Gadgetory

hey guys it's Brandon Minnemann from pocketnow.com Windows Phone 7 is technically the successor to Windows Mobile but they are completely different in this video we're going to compare Windows Phone 7 with Windows Mobile should be interesting let's get to it okay before getting started we want to mention that this is not final Windows Phone 7 hardware or software and I am running a custom ROM here on the HTC hd2 as many people are that are running Windows Mobile devices and we're going to talk about why that is in a minute so let's briefly go over these lock screens they're a little bit different both of them show you new message notifications on the bottom Windows Phone 7 will show you if you have a new calendar appointment so we're going to unlock these devices and dump right into the interface here so what a lot of manufacturers have had to do over the years for Windows Mobile is make their own custom interface because the default Windows Mobile interface that today's screen as it used to be called is just pretty much useless it's very basic you can't do much with it you can add plugins to it but it's really ugly it's very one-dimensional so HTC most notably for their HTC Sense came along and made this beautiful gorgeous interface that sits on top of Windows Mobile other companies like SBB came out with mobile shell there was a lot of proprietary interfaces from Samsung with TouchWiz and really all the developers came forward to customize all of these interfaces so you can customize the HTC Sense interface really in any way you want you can use a ROM that has cookies home tab editor which allows you to have dozens and dozens of quick links and to really customize the interface you can use the Max Sense UI I mean the list goes on and on about how you can customize Windows Mobile Windows Phone 7 not so much customizable in fact I think people going from Windows Mobile to Windows Phone 7 are going to feel a little bit boxed in because not only can you not change the interface you can't change the web browser can't change the keyboard can't change really the default applications but that's not necessarily a bad thing that was one of the problems with Windows Mobile there was just too much that was left uncooked by Microsoft and Microsoft is really focusing on making sure that the core experience of Windows Phone 7 is good out of the box so you don't have to get the proprietary interface ok enough about that let's talk about these two different interfaces and how they are different the HTC Sense UI for Windows Mobile is grouped into tabs and tabs organize various actions so we have a tab for people we have a tab just for photos we have a tab just for music so you can play music right from your home screen it was a great idea and Android is kind of like this the way that it is today it's multiple screens with different kinds of information that you can customize and one of the best parts of HTC Sense is the home tab where you have these Quick Links Quick Links can be a variety of shortcuts so you can have a quick link to call your favorite person quick link to a program quick link to a website Windows Phone 7 takes this idea of Quick Links and really puts it on steroids they call them live tiles and they can take on a wide variety of functions they can be links to your favorite map places links to multi media links to your favorite people links to web sites and then there are all the live tiles that haven't been made yet that hold a lot of promise so you could have a live tile to show you sports scores or a stock or weather in Windows Mobile you really didn't have that with the Quick Links in order to see the weather you would have to go over to the weather tab in order to see stocks you would have to go to the stocks tab so in Windows Phone 7 you've got this glanceable information that is really expandable so while the interface is not customizable in Windows Phone 7 in terms of making these blocks in a rectangular or make them into ovals or make them have a 3d effect you can't do that but you can really change the way you interact with the phone so let's say you're done on the home screen and you want to open up a program that's not within easy reach maybe you want to open up say the calculator calculator is not here it's not there I didn't pin it to the Quick Links so in Windows Phone 7 you swipe to the right you get your full list of programs in Windows Mobile of course you press the start button and here is your scrollable list of programs now in both of these operating systems if you have a lot of programs they're just going to list vertically and the list is going to be SuperDuper long but in Windows Mobile or at least the later version it's like six point five point three and six point five point five you can move around the program so let's say I use footprints a lot I can put it right at the top with an easy reach Windows Phone 7 doesn't have this capability the programs are only listed pathetically sure you could take any of these and pin them to your Start screen like so looks like it's already up no if there goes but you really can't reorganize the list of programs it would be nice if they had the same alphabet jump system that they have in Zune let me show you what I mean if we go here into Zune and we go to a listing of say music if you press on a B you can quickly jump to anywhere in the alphabet Windows Phone 7 really should have this for the Start screen so if you know you what the calculator you tap on the letter you go to C boom we're then so let's talk about the Internet experience in Windows Mobile you had a choice from Skyfire Opera Mobile default pocket Internet Explorer and several other browsers in Windows Phone 7 you get one browser and one