Windows Phone 7 Series, Day 2

I took a second look at the screenshots and videos of Microsoft Windows Phone 7 Premium Series Experience Extravaganza Bonus Extra With A Cherry On Top, and I’m not as impressed. I’m still glad to see Microsoft take this leap, and a very large one it was. But for all of Microsoft’s philosophizing of “tasks” versus “apps,” the new home screen that scored so many creative points is still just a bunch of icons displaying basic information. A big box displays the number of new SMSes, another displays new emails. So on and forth.

From a functional standpoint, it’s really no different from the red number badges on the iPhone’s Messages and Mail apps. In fact, just about any iPhone app can display those badges, and you can move any app to the iPhone’s Home screen. Android makes things a little more interesting by allowing widgets that actually do something, such as a Google search box that accepts input. There’s a little more to talk about in the UI department, though, especially when it comes to making touchscreen phones easy to use and offering tappable targets for tasks, apps, or whatever-you-want-to-call-thems which are easy to hit. One could argue, for example, that these big home screen “tiles” are much easier to hit while you’re walking down the street or texting while riding in a car or bus.

In terms of helping Microsoft Windows Phone 7 Premium Series Experience Extravaganza Bonus Extra With A Cherry On Top to stand out from the competition, I still think Microsoft had a generally good idea to assimilate the Zune’s UI for its phones. I really like the Zune, its UI, the Zune Marketplace, and its Zune Pass subscription option (see the review I wrote for Ars last year). However, I worry that it may also waste a lot of screen real estate on a device that is already strapped for said resource.

Creative UI with a complete disregard for optimizing space can work on a media player like the Zune because it only needs to list a handful of features and sub-featutures (Music/Artists, Albums, Songs, for example). You have room for large titles that don’t quite fit on the screen of the device, creating visual tension and therefore interest (see: print magazines that hide half their name behind a product or celebrity’s head. The trick makes your brain want to look at the cover and verify the title, even if it only takes a fraction of a second). But the Zune UI wasn’t really designed for scrolling through 700 contacts to find the one you need to call.

Microsoft is rarely known for good UI design, with a couple of rare exceptions in the Zune, Xbox, and Windows 7 Media Center (disclaimer: I’ve never used an Xbox or Windows 7 Media Center, I’ve only heard their interfaces generally praised in gaming circles and tech media). We’ll have to wait and see how this massive redesign of Microsoft Windows Phone 7 Premium Series Experience Extravaganza Bonus Extra With A Cherry On Top plays out, especially when it comes to guidelines and integration features available in the SDK to third-party applications. But put me down as an optimistic skeptic as to how thoroughly Microsoft reinvented its mobile OS and “changed the game” of smartphones.