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
Embarrassingly Smooth
Microsoft developed the Windows Phone 7 UI under the codename Metro. It’s supposed to represent the sort of simple chic design you’d find popular in a big city. If Windows Phone 7 is Metro, Windows Mobile 6 was probably suburban. A more accurate codename for the UI would have to be Liquid - there’s just no other way to describe the interface other than fluid.
There are two dominant UI elements spread throughout Windows Phone: the tile and tappable text.
Tappable text is exactly what it sounds like and the OS is littered with examples. Even conventional tabs are nothing more than oversized text in Microsoft’s Segoe UI light font.
The tabs are incredibly useful in Windows Phone, I’d say just as useful as the first time we got tabs in desktop OSes. In the email app for example there’s a tab for viewing only unread messages. To get to that tab, just swipe to the left. Microsoft calls this "pivoting." You even get a preview of the tab before you swipe to it thanks to Microsoft’s wider-than-a-single-screen interface.
Windows Phone tabs are used extensively in other applications. The Music app uses tabs to switch between what’s currently playing and all of your sources of music. The Videos app uses them to sort between different types of videos (e.g. personal vs. movies or TV shows). Apple and Google use tabs in their smartphone OSes but they’re more traditional. Your finger tends to hover around content, and swiping an entire screen to get to the next tab is just quicker than repositioning your finger at the top or bottom of the screen to tap a button. Switching between tabs in Windows Phone just feels more fluid than in the Apple and Google offerings.
The second basic UI element in Windows Phone 7 is the tile. At least on the Start screen, a tile is nothing more than a giant, optionally animated icon. Tiles can either be square or what Microsoft likes to call a double wide, effectively two tiles placed next to each other.
The default tile is composed of a simple white symbol (e.g. a phone, a camera or an IE logo) and a single line of text.
There’s a fine line between a text heavy UI and navigating through a book. Microsoft stays on the right side of that line by making extensive use of color and animation. Most screens are static when you’re looking at them, but start interacting with the screen and the OS subtly updates various parts of the screen to keep everything lively.
Assuming you’ve synced your contacts and/or provided a Facebook account, the People tile will display mini profile pictures of your friends. The OS automatically cycles through your friends and you don’t have to do anything to customize it, it just keeps things fresh.
The same is true for the Pictures doublewide. Your actual photos will cycle in here. The Music + Videos tile will display a photo of whatever artist you just listened to.
The UI is also functional. The Calendar doublewide gives you a listing of your appointments for the current day. Tiles for email, phone and the marketplace spawn counters to tell you how many new items (e.g. emails, missed calls/voicemails) lay within.
Animations are spread heavily throughout the OS and virtually all of them are GPU accelerated.
Windows Phone 7 runs two threads in parallel related to the UI: the render thread and the UI thread. The former preps the current frame for rendering and the latter predominantly handles user input. Most manipulation of objects, animation and transitions is handled by the GPU. In fact, Microsoft seems to have recognized the performance deficit on current ARMv7 processors and shifted most of the performance burden to the GPU.
The entire OS only supports a single GPU at this point: Qualcomm’s Adreno 200. Eventually we’ll see support for the 205 and other GPUs, but today, that’s all Microsoft supports. It’s an important limitation because it ensures that all Windows Phone 7 devices, regardless of vendor, have a fully GPU accelerated UI. While Qualcomm’s Adreno 200 GPU isn’t exactly fast, it’s fast enough to run all of the OS UI animations at a constant 60 fps.
Start screen flying out, mid animation
The GPU is put to constant use in animating everything from moving around within an app to launching the app itself. Apps don’t just appear, they fold in. Tap anything pinned to your Start screen and the tiles will quickly fly, piece by piece. The app/hub you tapped on will fly in with similar pomp and circumstance. Even within an app, switching between tabs is an extremely smooth affair. The Start screen animation occasionally feels like it takes too long, but for the most part it’s a non issue.
The high frame rate animations and the absence of any dropped frames makes Windows Phone feel very fast (at times even faster than iOS). It also makes any occasional choppiness or slowdown from downloaded apps very frustrating.
