A Windows Phone 7.5 Review from a Dedicated iOS User

As someone who follows his Klout score heavily (only for the perks, I swear), I was able to snag a free Samsung Focus running the latest version of Windows Phone 7, “Mango” (7.5). I’ve had the phone for a few days and thought I’d share a long-winded description of the hardware, software and my experiences with the device.

Hardware

Screen

The Samsung Focus is a nice phone. Its 4-inch Super AMOLED display is gorgeous, even though its 800x480 resolution pales in comparison to the iPhone’s Retina display. Colors are vibrant and it works very well in the sun.

Some people feel the iPhone’s 3.5-inch display is perfect because it’s easy to operate with one hand, but the Focus’s 4-inch screen size is the sweet spot. It’s not too big to be overwhelming, but it’s just large enough that nothing feels cramped. The iPhone would do well with a 4-inch screen.

Body

The whole phone is made of plastic - plastic buttons, plastic back, plastic shell. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a solid phone when it’s all assembled, but the battery cover is very flimsy and once you’ve held the “glass-and-metal sandwich” that is the iPhone 4, everything else just seems…less-than.

If you’re looking head-on at the Focus, you’ll find a power/sleep/wake button on the right, a dedicated camera button below that, a volume rocker on the left side, a micro-USB slot and headphone jack on top and the three standard Windows Phone 7 touch-sensitive buttons on the front-bottom: Back, the Windows button and the Search button. On the back of the device is the 5-megapixel camera and speaker.

Overall, the Focus is a well-weighted phone at the right size that feels good in the hand. It’s not of the same build quality as the iPhone, but really, what is?

Buttons

Since I’ve only owned an iPhone since 2007, my muscle memory is heavily vested in a single “Home” button on the front. Throwing two new buttons into rotation was frustrating at first, because on the iPhone, you usually find a “Back” button within your currently-active app. In WP7, you have to make use of the touch-sensitive back button to navigate backwards within an app.

On the one hand, it’s annoying to always have to go to the bottom of the device to travel back, but on the other hand, this button has one dedicated function throughout the system and all third party apps: to take you back one step.

Holding the Back button down activates the webOS-style card system for navigating your recently-used apps/quick app switching. It works well and recently used apps pick up right where you left off when you come back to them.

If you hold the Windows button, you gain access to Android Voice Actions-esque voice commands, like “Text [INSERT NAME HERE],” followed by a prompt to dictate your message. You can also search for nearby businesses, or conduct a Web search. It’s not accurate all the time and you have to over-enunciate some words, but it’s a good feature to have and there’s definitely room for improvement.

Camera

Having a dedicated camera button is great, as you don’t have to scour your homescreen for the “Camera” app in order to initiate it. Once clicked, the app opens fairly quickly and pictures can be snapped in a relatively quick succession. In my extremely unscientific tests between the Focus and the iPhone 4 running iOS 5.0.1, the Focus was only slightly faster at capturing photos. The quality, however, doesn’t match up to the quality of the iPhone’s photos.

The Focus’s photos are okay, but not on the level of the iPhone 4, and the lower-resolution screen makes getting an idea of their quality difficult until you can sync them to your computer.

I’m no camera expert, so I’ll let the shots speak for themselves.

Video is shot in 720p HD, just like the iPhone 4, and as soon as I figure out how to get the one I filmed from the phone to my Mac without my computer freezing (more on that below), I’d be glad to show you. I did find a sample video on YouTube made using the Focus, so let that be your guide for now.

Battery Life

With moderate use (occasional Web browsing, updating Facebook/Twitter, listening to music), I’ve been able to go a day and a half on a single charge. Not too shabby. I’ll follow up in the coming weeks with more data as I use the phone more often.

Software

Windows Phone 7 is a slick OS. Everything is smooth and rarely are there any lags. I know some people might not like the animations, but they’re not ostentatious and they make the phone feel like it’s going off to fetch the necessary resources to do whatever you’re asking it to do. These animations act as a bridge for your eyes between your tapping on an item and the next screen appearing.

Once you wake the device from sleep, just flick the lock screen up and there are your tiles - namely the “AT&T” tile (your phone app and contact info), People (your friends and contacts and their various social network updates), Messaging, Email, Internet Explorer, Maps, Calendar, Music + Videos, App Marketplace and the Me tile.