browser only it's Internet Explorer as we talked about in the previous video Internet Explorer on Windows Phone 7 is darn good it's smooth it works very well it allows you to load multiple tabs at a time the real weakness here is that it doesn't support html5 or flash in Windows Mobile you could get Skyfire which can do flash in html5 just fine so we're going to compare here Pocket Internet Explorer just for the sake of a throwback with Internet Explorer on Windows Phone 7 a lot of people didn't use Windows Phone a lot of people chose not to use pocket Internet Explorer on Windows Mobile cuz it's just not that good compared to opera so let's go to pocket now calm on Pocket Internet Explorer here I'll go to the home page what on on this device and and here's a good example of how Windows Phone 7 is going to different from Windows Mobile I've been trying to load pocketnow.com here for a couple of minutes despite having a perfectly good Wi-Fi connection the browser is just not working this was a curse of Windows Mobile where things just wouldn't work the device would have to be soft reset on a regular basis of course with some good tuning in a very good run that wouldn't be necessary but this is just an example of where things don't work and in Windows Phone 7 through through my usage of everything just works it's the exact opposite the interface is always fast everything launches the way it should and there's no problem so I'm going to stop it from loading and we're going to just go back to the the home screen here now let's talk about the application experience Windows Mobile has the windows marketplace for mobile which only to this day has 1200 apps despite being around for about a year and a half now that's really nothing it's not a competitive marketplace a lot of the apps are too expensive there's just not a good selection Windows Phone 7 will hopefully have a totally different ecosystem of applications and Microsoft knows that they have to have a much better app offering so they're really going after developers the interface for Windows Phone 7 for the app experience is much much better than than Windows Mobile Windows Mobile looks like this when this app was made in an overnight here in in Windows Phone 7 we tap on apps and we get the Metro interface it's very fast of course there aren't going to be any apps here because this operating system isn't launched yet but we can see what it would be like to have some apps in the market so you can see featured you can see top new free and you can kind of flick around you can tap on the stocks app here and load that up and kind of like the App Store for Android or for iPhone you get a rating a description screenshots that you can tap on and flick through it's a very well done interface for an app store unlike Windows Mobile and so it's very likely that the app offering for Windows Phone 7 is going to be infinitely better than what we got on Windows Mobile of course with Windows Mobile there were thousands of apps but very fragmented you could go to a variety of different websites you could send the cab to your device it was a mess but a Windows Phone 7 is going to be a true application experience that rivals that of the iPhone and Android and finally I want to talk about fast app switching the ability to multitask between two applications or three applications we recently did a video about the iPhone versus Windows Phone 7 put a link up on the video after this and in iphone there's a very easy way to multitask you tap DoubleTap on the on button you can go to the recently used program jump between the two instantly Windows Phone 7 does not have fast app switching and it kind of is a bummer so if we want to go into settings and we want to jump back to marketplace which we were in previously you can press the back button we first go back to the Start screen and then we go into marketplace press back again we don't jump forward to what we were doing before there's no way to jump forward in Windows Mobile we do have fast app switching but windows mobile 6.5 kind of took it away but not really so in windows mobile 6.5 in order to do true fast app switching you have to install a task manager that will allow you to drop down a list of currently running programs and that will allow you to jump from program to program in windows mobile 6.1 and below if you went into the Start menu which had a button up here you can instantly get to the previous program through the recently used programs menu so that was really good app switching but Windows Mobile out of the gate has always had true multitasking so you can have a program running while another one was running a switch between the two in Windows Phone 7 it has the capability in the core architecture but it's not available to the consumer in terms of fast app switching so in the end Windows Mobile in Windows Phone 7 argue entirely different operating systems totally different experiences in fact they're opposites in a lot of ways Windows Mobile is extremely customizable Windows Phone 7 really isn't customizable Windows Mobile at times acts weird it freezes things don't work Windows Phone 7 seems to always work things don't freeze I haven't had to software set the device once because of a failed program or any kind of freeze so it depends on the kind of user you are and hopefully we will see the same sort of robust development for Windows Phone 7 that we have seen for Windows Mobile although it remains to be seen if it's actually able to be hacked and changed and modified so curious to hear what you think about the comparison between Windows Mobile and Windows Phone 7 leave a comment and let us know what you think please thumbs up the video if you liked it and thanks for watching that's in front