For the most part the UI never slows down, but once you start downloading apps from the Marketplace all bets are off. Many of the 3rd party apps and even Microsoft’s own Xbox Live Extras app drop frames like there’s no tomorrow. That’s the biggest concern I have for the initial wave of apps: they won’t be tuned for performance as much as the apps you get with the phone. The core OS is so fast you assume the rest of the WP7 world will be the same. Ultimately as performance agnostic as Microsoft has tried to make Windows Phone, you will eventually run into UI slowdowns - just not with the Microsoft apps that come with the phone.
Progress bars echo the UI’s minimalist design. You get five animated dots that fly by the top of the screen when you’re waiting for network response (e.g. loading pages in the Marketplace).
All of the progress bars animate smoothly and seemingly linearly, which helps make the phone feel fast even when it’s taking a long time to do something. This is made most evident while loading web pages in IE mobile.
The overall UI is very well thought out. It’s clean, attractive and performant. It’s easily the best UI Microsoft has ever created and one that I hope inspires revolutionary designs within the company’s other business units.
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Kentcomp - Friday, October 22, 2010 - link
I really appreciate you guys so thoroughly reviewing WP7. Your review was like reading a really well illustrated, yet candid owner's manual. Thank you!PS I find the home screen to be kind of boring too but I'll choose functionality over style 99% of the time. After all, the homescreen is just there to get you to where you really want to be.
Riccardo - Friday, October 22, 2010 - link
That's a remarkably in-depth review. Thanks guys!rye222 - Friday, October 22, 2010 - link
amazingly thorough article. i've been eagerly awaiting these phones ever since i bought the Zune HD and thought, "if MS made this into a phone, they would own". thanks Anand, great job as usual on your articles!lewchenko74 - Friday, October 22, 2010 - link
The interface is too minimalistic. Hate the massive two color icons. Just looks ugly.. and really not that functional if you have a lot of these 'icons' to wade through.Then there are the limitations that mean it isnt quite as feature rich as an iphone or Android in certain areas.
There is absolutely nothing compelling to sway me to this phone (at all).
Anyone with an app library (android or iOS) is hardly gonna part with their spent money on a new device and lose that investment... plus it barely has an app library yet.
I wish MS well as competition is important... but it really doesnt give an iOS / Android owner anything new, plus if I was buying fresh... I think that the iOS / Android phones and app-sphere etc are just more compelling.
Nice thorough review though.... just read a little too enthusiastically MS focussed at times, but a good read.
hakime - Friday, October 22, 2010 - link
"The UI is a thing of beauty. Microsoft got the style, customization and performance one hundred percent right on this thing. It makes iOS feel old and utilitarian. It’s funny to think that Microsoft was the one to out-simplify Apple in the UI department."This sentence summarize by itself how not objective and professional this review is. I mean no one on Earth being a little bit rational can think that this Metro interface is beautiful let alone functional or easy to use. I mean how a hell can a text based interface with half displayed text all around and ugly flat colors on top of black background can be called beautiful? This interface just lacks taste, it is different yes, but it is bad, it lacks interaction. You are so Microsft driven that you come to think that a different interface is necessarily easy to use and functional. Nothing is right here, the theme, the colors are ugly with little sense for giving some wish for the user to use the phone, there are too many steps needed to go to what the user wants to do, the tiles are a mess as they can be anything and hubs are an obscure UI concept that serve little interest. You want to browse through your apps, you are presented with only a list view and good luck with that. The calendar and SMS apps are a horrible vision for the users, they are just ugly. The email app looks like it was design by a bunch of students in GUI design with no clue on how to present the information to users. And everything else is just a mess in itself hidden behind a ton of useless animations.
In contrary, iOS just looks easy to use, clean, beautiful. You have your phone and that's it, not extra useless UI concepts and distractions. They are nice for a demo, but for daily usage, they rapidly get useless.
Then you continue with the Zune pass, noting that it is better than iTunes, but in what regard? You are strange enough to like the Zune pass, that does not make it better than the iTunes model. Again non objective argument.