Let’s blow through these:

AT&T/People: Why they didn’t just name the AT&T tile “Phone”, I don’t know, but within the AT&T app, you get access to your voicemail, keypad, contact list and search. The contact list is actually a shortcut to your “People” tile, which is good and bad.

The good: You can see a friend’s latest Facebook update as you’re calling them.

The bad: The People tab aggregates all of your contacts from all your social networks into one place, regardless of whether or not you have their phone numbers.

I keep the Contacts section of my iPhone very neat - only the people for whom I have phone numbers go in there. I don’t want my social networking contacts interspersed with my “legit” contacts.

Messaging, Email and Voice Actions: Email renders beautifully in WP7 and threaded conversations are very easy to keep track of. I actually prefer this basic look to the candy-colored bubbles of iOS. The SMS feature is simple and pleasing to the eye, but the big “woo hoo!” lies within the speech-to-text functionality.

Similar to Android, speech-to-text is almost everywhere, but the most useful spots are within the SMS app and in the Siri-esque voice actions. Oddly, though, this feature is nowhere to be found within the email application. Hopefully, that will be fixed in an upcoming update.

To access voice actions from anywhere, just hold the Windows button and up pops a little “listening” animation. While it isn’t nearly as robust as Siri, you can say, “Text [name]” and it will tell you to speak your message, then you can send it only using your voice - very helpful in the car.

Internet Explorer: It’s a surprisingly capable browser and gives you the option of defaulting to mobile versions of websites or desktop versions while browsing.

That said, it’s frustratingly slow. Even on WiFi. Mobile Safari renders websites much faster, even over a 3G network.

Maps: This one isn’t too different from iOS’s Google Maps - find your location, get directions, traffic, etc…

The bonus feature not found in iOS is “Local Scout,” which locates nearby restaurants and businesses, then provides their addresses, phone numbers and hours of operation. Finding the number for that new pizza place is a lot faster with Local Scout than with a basic Google search.

Calendar: It’s a simple calendar with to-dos, an agenda view, day and month view, and it syncs with Google Calendar. It bears the same design aesthetic as the Messaging app, so don’t expect to see any stitched leather here.

Music + Videos: Music and video playback is just like what you find on iOS. You can listen to your music in the background while you explore the phone and controls are available on the lock screen. The included headphones also have a play/pause button and volume rocker for remote playback.

A timer is displayed on the currently playing track’s cover art when you back out to the main Zune app screen, which is a nice touch (and have I mentioned how beautiful a font Segoe is on Windows Phone 7? It really is a great choice, built for clear readability and good looks.)

Podcasts, radio and even third party entertainment apps are bundled under the Music + Videos app, so those podcast subscription apps you download from Marketplace can either be accessed via their own live tiles, or from under this one umbrella.

App Marketplace: Think of the Marketplace as a hybrid of what iOS and Android offer. You’ll find more legitimate apps than in Android’s app store, but many of the ones you do find help you get more out of your phone’s features (like an app that puts a tile with quick access to your Bluetooth, WiFi, Airplane Mode and Cellular toggles.

Windows Phone Apps seem to be more expensive than iOS apps. For example, Angry Birds is $2.99 on WP7, but 99-cents on iOS. Is it harder to develop for WP7? Is the lack of a user base reason to charge more, so you make more?

Regardless, you’ll find the usual staple of apps you can’t live without: Spotify, Netflix, Evernote, Facebook, Twitter, etc…

One issue - like Android, there are several app stores from which to choose. You get the regular Microsoft store, then there’s Samsung’s “Zone” and AT&T’s “AppCenter”. One is fine, folks - thanks.

Other OS Features

Bing Search: Attached to the magnifying glass button on the front is immediate access to Bing search. The basic search function isn’t anything to tweet home about, but the addition of Local Scout, Vision search, voice search and audio search make it immensely useful.

I’ve already discussed Local Scout, so let’s look at Vision search. Vision search utilizes your phone’s camera to scan barcodes found on various multimedia and then search the Web with the results. For example, scanning the barcode for Tom Wolfe’s I Am Charlotte Simmons brought up results to buy it on Amazon.

The other neat trick is the text-recognition engine that finds text on a scanned item and then either searches the web for that text, or translates it into another language within seconds. I know this can be done via third-party apps on iOS, but I’d love to see this functionality baked right in.

Audio search is similar to Shazam - hold your phone up to a speaker and it should recognize the music playing. I ran the test on several songs, but the one that got me was the classical piece it recognized, right down to the CD the recording came from.

