Early impressions of Windows Phone 7 Technical Preview start rolling in
Several online publications released today first-hand looks/impressions of the current Windows Phone 7 “technical preview” which was made available via a pre-production Samsung phone (note – not the final version of the hardware mind you). After reading the early impressions, it appears Windows Phone 7 is shaping up to be a solid mobile OS but is it too little too late for the company? With intense competition from all over, Microsoft has the arduous task of convincing users they are cool now – at least cool enough to be considered over an iPhone or Android smartphone. The days of saying Office/Exchange support is better on a Windows Mobile phone are gone.. and without simple features such as copy/paste and multitasking, one has to wonder if Windows Phone 7 can truly succeed in the long run.
In any event, here’s a quick sampling of the articles including a quick blurb from the respective review:
From the folks at Gizmodo:
“Windows Phone 7 is good. Really good. It has the raw components needed to build a great smartphone. Or at least, one from 2009. Is that enough? It’s starting a generation behind Android and iPhone, which now have tens of millions devices. On top of that, it’s behind them functionally, too, missing things that are now table stakes, like copy and paste and multitasking for third-party applications.”
From the offices at Engadget:
“What we’ve been presented with here doesn’t exactly feel like a complete mobile operating system in many ways. 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”
From PC Magazine:
“Smart phones are, for all intents and purposes, handheld computers. As such, it’s impossible to hit every feature in a hands-on report. Windows Phone 7, for instance, comes with a complete set of Office apps that let you create and share documents. I was disappointed to see that this build wouldn’t let me type in landscape mode, but that has to be a beta bug. The Xbox Live Games Hub isn’t functional yet and there are, essentially, no apps in the Marketplace. Even so, Microsoft is clearly – and finally – heading in the right mobile direction. Now if they could just nail down that ship date. “
The geniuses at BGR:
“There is no killer application on Windows Phone 7, and we can’t see an overwhelming reason to use one instead of an iPhone, BlackBerry or Android handset. Whether Microsoft’s OS updates to the platform will be enough to change our minds in the future is up to them, but for now, they’ve created a decent mobile operating system from scratch, but it unfortunately still has that Microsoft feel. And that’s not the best thing sometimes.”
