Windows Phone 7

Microsoft’s next most expected product Windows Phone 7 has unveiled at Barcelona’s Mobile World Congress last month. Windows Phone 7 is based on Windows kernel CE 6 while the current Windows Mobile version is based on kernel CE 5. It has planned to release on the holiday shopping season of this year. It has finger based touch screen input system and the UI has named as ‘Metro’, it looks like Zune and Xbox components including 3D effects and transition animations. It includes support for Microsoft Outlook and Office support as well as licensing to a wide variety of third party hardware vendors. However, the multitasking and copy & paste will not support for 3rd party applications.

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Technical Specification

  • Screen resolution will be 800 x 480(WVGA)
  • Following hardware buttons are required for WP7: Start, Back, Bing integrated Search button, Camera and Power button. Some vendor devices can have more buttons than these five. But, these are required.
  • Capacitive multi-touch with support for minimum of four contact points.
  • A Qualcomm Snapdragon CPU with DirectX 9 graphics support and the platform is flexible enough to expand in future, according to Microsoft.
  • 256MB of RAM
  • Currently 8GB of internal Flash storage, but no support for microSD cards.
  • WiFi support
  • AGPS
  • Accelerometer
  • FM Radio
  • 5 MP camera with flash

The ‘Metro’ interface is a type-and-motion heavy interface based on primary colors and lots of minimal, negative space, and this will be a familiar interface for Zune HD users. It has large, bold text that trails off the screen, menus which move dimensionally in and out instead of just side to side, and the sense that you are panning over long, single pages of information, rather than a set of separate panels. The clean, sharp ‘tiles’ which dominate the home screen, completely lacking in any real world-inspired bevels, drop shadows, curves of textures,  dialer, and alphabetical search grid, which looks like they’ve been built out of separate parts from Tempest. There are two themes basically boil down to light text on a black screen and it is the default theme of the OS and dark text on white screen, and you can pick your choice of four accent colors: red, orange, blue and green.

The phone unlock screen includes time, date, upcoming calendar events, number of unread messages, and number of missed calls. When the screen unlocked, it shows the user-configurable and movable ‘tiles’. The tiles can be linked to an application, a specific contact or a website, a photo gallery, playlist. But you can link anything with these tiles. It has an automatic tile sorting system as the user’s favorite list.

Multitasking And Notifications

The Windows Phone 7 series can process only the Microsoft’s core apps in the background. Third party applications cannot run in the background, and it supports push notifications enabling third party apps to send updates to the home screen even when another application is running. As a reason, Microsoft’s says, it eats a lot of battery life.

Page States

The OS support for page states, which is similar to cookies on websites. It is a light weight package that can easily be kept in memory to preserve the look and feel, and data of an app while discarding the memory heavy UI elements. When the app is needed again after the user navigate away from the screen, it reconstructs to its previous state and this process is called ‘dehydration’ and ‘rehydration’.

Hubs Strategy

Windows Phone 7’s Hub strategy is a unique feature for the platform. From the People Hub, you can manage your various mail accounts and social networks in a single view. You can set status updates and check mails in single place, rather than changing applications. The Picture Hub helps you to access your locally stored photos or cloud based social network picture galleries, upload pictures and comment on them. They offer photo editing functionalities as well. The Game Hub is integrated with Xbox Live, where you can use your avatar in there, and Xbox Live games and achievements, Spotlight feeds, and the ability to browse gamer profiles. The Zune HD is your Music + Video Hub in the Windows Phone 7. You can download new music over WiFi and 3G. You can rent or purchase videos as well. Microsoft is working with Pandora to integrate with the hub, utilizing the Zune player to tap into Pandora’s streaming services.

It has its built in Internet Explorer browser, but it’s not fast as mobile safari.

The business people always love Microsoft Windows mobile, as it has many stunning features, and it has a great support for office tools. Windows Phone 7 has great features with multimedia support and the users will love this lot more than before. In near future, we can expect some wonderful add-ons and application for the new product. Most of the games are developed with XNA support and lot of silverlight features has added to it.

References

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