October 12th, 2010 by Arjan Olsder Posted in Platforms: Windows Phone | No Comments »
Yesterday was a great day for Microsoft as Windows Phone 7 finally had its international launch. In this post, we do a quick recap of the information we got hold of during and after the presentation at Microsoft HQ NL.
Devices
In total, there will be 9 devices available at launch. These devices come from Dell, HTC, LG and Samsung. As the Netherlands is a soft launch country (there is no Dutch support in WP7 yet), Dutch consumers will have to choose between the LG Optimus 7, HTC Trophy and the Samsung Omnia 7 (which we received at the end of Samsung’s presentation).
Windows Phone 7 will launch first in the EU (October 21st) followed by the US (November). Reason for the US delay is the CDMA network, which requires different radio’s in the devices.
Hardware
We have been writing about the minimal hardware specs before, but yesterday we were shown the exact reason for it. The experience is extremely fast and Microsoft will have full control over firmware updates. Everybody will always run the same edition of Windows Phone 7 on any Windows Phone 7 device. Vendors are however allowed to put ‘better’ hardware into their devices (i.e. 8GB memory instead of the default 4GB).
Just like the iPhone and iPod, Windows Phone 7 devices are not able to make use of external memory. This means you have to pick your device carefully depending on your memory needs. Microsoft took this step to avoid side loading of apps onto the devices.
Though the physical size and types of touchscreens differ over the devices, all 9 of them run at a comfortable 800×480 resolution. A smaller resolution will become available in 2011 for low budget devices. One of the reasons for this delay is because Microsoft doesn’t seem to have a solid vision yet on how to support these smaller screens toward developers. Will the OS rescale, or will the developers have to create special apps for those devices, a tough question.
Services
All Windows Phone 7 devices are able to sync with both Exchange Server as well as other free e-mail and contact services like Gmail and Yahoo. The phones also come with built in support for Facebook. The phones will combine userdate from all services so the people hub can be used to track what your friends have been doing.
Bing is also fully integrated into the system just like Google on Android. Bing even supports voice search and is, just like Google on Android, able to present results based on GPS location.
With a limited memory capacity, cloud services are extremely important to Windows Phone 7. Thi is not only shown through facebook connectivity on the people hub, but also in the pictures hub where I can view photo’s uploaded on facebook by my friends as well as content stored on the Microsoft servers.
Finally there is support for Windows Marketplace, Zune and Xbox Live. All three of them are not available in The Netherlands yet due to the missing Dutch language, but these will be vital in Microsoft’s marketing strategy and we are looking forward to checking them out via a workaround we will publish later.
Firmware
As stated above, uniform hardware will mean that Microsoft is able to control firmware updates at any time, unlike Android. This also shows as Microsoft will enable copy/paste functionality early 2011 and later on, multitasking.
Later this week, we will write more about our experiences with the phones we have played around with.
