The Windows Phone 7 Review
by Anand Lal Shimpi & Brian Klug on October 20, 2010 7:00 PM EST- Posted in
- Smartphones
- Windows Phone 7
- Microsoft
- Mobile
The Best Smartphone for Music Lovers
To call it a Zune Phone would be a disservice. The Zune was a capable PMP that didn’t gain mainstream acceptance. Windows Phone 7 isn’t destined for the same obscurity. But the Zune icon is present on what Microsoft calls the Music + Videos Hub and it is more functional than the iPod app in iOS and Android’s media player.
The first screen in the Music + Videos hub is the zune panel. Here you have access to your music, videos, podcasts, FM tuner and the Zune Marketplace.
Tapping on music will take you to your music. There are tabs for artists, albums, songs, playlists and genres. There’s a “now playing” playlist that you can add to in real time. Tap and hold over any album or song to add to the playlist. To view the now playing playlist just swipe over to the history tab and tap the current song.
The player interface is pretty slick. Swipe to flip through songs and you get back, pause and forward buttons for playback controls. It took me a while to find the shuffle playback option, which is revealed if you tap the album art in playback view.
Below the song you’re currently playing you get a list of the next three songs in the playlist.
So far I’ve described pretty basic features of any smartphone media player. Here’s where the Zune integration rocks. Viewing any artist or album you get a list of what you own on the device, scroll down and you’ll see a label for In Marketplace and a downarrow widget. Tap the widget and you’ll get a list of artists or albums in the Zune Marketplace.
From here, directly in the media player application, you can preview and buy songs over WiFi or the cellular network. If you have a Zune Pass, you can also play anything you find here right away without incurring any charge.
Zune Pass is the major sellingpoint of Microsoft’s Zune PMP. For $14.99 per month you get unlimited streaming of all songs in the Zune Marketplace. You also get 10 download credits per month to use on songs you want to actually own (DRM-free).
The Zune Pass integration in Windows Phone 7 is just awesome. You can play any song you’d like that’s in the marketplace, even if you’re on the road. You can also spend your 10 credits per month while connected to the cellular network.
The Zune Pass streaming works like an expensive Pandora, except you get to pick and choose the songs you want to listen to. Remember an album that you really like but don’t have synced to your phone? Just search for it in the marketplace and start streaming it immediately.
You can mix streaming songs from the marketplace along with songs you have synced to your phone in your “now playing” playlist.
The whole interface is extremely fast and like the rest of Windows Phone 7, it’s very dynamic. Backgrounds in the Music app are dynamically populated by art pulled from the Zune Marketplace. You’ll get a picture of the artist you’re currently listening to as a background. Dithering can be an issue unfortunately.
Note the dithered background
Playback can continue while you’re in other apps. To access playback controls just hit the volume up/down buttons regardless of what app you’re in.
Navigating around the music app takes some getting used to, particularly if you’re expecting it to be like an iPod or fairly stripped down media player. Once you get the hang of it, there’s nothing like it. The back button always takes you to where you want to go, the UI is super fast and the mixture of your own content with the Zune Pass streaming content is just awesome for lovers of (legal) music. Dare I say the only thing that’s missing is some sort of social network integration for you to share your music interests with others on the device itself?
The Zune experience on Windows Phone is significantly better than what you get from both Android and the iPhone. If you buy a lot of music on iTunes, Zune Pass is probably a better deal. You get 10 song downloads per month plus unlimited streaming for $14.99 per month. You can also stream on your PC and Xbox 360 in addition to your Windows Phone.
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x0rg - Wednesday, November 3, 2010 - link
To me it looks like Microsoft just needed to release something ASAP. Later they can work on interface improvement, I mean fonts, sizes, blocks, text location, easy shortcut access, backups, etc. There are tons of things to improve.landswipe - Thursday, November 4, 2010 - link
"The downside to this layout is that every time you want to enter a different URL, you’ll have to rotate to portrait, enter it, and then swap back. Same if you want to change tabs or use a favorite. That can get a bit frustrating if you’re used to viewing pages in landscape, but not totally killer. There’s an impressively fluid rotation transition between portrait and landscape, however."Same theme through the whole article...
