&#8217;ve spent some time with it in a setting that allows for video\/photography &#8211; but in the mean time, read on for my notes and early impressions.<\/p>\n<p><span id=\"more-26323\"><\/span><\/p>\n<p><strong>Notes:<\/strong><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Windows Mobile 7 is officially known as &#8220;Windows Phone&#8221;. If you&#8217;re talking about this build in specific in relation to others, its <a href=\"http:\/\/www.windowsphone7series.com\/\">&#8220;Windows Phone 7 Series&#8221;<\/a>, but Microsoft primarily refers to it as &#8220;Windows Phone.&#8221; <\/li>\n<li>No consumer devices will be shown today, nor is it likely that any will show up this week at Mobile World Congress. The only ones floating around are pre-production, development-only handsets<\/li>\n<li>We&#8217;ll have a full list of hardware partners soon, but the names we&#8217;ve heard mentioned so far are Dell, Garmin-asus, LG, Samsung, Sony Ericsson, and HP.<\/li>\n<li>The first Windows Phone handsets will launch &#8220;in time&#8221; for the Holiday season of 2010<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><strong>Impressions<\/strong><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>The interface is a rapid, massive departure from Windows Mobile 6.5. Really, it&#8217;s huge. There is next to no resemblance between Windows Phone and any past version of Windows Mobile<\/li>\n<li>As far as we&#8217;ve heard so far, the<a href=\"http:\/\/www.mobilecrunch.com\/2010\/01\/18\/everything-you-need-to-know-about-windows-mobile-7\/\"> details we broke in January are spot-on<\/a>. Much of the interface is <em>very<\/em> Zune like. As we said then, <strong>manufacturers will not be able to make massive modifications to<\/strong> Windows Phone. Microsoft specifically said that things like HTC&#8217;s TouchFlo will not exist on Windows Phone. <\/li>\n<li>The Zune brand will be used for music\/video content, while Xbox Live will be used for Games.<\/li>\n<li> The homescreen is made up of two pages: on the left is a series of &#8220;panels&#8221; (<strong>Update: <\/strong>They&#8217;re called &#8220;Live Tiles&#8221;), either square or rectangular, which serve as shortcuts to your favorite applications and pull in data from them. On the right is a simple list of all the applications installed on the handset. You flip back and forth between the two pages by swiping. <\/li>\n<li>The panels on the homescreen (the shortcut icons) are dynamic, to some extent. The &#8220;Photos&#8221; panel pulls in recent photos as the icon background, for example.<\/li>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/tctechcrunch.files.wordpress.com\/2010\/02\/windowsphone.jpg\" class=\"shot2\"\/><\/p>\n<li>The entire thing reminds me very much of a combination between the Zune interface and the new Xbox 360 dashboard<\/li>\n<li>Panels can be dragged around and rearranged on the homescreen the same way icons are re-arranged on the iPhone: tap and hold, then drag.<\/li>\n<li>Each screen has been stripped down to its core &#8211; if it&#8217;s not necessary, it&#8217;s not onscreen. There is no Start button lingering at the top of the screen at all times; hell, there&#8217;s not even a clock\/WiFi\/battery bar up there until you click the space it would usually be.<\/li>\n<li>Windows Phone is <strong>very<\/strong> heavy on the animations, and Microsoft is proud of it. Take the calendar, for example: when you jump from a day view to month view, it zooms gracefully from one to the other. It makes the entire interface look incredibly slick, though we&#8217;re already hearing people ask if they can be turned off (and no, they can&#8217;t.)<\/li>\n<li>There is at least rudimentary Facebook integration; I spotted Facebook status updates being pulled into the contacts screen (which is called the &#8220;People&#8221; hub), and you can update your own status from the same place.<\/li>\n<li>All Windows Phone handsets must have three buttons: back, Start (Windows key), and search. As we&#8217;d heard, Microsoft is being pretty strict about the specs of Windows Phone handsets. <\/li>\n<li>The search button is context sensitive. For example: on the homescreen it launches Bing, but tapping it while on the application list screen will let you search through just your apps.  <\/li>\n<li>I&#8217;m not sure if we were supposed to see this yet, but holding the search button will launch a voice searching feature. It wasn&#8217;t currently functioning<\/li>\n<li> As far as I could tell, there is currently no copy\/paste functionality. We were told that &#8220;developers will hear more about that&#8221; at Microsoft&#8217;s MIX conference next month, though it was implied that it would be about why copy and paste &#8220;won&#8217;t be necessary&#8221; rather than when it was coming.<\/li>\n<li>The build we checked out was really buggy &#8211; but considering that they&#8217;ve got almost a full year to patch it up, I&#8217;m not too worried at this point.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/feedads.g.doubleclick.net\/~at\/UF6_DWc8ipPUuEyOMtLY-5tKS2c\/0\/da\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/feedads.g.doubleclick.net\/~at\/UF6_DWc8ipPUuEyOMtLY-5tKS2c\/0\/di\" border=\"0\" ismap=\"true\"><\/img><\/a><br \/>\n<a href=\"http:\/\/feedads.g.doubleclick.net\/~at\/UF6_DWc8ipPUuEyOMtLY-5tKS2c\/1\/da\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/feedads.g.doubleclick.net\/~at\/UF6_DWc8ipPUuEyOMtLY-5tKS2c\/1\/di\" border=\"0\" ismap=\"true\"><\/img><\/a><\/p>\n<div class=\"feedflare\">\n<a href=\"http:\/\/feeds.feedburner.com\/~ff\/Mobilecrunch?a=E97fTN76WsQ:U1DnPZWYTzA:V_sGLiPBpWU\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/feeds.feedburner.com\/~ff\/Mobilecrunch?i=E97fTN76WsQ:U1DnPZWYTzA:V_sGLiPBpWU\" border=\"0\"><\/img><\/a> <a href=\"http:\/\/feeds.feedburner.com\/~ff\/Mobilecrunch?a=E97fTN76WsQ:U1DnPZWYTzA:F7zBnMyn0Lo\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/feeds.feedburner.com\/~ff\/Mobilecrunch?i=E97fTN76WsQ:U1DnPZWYTzA:F7zBnMyn0Lo\" border=\"0\"><\/img><\/a> <a href=\"http:\/\/feeds.feedburner.com\/~ff\/Mobilecrunch?a=E97fTN76WsQ:U1DnPZWYTzA:yIl2AUoC8zA\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/feeds.feedburner.com\/~ff\/Mobilecrunch?d=yIl2AUoC8zA\" border=\"0\"><\/img><\/a>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>We&#8217;re not allowed to say much about it, so we&#8217;ll leave it at this: I got a bit of hands-on time with Windows Phone (the official name for what was previously known as Windows Mobile 7) prior to its announcement. I&#8217;ll have a bunch more to say about it once I&#8217;ve spent some time with [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":682,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-321628","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/321628","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/682"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=321628"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/321628\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=321628"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=321628"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=321628"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}