It was not a question of if, but when. The Windows Phone 7 Series emulator ROM has been completely unlocked revealing more of the preproduction mobile operating system Microsoft didn’t want you to see.
Although there is definitely a lot to explore, to be devil’s advocate I must remind everyone that Windows Phone 7 Series and this ROM in particular is still a very early piece of work and the components in this emulator demo is not representative of what the final product will be. Play with it, have fun with it, but don’t build expectations on it.
Contrary to the controversial report out of Microsoft MIX10 this week that Windows Phone 7 Series will not feature copy & paste functionality, a person close to the den explained that copy & paste is definitely a scenario and feature that the team is putting a lot of thought about and hope to bring to the platform soon after initial release.
Let’s not forget Microsoft already knows at least one way to do copy & paste from Windows Mobile, but this was one of many scenarios they want to refine to fit in the context of their new user experience which already has a lot of “smarts” for automatically connecting data between applications – for example, detecting and hotlinking addresses in emails to Bing Maps.
As it turns out, the development team actually knows exactly how they will be implementing copy & paste in WP7S but did not believe it could be implemented without affecting the release schedule they’ve committed to and therefore will be including it in an update down the road.
A number of concept screenshots of early Metro concepts for Windows Phone 7 Series was published in the slides of the “Windows Phone UI and Design Language” session at Microsoft MIX10 this week giving us a rare peek into what Metro could have been.
If one thing’s for sure, large fonts and a text-driven layout was a sure-thing since the beginning. It appears they experimented with a much larger time display and diagonal-placed controls which look kind of cool but one could imagine to be a usability nightmare. Take a look for yourself.
If a woman walking down a street didn’t do it for you, then a new Windows Phone 7 Series promotional video with a stronger emphasis on end-to-end scenarios was shown off at a Microsoft MIX10 session this week.
This Star Trek-inspired video takes you in to the lives of Anna and Miles, two made-up “life maximizer” personalities that the WP7S team uses to craft their product for. Scenarios demonstrated in the video includes taking and sharing a photo, playing games, messaging, social networking, searching and navigation. These guys obviously have a lot of free time.
As a great example Microsoft is still tweaking and crafting the Windows Phone 7 Series experience, a couple of new subtle yet “delightful” UI features was actually added to the build of the OS they’re showing off this week at the MIX10 conference.
The first of which in case some people are not very good at “spot the difference” and haven’t noticed what you’re suppose to be looking at is the new “Messaging” tile which has an emoticon that appears when you receive a new message. If that wasn’t delightful enough, it also changes as you receive more text messages – from a smile to a wink to a gasp.
Of course this demo build changes the emoticon with quite a small margin and this will be padded out in the final release, although I’m sure heavy SMS users will trigger all of the emoticons without a sweat.
The other change that has been implemented is “tile flipping”. Best illustrated with an example, tiles like a contact pinned to the Start screen will at times flip on its back like a card to reveal messages which in this demo is a Facebook status update.
I think this is a great idea to bring even more “life” into the already “live tiles” that exposes highly contextual information from services like a social network without any input or effort from the user. Delightful indeed.
Following a lead from a xda-developers.com forum thread whose users have analyzed the Windows Phone 7 Series emulator ROM with CSI-like forensics, a question that is now obvious in retrospect was raised, “are Microsoft’s own applications on Windows Phone 7 Series based on the same development platform it exposes to third parties, Silverlight?”
As I found out today at MIX10 the short answer is no, but having said, there is a legitimate explanation.
The reason the “default” applications on Windows Phone 7 Series are not built on Silverlight is actually a very straightforward technical problem, the applications were simultaneously developed with the platform and tools when they committed to building the operating system from scratch.
Having said that, neither users or developers should be concerned as Microsoft assures this will be no disadvantage to third parties.
In terms of performance, they state there is no discernible difference in the processing or rendering speed of third party applications. On the other hand, the breadth of APIs could have some differences but developers of other smartphone platforms like the iPhone face this too. Microsoft vows to surface additional APIs if developers voiced their needs.
