Gadgetory

hey guys it's Brian a minimun from pocketnow.com Windows Phone 7 built 64 1/4 was just 2 released for the emulator for developers according to Microsoft this is very very close to what we're going to see when devices start shipping in just a couple of months we're to walk through build 64 1 4 with you now and tell you what's different let's get to it ok so a lot of what's new is to help the user experience be better so it's faster it's easier to understand what the icons mean you'll see what I mean in a second so I'm going to click around to a variety of these applications Here I am on the home screen there are all my tiles they move around a little bit more smoothly than the last time we took a look at the emulator build so let's jump into some screens here so here we are in the phone application and things seem to whip up faster you're going to take notice of that soon so if we dial number all the screens are a lot more refined as you can see here is the calling screen we can open up the keyboard do all sorts of things and let's go back to the start spinning because there's nothing interesting here except I do want to show you one thing you see these buttons here at the bottom in previous builds of Windows Phone 7 we didn't know what they meant but now if you tap on these three dots and you get the expanded menu you will always get a little caption underneath each button very very helpful really will help you to understand the icons while keeping the operating system clean let's jump back we go to the people tab we can't do that much in here I have one contact and we can swipe to the right says set up Facebook but when you go to add an account you can't add any account Twitter or Facebook exchange Gmail it just it doesn't work in the emulator so it's really difficult to show you that but of course this is the people hub which is where all the different feeds come through all of your pictures all of your contacts what's going on with the various people that you keep in touch with so nothing really different there the calendar is mostly unchanged except that of course as I mentioned if you click on these three buttons you get little captions underneath of the icons if we click on calendars you can have variety of calendars synchronizing to the same place so you can have one for Gmail one for exchange and so on and so forth I added something there to remind myself to film the video as a demonstration we can flip to another view we can go to the month view and go up and down very smooth very fast fluid interface here we can go into messaging which has been spruced up as well I have one conversation with Bob and look how nice it is it's just a simple speech bubble that lets you know what you said last you can add an attachment which would of course be a message let's jump back to the Start screen email setup can't do anything with this it says add an account and you can't you can't add an account so let's go back to this screen Xbox Live hasn't been changed much and I hope you're seeing how fast this has become before it was a little bit slow it seemed that the animations were taking too long but now everything is just so fluid which is great to see Internet Explorer is working very well so we can actually go to a website let's go to pocket now calm the keyboard actually makes a different sound now than it did before a little bit more subdued which is good so this does have Internet connectivity so it's loading pocketnow.com pretty cool as if you were to use the device in in front of you very fast internet rendering speeds of course this is on an emulator so it's hard to tell how fast it would be scrolling is super smooth and DoubleTap the zoom in of course and it resizes the column beautifully it's tough to say how it will respond to multi-touch because I'm not using an auto multi-touch computer of course you can do the pinch to zoom but things are loading almost as fast as a desktop browser and I hope this is a sign of things to come for the Windows Phone 7 browser and we have some options we can go to settings we can add as a favorite right here and click OK and this is now in our favorites menu we can go to the favorites list here by going to the star and you can see your history let's go back with the back button you can open up multiple windows which is nice let's see how it handles that so we're going to go up here to engadget.com and here it comes through okay seems to have stopped of course this is an emulator so it may be a little bit buggy but we can easily switch between pages you get this nice little animation a great and simple way to move around between multiple pages we dive into settings we have a few things we can change we can allow cookies let Bing suggest sites as I type of course Microsoft's going to use Bing you can set your preference to have mobile version or desktop versions show up when you use the web browser so let's get out of this back to the Start screen the pictures hub is generally unchanged although it's a little bit more smooth so here we have what's new so you can see if people updated pictures on Facebook and so on we can go to all pictures and there are some pictures included on the device so we can tap we can swipe look how smooth the animations are and it's right now it's actually being slow but a minute ago it was very smooth we can double tap to zoom in it does it almost instantly we can we should be able to tap on the tap and holding on the picture and we get a pop-up menu so we can use this as the wallpaper and an ugly wallpaper we can move this around to get it just right click the check and let's see if it actually said it go back to the homescreen I think the wallpaper would be the lockscreen and we'll try the