My week with my test Windows Phone from Microsoft continues and I have to say I got used to using the phone very quickly. In this part of the review I thought I’d write about the main applications that are built into the core operating system.
The main way these apps work is through panels. The most obvious of these is the people panel which holds your main contacts list but also acts as an aggregator for your Windows Live and Facebook streams, plus any other streams you add to your Windows Live account. Generally this works extremely well, though it’s obviously no substitute for the full, seperate Facebook app itself.
It’s a really good way to keep in touch with what’s going on in the lives of your friends but is obviously limited by the phone’s small screen size. It’s disappointing to not see Twitter integration here but we can be certain that this will come soon in a software update.
Version 1 Niggle: This is obviously the fault of the lack of proper multitasking on the OS, again something that I know will be solved eventually. In principle the idea of this connected hub with all your friends’ updates in one place is fantastic. In practice it doesn’t actually update until you open the panel, which can slow down updates for several seconds at minimum or a good twenty seconds at worst.
The messaging and mail apps I simply can’t fault. They’re utterly fantastic and exactly what you need. The way the conversation threading works with SMS messages is also really great and the email app is quite powerful.
Version 1 Niggle: Calendar on the other hand I can’t be quite so kind about. It’s fantastic to have a calendar app (finally) that seamlessly syncs with my calendar in the cloud but it’s lacking a few important things. Firstly, the day and agenda view will tell you the date of appointments but not what day of the week they are on, a significant oversight that. Also there’s no year or planner views and these would make a nice addition.
To read the full review with pictures visit Windows7News.
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