Best integration of Facebook in WP7? Is it a big deal or even a nice feature? The question is if it is really a good thing. Why should I have all my contact and photos all mixed up in an almost uncontrollable mess? Someone objective would surely recognize that such exaggerated integration of Facebook just makes little sense. A well designed app is more than enough to access the Facebook content without having to have all the time friends and non-friends popping up with messages and photos. Distractive and useless like the UI of WP7.
And what about not being more reserved with the major shortcomings of WP7. How many times we have been told about the lack of multitasking in iOS? And now an os comes to a market where all the other mobiles os have multitasking and this is not called a deal breaker! It is a deal breaker, not having multitasking on WP7 is just inexcusable from Microsoft.
Same thing with copy and paste, in 2010 an smart phone should have an efficient copy and past implemented, and WP7 not having it is a total shame. Sure, most implementation out there sucks, and only the iOS has a real efficient and easy to use implementation, but that does not forgive Microsoft for that.
What about also the significant lack of unified mail box in the email app, the lack of robust security features, the lack of tethering, the clumsy Exchange support, the pour performing third party apps, the lack of universal search, the excessive $14.99 for zune pass, the inexcusable lack for support of HTML5 which is even more unacceptable as the os does not support flash either, no YouTube app, weird interface concept when you need to long press to reach some options and in-app menus, etc...
The list is long, WP7 is surely full of animations but it is little functional. And the authors fail to give an objective review of this system which is new but far behind the competition. Having a different UI style does not make this os more functional or even attractive. It just sacrifices too much on real usability for bringing useless UI concepts. The authors wishing so much that their lovely Microsoft brings something to save itself from the mobile market that they have forgotten what objectivity means.
dustcrusher - Friday, October 22, 2010 - link
It's a review. Reviews are inherently subjective. The only parts that aren't are the benchmarks, and even those are arguably not 100% objective. I think at points they were gushing over what worked well but there were other points where they did bring up some valid objections, even if they tinted them a little with rose-colored glasses.Thanks to this review, I learned enough to realize I'm probably better off going to an Android phone when I am able (disclosure: I'm on WinMo 6 right now). Android simply fits my wants and needs better. I don't see WP7 taking giant chunks of market share from Apple or Android, but I think it will do better than WinMo did.
Microsoft is trying to do something different; seems like they are trying to make a smartphone that is as easy to use as a featurephone. It's risky but it could pay off big time. If their sole intention was to cram all of Android and iOS's features into their new OS, it'd be closer to WinMo 6.6 w/HTC's UI shell on top.
A couple of reviewers decided they like the way WP7 does some things. You are clearly happy with your iPhone, so why are you letting it bother you so much? Do you really want to come off as a trollish fanboy?
cjl - Friday, October 22, 2010 - link
Have you read any of Anand's Iphone reviews? If anything, Anand is biased towards the iphone at the expense of pretty much anything else, so the fact that this review is so positive speaks volumes about the phone.Also, to everyone complaining about the interface, you should really try using a Zune HD sometime. It's amazing how natural the interface is.
headrush69 - Sunday, October 24, 2010 - link
There is a big difference between saying an interface is natural to use over saying it is a thing of beauty.Frankly many of the screen shots make elements of the interface look very basic, dated and rushed.
Example: plain square flat buttons on call screen, on/off toggles in setting screen.
Of course these things are pretty trivial to improve and I'm sure they will, but statements like this in the article
"The UI is a thing of beauty. Microsoft got the style, customization and performance one hundred percent right on this thing. It makes iOS feel old and utilitarian."
I just can't agree with and believe exactly the opposite.
Smilin - Monday, October 25, 2010 - link
Have YOU seen the UI? Not screenshot of it. Have you seen it? Used it?Your opinion is worthless.
Smilin - Monday, October 25, 2010 - link
smells like hater in here.Sorry man but this is the most comprehensive and *objective* review I've seen yet. Most of the things you're griping about are IN the article. Did you read it?