Eighteen months ago, Microsoft hit the reset button on Windows Mobile, throwing out years of features and applications in favour of a panoramic interface designed for touch, social networks and cloud services.

Instead of a different skin from every phone maker, there's a single interface with tiles and hubs for integration. Instead of dense screens of information and menus designed for picking at with a stylus, the interface spreads lists and thumbnails over layouts far bigger than the screen size and you spend your time swiping and sliding.

Windows Phone 7 is a world away from any phone we've seen from Microsoft before and the design might well delight you – but what can you actually do?

From the moment you turn it on, Windows Phone 7 looks good. Even the lock screen is colourful and useful at the same time, with a photo background you can customise, details of your next appointment and notifications for missed calls and new messages.

Slide the lock screen smoothly out of the way and the Start screen shows you what Microsoft is trying to do with Windows Phone 7.
This is a radically new interface. Neither tiles nor animations are new on mobile, and neither is adding notifications to icons, but the Home screen puts them all together beautifully.




That's a word we find ourselves wanting to use a lot about the Windows Phone interface, which is vivid and engaging, whether you choose the white theme or the black, which saves power on OLED screens and sets off the ten accent colours well.

Most tiles take up a single space, but Pictures is twice as wide so that the photo it uses is big enough to enjoy, as is the Calendar so you can read your next appointment – and if you pin an artist you get a double tile so you can tell it's not an album.

Like pretty much any other smartphone, you pick the tiles you want to see all the time, for apps and tools and (more unusually) specific people and music or the six hubs that organise content (Music and video, Pictures, Games, People, Office and Marketplace).

The Home screen, the hubs, the web browser and many of the apps are bigger than the phone, with a visual hint of what's to the right to encourage you to swipe across and see more.

This is a uniformly fast and responsive experience and it means you don't feel you're peering at information through the bottom of a matchbox.


For the Home screen, you swipe across to get a full list of all the apps and tools on the phone, then press and hold to pin an app (or to uninstall it – you can uninstall nearly any app, even ones from the handset maker or the network).

Press and hold again to move a tile about (the other tiles shimmy out the way to make it obvious where you're dragging to).
And rather than just using them to launch apps, the idea is that tiles give you the same instant hit of information as a travel sign; what you need to know and nothing more.

This works really well in some cases; seeing the time of your next alarm is useful, seeing Facebook updates on the tiles for friends you pin to the start screen does make you feel you're in touch with them (although it's a shame you don't see emails and text messages from them scrolling across the tile as well).

Most of the third-party apps we've seen so far don't do anything clever with tiles; hopefully that will change as developers get used to what Windows Phone can do.

The tiled interface works perfectly for the built-in apps and a few favourite extras. But once you start to pin a lot of apps, the distance you have to scroll to get to the bottom gets long, even with the fast and responsive scrolling.

A long scrolling list has less potential for confusion than Android's multiple Home screens, but it's not as efficient once you have a few dozen apps.

It would make sense for a future version to either turn the Start screen into a panorama like the hubs (giving you multiple columns of tiles) or better yet to enable users to create their own custom hubs to group specific apps on.

That would be more complex than the elegant Start screen, but power users are going to need some way to organise large numbers of apps.

We'd also like a way to pin the Wi-Fi settings to the Start screen (maybe there will be an app for that). In fact there are a lot of useful options tucked away in the Settings menu but not everything you might want.
One thing that did irk: it's disappointing not to be able to set your own tune as a ringtone.



Keywords: Windows Phone 7 ,Home screens,Wi-Fi settings,ringtone, few dozen apps, next alarm, Facebook,handset maker,launch apps,Calendar,Windows Mobile, phone maker,features,applications