Little Upside... bit more downside... a little frustrated?... but HEY come on we are friends!!! there is some cool animation by our designers to make up for it all :D <cheesy grin>
It stinks of slight of hand, and overall sounds like an epic fail waiting to happen... This just won't compete.
As a developer, I don't think the apps/games produced are going to cut it... With Android and iPhone you can at least write cross platform opengl games in C++. dotNet is just pure lock-in.
I hope they sell just enough of these things to put an early end to it... I have a feeling a lot of people are going to get fooled.
jeans_xp - Sunday, November 7, 2010 - link
It's bad news for us, AMOLED is not used.www.mobilegoing.com
vhx - Tuesday, November 9, 2010 - link
Only problems I have are no custom ring tones (really now...). No messenger support yet. No clue about 3rd party apps, no one is talking about it. Will it be like Android or the tight control Apple has? I couldn't find any article talking about this.DKant - Saturday, November 13, 2010 - link
I got through 15 pages and that was it. I have already decided this is my next mobile-platform anyway (unless I start hearing rumors of a hologram-projecting iPhone 5), no point reading the remaining 200. I can't imagine the amount of patience it must have taken to WRITE this behemoth! :) Of course it's your job, you've been doing this forever etc, but still.Man, finally. A "proper" competitor to iOS, which was getting a little stale. And I have too many issues with Google's approach to consider any of the quadrillion models on offer.
Well. I do hope WP7 sells and lives longer than the Palm. :_(
(And I'd never imagined I'd finish a post with this..)
To Microsoft!!
CSMR - Saturday, November 13, 2010 - link
Very informative review, but shouldn't this site be serving people who are technically minded rather than the average consumer?There is no question WP7 has a lot of excellent points.
But I'm not sure how you can accept a system that does away with files, and uses a limited sync system to move content around in approved ways.
Or call software "The Best Smartphone for Music Lovers" when:
- it believes that music consists of "songs" written by "artists" and put into "albums", when only a minor part of the history of western music is of this form
- it does not allow a folder structure for navigation, only limited tags of the above form
- gapless playback is incomplete
Microsoft needs prodding to update the system in a way that retains the new features and GUI but also implements the basic features. If it doesn't get this from tech sites, where are we left? Perhaps Windows 8 will decide Turing completeness is no longer important, people just need to be able to do x, y, and z as simply as possible. I'm sure there are a lot of people at Microsoft who want WP7 to be a real OS - without changing usability. They just need a bit of support.
Millsington - Tuesday, November 16, 2010 - link
Excellent point about folder navigation, I had forgotten about that. It is sorely missed in modern music players.Sadly, I don't see the issues you raised being addressed for some time unless WP7 really takes off.
billybarker - Tuesday, November 16, 2010 - link
Check out these Windows Phone 7 Application Icons - there are 350 icons in the set. http://goo.gl/rMk08warden6 - Friday, November 19, 2010 - link
I've had my HTC 7 Mozart for a fortnight. I like it. I like the big square icons on the Start screen (although I've toned down the colour as much as possible); I like the integration with Google Mail, Contacts and Calendar (yes it does work, set it up as an Exchange server); I like the threaded conversations for texts like the iPhone; the music player is good; oh, and it's not a bad phone either.There are some issues -- there's no Messenger client, gapless track playback is haphazard to say the least, there's a limited range of alerts/ringtones and you can't add more, and battery life is a bit short. Especially with push email. Hopefully some of those can be fixed, but they're definitely not deal-breakers for me.
What I can't figure out is how to do "Inverse" on the scientific view of the calculator. No inverse-sin, inverse-log, etc. That's not a deal-breaker either, I don't use those very often! But it's an odd omission.
anistoona - Sunday, November 21, 2010 - link
" but while home I don’t use those apps as much. Instead my smartphone behaves more like an SMS, phone, email, camera and web browsing device, and it’s in those areas that Windows Phone is easily just as good as the competition."With all my respect: If I need only the SmS, phone, email, Camera and web borwisng things form my handheld device, I would like to buy a 150$ Symbian phone, I don't need to buy an up to 700$ smartphone to do that things!!
WinMob 5, 6.x was the system which puts the definition of what " Smart Phones" should capable of, and disappointingly Microsoft chose to give up that system and replaced with a modified copy of Old, aged and discontinued competitors system ( I mean first generation of iOS ) ..
Really good choice Microsoft !