Gadgetory

what's up everyone John Breton Justin TechnoBuffalo here I want to give you an overview and a review of Windows Phone 7 show you the nuances of the operating system what's good what's bad and talk about how it's gonna fit in the entire mobile marketplace so if you have an interest in the operating system and how it's going to work stick around so we're gonna do this demonstration on the HTC surround this particular video is not going to be a review of the surround itself will focus on hardware reviews and upcoming videos but I do want to show you the operating system and how it works as a whole so let me talk about first the idea behind Windows Phone 7 this is directly from Steve Ballmer's mouth at the Microsoft announcement in New York what's really important to Microsoft is no fragmentation so they have to make sure that the operative system is going to be the same across all experiences so every device that's going to be running Windows Phone 7 has to be the minimum spec requirements to ensure that it's going to be fast or at least fast enough to make Microsoft happy and that means that no matter what phone you pick up whether it's the HTC surround that we have here samsung focus or the hd7 whatever it might be your experience is going to be very very similar they're not taking the Android approach of different operating system versions on different phones it's going to be the same version of Windows Phone on each device and that's going to be true with carriers as well the updates will be pushed out sort of uniformly to make sure that there is that conformity throughout the operating system they wanted you to be able to sort of see all your information very quickly with one click and they want to happen to be sort of accessible in a easy to access manner and something that was very visually appealing so I think one of the biggest problems Windows Phone 7 is going to have is that it's made by Microsoft it's a very polarizing company much like Apple so when you watch this video and you put together your own opinions on Windows Phone 7 try and separate Microsoft from the equation try to look at as an operating system as a whole and how it works and trying to take out the fact that it's made by Microsoft or whatever preconceived notions might have about that once I was able to do that mentally I was able to appreciate the opportunity mindset in very editorial and try and take that those preconceived notions out the window all right so I've talked about the phone let's go ahead and show you so the home screen is made up what Microsoft is calling these live tiles and essentially what they are our grid is sized widgets that have updates live in the background so you have a ton of ways you can set these up but essentially when you want to view them all it is a completely a vertical scrolling and at first I found that vertical scrolling to be quite a bit cumbersome I had to scroll down and down and down to get to where I wanted to go and as I was doing that using my iPhone I like II realize that I was scrolling left and right horizontally to get to my applications I'm very similar to Android as well to scrolling through home screens this is sort of a reverse of the way you might be used to scrolling on iOS or Android is something that you do get used to so these all these home screens update you can see right here it's people and that's in place of a traditional contacts type of menu assert pulls and everybody's Facebook information Windows Live and a few other social networks into this sort of universal looking contacts field I definitely enough there is not any native support for Twitter it's not gonna pull in your Twitter contents natively and amalgamated into this peoples tab unfortunately it's actually going to have to rely on a third-party application for Twitter much like I have right here Windows Phone 7 is very much about the social experience and the Twitter emission is pretty significant although I assume eventually Twitter will be included so let me go ahead and open up the people tab here and show you very quickly what that looks like so you go ahead and scroll through you can see everybody's information get that back and focus here I can go ahead and see everybody's information and see what's there you can scroll through and see what's new on Facebook you can go ahead and see recent pictures and go back to your task menu or your array rather of contacts and that's sort of how you go through and dial what is really here with this so as a way to quickly scroll through contacts on the iPhone or Android you can hold your finger down the side and scroll through and jump to letters here you have to a lot of flex going to get to where you want to go something that I think definitely needs to be fixed incoming versions so that's what the risk of making us a very long video I'm gonna sort of jumping out past the live tiles and just know that these do update live in the background you can set live tiles for your favorite contacts although it's not gonna be able to Clark contact directly it's gonna open up a menu whether or not you want to call or text that person and that's sort of Windows Phones answer to speed dial I would suppose so this operating system is very animation heavy and it looks really good and you see these little animations a little nuances pop up throughout the entire operating system let me give you a one quick example so the phone is locked and you go ahead and unlock it the unlock screens first of all you see a lot of information which is very useful different email accounts and sets show up there I should go ahead and scroll this up you can see the text start to fade away and there's a lots of very little sort of animation hints like that that make me server appreciate the operating system the physics engine here is really saw it's got that sort of rubber band effect as you scroll really just makes you feel like a very polished operating system serve something that I would have liked to have seen once a webOS launched the fact that Microsoft is imposing minimum spec requirements mean every phone can support this and your experience with these animations gonna be really nice and you see I'm sort of pop up throughout the operating system alright let's go ahead and talk about these more of these hubs and the hub customization so some of these hubs take up the entire row you can see right here there is a calendar picked up the whole hub and you've got this HTC to take out the whole hub then go ahead and move these around but you can't pick weather after you take up one spot or two and service sent by default so since you already have the same experience across all the devices and different manufacturers how are the manufacturers going to customize the experience and the answer is they can customize these hubs so here's the HTC experience this is the HTC hub and once you sort of put in custom information about the manufacturer or they'd like to be in there so you get sort of a cool animation here then you get what will be familiar-looking floozy that have used a sense device this is the way that HTC is customized it Samsung has their own customization in there which give you access with today's screen