lockscreen in a few minutes so let's continue down here we have music and video this is the Zune application and it's again much smoother than it was in previous build so we can swipe to the right swipe to the left there's not much you can do with it right now because it's not connected to the marketplace but you can just see the transitions and going in and out of these various items it's just super fluid it kind of whips into place if that sort of makes sense back to the home screen we go and then we have maps the the Bing Maps application which is actually quite functional in this build we get the weighting dots up at the top it says Bing is not available so maybe it won't work for us in this demonstration let's see perhaps we can try coming back to it but it does work and it works quite nicely kind of as you would expect on another smartphone device now of course we can move around these tiles like we did before that hasn't changed so we tap and hold can slide things around and you get this little unpin button and it will remove something from your Start screen but of course you would have to do that one at a time because of the when you tap in hold it only lets you action on one item if you want to take it off the screen now let's talk about the other stuff that's on here if we swipe to the right we get all of the applications and now Microsoft hasn't changed this yet it is really surprising because it's kind of ugly to be honest it's just a long list of applications and when you start loading on third-party apps this list is going to get long and there's not going to be an easy way to navigate this menu unless you're adding the programs to your Start screen so we've talked about some of these things alarms very basic functionality here you can add a new alarm from click the back button calculator these are standard built in applications they've been slightly modified in this latest build of Windows Phone 7 scrolling down we have marketplace won't let us connect to marketplace we have the People Hub what I haven't shown you yet is office 2010 in this build and settings let me go into office 2010 now and this has been further refined again so we can explore word we'll go into the word application you get this tutorial this is a whole more it's a lot more involved than what we saw previously which is nice so we can scroll down and that's great let's open up a new document it looks like it's making me edit this so I'm going to try to find a way to open up a new document and here we can add comments to the document and really great collaboration features within office 2010 Mobile that's really one of the hallmarks of Windows Phone 7 so so this is great you could type and you get the idea from there you can should be able to press ENTER and well let's go back to the office of don't Save Changes so very simple pop-up Metro like interface of course we're used to that SharePoint integration we can open a document or list on Microsoft SharePoint Server or open in the URL and let's jump into Excel real quick before we dive into settings so this is just a look at Excel Mobile and it's a lot more powerful than what it was in previous versions of Windows Mobile and that's great because Microsoft Office is really one of Microsoft's key products and it's great to see if they're really spending a lot of time on it here in Windows Phone 7 so it has saving functionality and you get the idea so let's go back and dive in the settings for a minute before we conclude this video settings have been updated a little bit something new is that you can change the theme to a variety of different colors now before was only three colors but now they've extended this I hope they extend this further because I mean these colors aren't the the most fantastic colors on the planet I'd like to have a little bit more choice and so of course we can change this to lime you can change the background to light the black backgrounds more suited for AMOLED displays well this is good for LCD so if we go back to the home screen everything is green spruce it up a little bit let's jump back in to settings here very very fluid interface I really excited about how smooth this has become we can change the ringtone and sound the Bluetooth the lock wallpaper we can change that to a variety of wallpapers and these are really nice pre-loaded wallpapers by the way so we can set that and you can set the today screen timeout jump back and keyboard settings ease of access none of this stuff is is terribly new let me go to the about phone so you can see the build number and everything that's built obviously sixty four one four this is apparently pretty much the final builder very very close to the final build so what you see here is what you're going to get more or less when you get a Windows Phone 7 device in the fall so also you can drill into application specific settings which is kind of a play of what the iPhone does so you can access these same settings within these applications or you come to the settings menu and do it individually so we can go back to Internet Explorer and you're gonna say this to see the same exact settings that I showed you a minute ago and we can dive in to specific application settings from here so a lot of improvement from what we saw in a previous build of Windows Phone 7 this is almost ready for primetime this is pretty much how it's going to look it's faster it's easier to use we can't wait till we can actually get a device in our hands and use it for this operating system is very very interesting and it's shaping up to look really nice so please thumbs up the video if you liked it and subscribe to our channel for more Windows Phone 7 videos and videos on other smartphones as well that's it for now