Windows Phone 7 is a brand-new thing. Microsoft's total mobile OS reboot is bold and fresh. It's also definitely a Version 1.0. Zune fans will be immediately impressed, but for everyone else, buying into Windows Phone 7 is taking a gamble that Microsoft will sand away the rough edges quickly.
For now, Windows Phone 7 is arriving on six phones in the U.S.: the Samsung Focus ($199.99, 4 stars), HTC Surround ($199.99, 3 stars) and LG Quantum on AT&T; the HTC HD7 and Dell Venue Pro on T-Mobile; and the HTC 7 Pro on Sprint. Verizon has said it may support the OS in 2011, but hasn't made any clear commitments.
All the initial Windows Phone 7 models have a lot in common. They run on the Qualcomm QSD8250, 1GHz ARM Cortex-A8 chipset. They all have 800-by-480 screens, 5-megapixel cameras, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and FM radios. They vary in terms of hardware keyboards, phone performance, camera quality, preloaded software, and available storage.
Apps and Xbox
It won't surprise you to know that Bing and Microsoft Office play major roles in Windows Phone 7. Bing, of course, is the default Web search engine; it also offers pinch-to-zoom maps. On my sample phones, Bing maps locked onto my location quickly and offered driving or walking directions. But it's still behind the leader, Google Maps. It doesn't do turn-by-turn, spoken driving directions or transit directions. When you zoom in on individual blocks, you don't see buildings or businesses tagged. And it got some addresses in New York City quite wrong, for instance putting JFK Airport in Manhattan.
The Microsoft Office implementation on Windows Phone is excellent. You can create, edit, and round-trip Word, Excel, and OneNote files, as well as edit PowerPoint docs. There's only one false note: no easy way to copy those files to and from your desktop. You have to send them to yourself via e-mail, save them on Microsoft's SkyDrive (for OneNote only) or store them on a SharePoint server.
Windows Phone 7 carries the Xbox Live brand, and gaming is one of the real weaknesses of the competing Android platform. At launch, Windows Phone 7 is probably already ahead of Android, but is behind Apple, the leader in mobile gaming.
Games you download appear under an Xbox Live icon on the home screen. There are only a few available right now, but they're very good-looking, with high-test graphics and smooth action. Even casual games such as Monopoly have 3D graphics. I'm frustrated by the lack of multiplayer XBox Live games at launch, though. In Windows Phone's interface, you can see your avatar, various gaming achievements and leader boards, but there's no option to play games with your friends. Microsoft says that feature is coming very soon, perhaps by the time you read this.
Microsoft says about 1,000 apps will be available by US launch, with "several hundred more" arriving each following week. A whole range of big names may be available by December, including Netflix, Kindle, Sling Player, ESPN, Facebook, and games from EA. The big-name apps were starting to filter into the store at the end of our review period; EA and Glu Mobile games, for instance, started appearing the afternoon that this review published.
Third-party apps aren't allowed to run in the background, though some apps save their states to resume to the same place when relaunched. Microsoft's multitasking is much weaker than Apple's and Android's here.
That said, the Marketplace is an interesting and pretty usable experience. At first it will be curated; only 2,000 developers who Microsoft prefers will be allowed in. That will (hopefully) populate the catalog with some high-quality stuff before the floodgates open. You can try any app before you buy, and you can bill apps directly to your AT&T phone bill. There's no option to return apps you don't like, though.
I especially like how you can browse the app catalog on a PC and schedule downloads to be synced over to your phone. If you choose to buy your app on the phone itself, titles under 10MB can be downloaded over 3G. For anything larger, you'll need a Wi-Fi network.