weather and widgets but this is sort of the way that HTC has done it so while their insert or Universal feel throughout the device there is still customization that can be done you can see here's some more example of the animations we're sorry' jumping through a lot of these nuances very quickly because I want to sort of show you everything in one - unified video in upcoming videos going through the devices I'll talk a bit more about the operating system as well alright so let's talk about new browser which is based on Internet explorer standards and hearing that is one of the places where I need you to sort of take back and step back from your preconceived notion about Microsoft because this is a very good browser and probably one of the best implementations of pinch-to-zoom that I have seen on a mobile device iPhone included it is extremely smooth very fast scrolling happens without any sort of checkerboard pattern down there so there's no waiting for it the content is there easy to view you can double tap to zoom in things just work very well on the browser what's not here right now what sort of shows that it's a young operating system we don't have flash support unfortunately you don't have support for html5 and oddly enough the right now there isn't any sort of native YouTube support yet that opens up an application - it doesn't really work all that well so presumably that will be coming when all these operate systems were launched they certainly had their shortcomings so when the iPhone was launched notoriously miss one was cut copy paste in multitasking when Android first launched missing a multi-touch browser and a few other features sure every operate system that enters the sphere is missing features and Windows Phone 7 is certainly no exception it's missing and a few really key features missing cut copy and paste although Microsoft did show us cut copy and paste to know that it is then is coming an implementation was actually pretty good something that will be coming according to the promise in early 2011 I know threaded email is very annoying here the email application is fantastic it works really well very easy to set up but no threat of messaging makes it difficult and that's something I'll show you in a later video to an interest of time we're going to have to sort of brush by it cut copy and paste I mentioned no multitasking so the sort of native Microsoft applications and right in the background you can run the zoom player in the background and listen to music applications will download in the background but there's no background support for third-party apps which is a bit disappointing and speaking of third-party apps app support are really important to the success of a platform and I have to say the Microsoft has done a very nice job with their marketplace which actually just went officially live today which is the 21st of October and there are a lot of apps you can download sort of custom HTC apps if you're using a device here like the surround you can go ahead and jump in and the applications are all sort of sorted by category you can download xbox live games and there are ton of sort of things you can choose from here social productivity and a lot of different categories and there are a ton of applications here and as this sort of the platform matures we're going to see many many many more and the applications can be downloaded and excuse me rather paid for right through your carrier bill so you only have to worry about putting in a credit card something to keep in mind so if you're worried about app support this is very very very good as far as the launch I think it's much more full-featured than Android Marketplace is it when it launched certainly Android is surpassed it now but as the platform matures I think that the application support is going to increase with it so very impressed with that so far one of the things I want to show you the last thing is the keyboard Harrogate nimpah text on these phones some are going to have full QWERTY keyboard some are gonna rely right on the touch screen let me go ahead and show you what the touchscreen keyboards gonna look like here we'll go ahead and open up a new message and let's say that it worked very well it takes traditional approach that we've seen on other devices least in text messaging of using that sort of bubble keyboard works awesome it's got a great auto correction feature this is probably the best keyboard I've used on any mobile device not tested quite a bit certainly devices larger keyboards and larger sizes are easy to type on but this one at least in portrait is extremely easy to use the autocorrection features are very good you can sort of see it move around you have a separate button for your emoticons one of the issues that I do have with it though is when you type in landscape you expect to keep word to get a lot bigger there's a lot of wasted space there on either side I would have liked the keyboard to have been a lot larger so go ahead and put this back up here so I know I had to sort of brush for a lot of features and I couldn't show you everything about the phone and I will sort of delve into these things more in upcoming videos but I want to give you a conclusion about the operating system and how I feel about it so despite this being a new operating system it is entering the sphere of very mature operating system so we're talking about iOS and Android which have a lot of these features that Windows Phone 7 is missing I think in the long run Windows Phone 7 is going to be a tremendous competitor to Android and iOS I think it's sort of a nice in-between between the very sort of locked down Apple model and the very open Android model this allows developers customizations through these hubs but keeps saying very unified to make sure you've got similar experience so I think Windows Phone 7 has tremendous potential in fact I've been using a Windows Phone 7 device as my daily driver for about a week and I have no plan on switching back to using an iPhone it's been very easy to use it's been fun to use it's been sort of an very short learning curve and it's been doing everything that I've wanted to do every day I go ahead and look in the app marketplace here and there are new applications that I'm using Netflix is here Twitter applications are here all the rest of the music streaming stuff that you like so I'm going to be here so if you're looking to get a new phone sometime in the near future I think you owe it to yourself to at least look at Windows Phone 7 because you might be surprised I feels very I guess on Microsoft II and it wasn't what I expected having come and seen you know Windows Mobile 6 6.5 and the previous versions Microsoft really did a very nice job of the soft breakfast um making it very modern scalable and really useful for the professional the texture or the casual user you'll find something that you like here although you are gonna have to live within some limitations such as the lack of cut copy and paste and full multitasking which presumably we'll be coming soon there you guys hope you enjoy certain overview and review of Windows Phone 7 I am John Renton carefully TechnoBuffalo and I will see you in the next video bye bye