Windows 7 Phone

Windows 7 Phone is more than the Microsoft smartphone we’ve been waiting for. Everything’s different now

The Windows Phone 7 Series reorganizes the cell phone, web and applications to deliver a mobile experience redesigned from the ground up. For the very first tine Xbox LIVE games and the Zune music and video experience are being made available on a cell phone.

This brand new, totally fresh operating system will appear in cell phones this year, but not until the holidays. All of the major wireless carriers and every likely hardware maker are backing it, and they’d be stupid not to. It’s totally awesome.

In the same way that the Windows 7 desktop OS was nearly everything people hoped it would be, Windows Phone 7 is almost everything anyone could’ve dreamed of in a cell phone, let alone a Microsoft phone.

Being tipped as the iPhone killer, Windows 7 Phone changes everything. But why?

Now that Microsoft has finally caught up with the cell phone market, the three most significant companies in desktop computing—Apple, Google and Microsoft—now look to occupy the same positions in mobile technology. Cell phones are officially computers that just happen to fit in your pocket.

So whats all the fuss about?

When Microsoft’s CEO Steve Ballmer announced the Windows Phone 7 Series, the internet seemingly went into overdrive. Surely this is just another handset, so why all the excitement?

Well one example is the Quick Launch screen. It is a far-cry from the old Windows Mobile start screen. Large, colorful tiles serve as shortcuts to your most-used or favorite apps or Web sites. You can also place live tiles on the screen with links to your Facebook profile or friends.

These tiles are live, meaning if the content of the app or site is updated, the tile will update on your screen. So if you have a link to a friend’s Facebook profile on your Quick Launch screen, that tile will update when they change their picture.

With a tap and drag, you can easily move them around in any order you like or press a broken heart icon to remove them from the screen. Swiping right takes you to a list of all of your apps. If you want to move one of your apps to your Quick Launch display, you simply press down on the app and select “add to quick launch.”

When you’re in an app, you’ll see a row of other menu options at the top of the display. Like the Zune, you can “pan” through these menu items with a flick of your finger. If you want to go back to the previous menu, you simply hit the arrow key at the top of the interface.

The People hub is another great feature. It provides one-click access to all your contacts, pulled from across the web and arranged in popularity order of “importance”, from those friends and family you interact with most appearing further up the page, and those you contact infrequently pushed down the virtual pecking order. You can even make specific “tiles” for your favourite people.

It’s a dynamic, personalised user experience that will change over time, in real time, depending on the type and flow of your daily interactions. There’s even a “What’s New” section, which pulls in social-networking updates from your contacts, straight from sites such as Facebook.

All in all, we think that Microsoft has worked minor miracles with its new mobile phone operating system and Windows 7 Phone or Windows Phone 7 Series (whichever you prefer) is going to be an outstanding success for the company.