Bing’s regular search results may not be as accurate as Google’s but their secondary search features are fantastic and really boost up Bing’s quality and usefulness as a whole.

Perhaps one day, Siri on the iPhone will be able to recognize songs on the radio, or use the camera to translate text, or even translate text you speak into the microphone.

There’s one thing I can’t figure out, though: are WP7’s search features great because they’re actually well done, or because I keep having to remind myself, “Wait, this is from Microsoft?” The world may never know.

Keyboard: The keys on WP7’s virtual keyboard seem taller and narrower than on iOS, so it can be difficult for people with larger hands (ahem) to accurately hit them.

Also, certain keys, like the comma, are arranged differently, forcing hardcore iOS texters to learn new placements. However, each key gives off a satisfying “click/thunk” when you press it and a confirmation of the pressed key appears above your finger - a la iOS - so there is some familiarity in that regard.

You also get a smiley face shortcut keyboard, so that’s nice.

Apps

Speaking of apps, there are some things you should know if you’re considering switching from iOS (or Android) to Windows Phone 7:

• The Live Tile settings (getting your data to push itself to the tile on the homescreen automatically as things happen) need to be activated within the app, as they are off by default. This makes no sense, since the whole marketing campaign for WP7 was centered around people glancing at their homescreens for new info, then going back to whatever they were doing. Having to enable these actions yourself kind of defeats the purpose.

• App design guidelines try to keep everything consistent among third party apps. I.e. all navigation is done at the top and you scroll horizontally to travel from page-to-page within the app. Scrolling vertically lets you view the content on any given page. Unfortunately, that’s where the consistency stops, as some apps save automatically, while others give you a little disk icon to initiate a save action, while still others give you a button that says “Save” right on it.

• If a search in any app yields no results, there is no message saying so. WTF?

• Multitasking/quick app switching is great, unless you’re using a third party music player app. For example, if you start listening to a podcast in the SlapDash Podcasts app and leave the app, or just lock the screen, your podcast stops. There’s no background playing functionality like on iOS. Not cool.

Gaming

I don’t own an Xbox 360, so I really didn’t use this feature. Maybe that will change in the future, but there are plenty of reviews out there that offer their takes on WP7’s Xbox integration and from what I’ve heard, it’s pretty sweet.

Windows Phone Connector for Mac

The first time I ran Windows Phone 7 Connector for Mac, it brought my MacBook Pro to a crawl - damn near froze it. The second time I used it, it actually did freeze the whole system, resulting in a hard restart.

When it works, though, it’s just like iTunes. You can load your music (it sees your iTunes library and playlists), photos, movies and other important data by ticking the necessary checkboxes. Be aware, though, that it takes a long time to sync. Microsoft really needs to update this app for better resource usage and fewer bugs. It’s a mess.

Nitpicks

• If you pick “blue” as the designated theme color, expect to see a lot of tiles with the same color. It can get monotonous.

• App icons, in general, are not as pretty as the ones you’d find on iOS. Many are simple, ugly, or both.

If you’re on iOS currently and you’re happy, don’t think you’re missing anything groundbreaking here. There’s still a lot of work to be done. Those who are on the fence and are thinking of giving up their iPhones in favor of something new would be remiss if they didn’t give Windows Phone 7 a long, hard look. There’s a lot to love and the experience is much smoother and more polished than anything you’d ever find on Android.

If you’re someone who thinks I’m wrong about that, lend me a Galaxy Nexus (I want the latest and greatest OS to test - not last year’s leftovers) and I’ll put it through its paces, but from what I’ve seen up through Gingerbread, Windows Phone 7 offers a better app store, a cleaner UI and a more cohesive experience than everyone’s favorite green robot.

Windows Phone 7 doesn’t feel like it came out of Microsoft. There’s no extraneous cruft, no vague error messages, no…heaviness. Every flick, every transition feels spritely and light, even on this year-old hardware. I’m happy to see Microsoft using the Metro UI within its upcoming Windows 8, but it should’ve made a version consisting of only Metro - no legacy Windows. This is an OS that deserves room to grow on larger-form devices, to develop a robust app catalog full of productivity apps, text editors and photo manipulators. Unfortunately, it looks like Redmond is keen on making sure its growth stops here, which is a damn shame.

Should you desire even more Windows Phone goodness, The Verge has a great review of Mango, replete with photos and videos, as well as a deeper explanation of some of the OS’s finer details.