Microsoft announced that its Windows Phone 7 smartphone OS has reached "technical preview" status, adding that it's now putting prototype phones from Asus, LG, and Samsung in the hands of developers. Samsung-built prototypes have also been given to a variety of journalists, who are responding with generally positive reviews.

An entry on the Windows Phone Blog yesterday by Terry Myerson (right), a Microsoft corporate vice president for Windows Phone Engineering, stated, "I’m very excited to share with this blog community that our Windows Phone engineering team has hit a very meaningful milestone; one that we're calling technical preview. We are certainly not done yet -- but the craftsmen (and women) of our team have signed off that our software is now ready for the hands-on everyday use of a broad set of consumers around the world."

Myerson continued, "Starting today, thousands of prototype phones from Asus, LG and Samsung are making their way into the hands of developers over the next few weeks. More than 1000 people at Microsoft have been using Windows Phone 7 devices as their only phone for the past several months -- apparently, no one has managed to leave one in a bar to be stolen! -- and there are more than 10,000 devices in the company's test labs, he added.

"We are in the home stretch," Myerson wrote: "We've been testing usability, battery life, network connectivity, and many other metrics for a long time. As a result of that work, I hope you will find the experience to be of surprisingly high quality."

Samsung's i8910HD formed the basis of review Windows Phone 7 devices

Concurrently, Microsoft released prototype Samsung Windows Phone 7 (WP7) devices, with hardware reportedly based on a Symbian phone, the i8910HD (above), to journalists and bloggers.

We discuss the generally positive results below in alphabetical order by publication. (To access the complete reviews, click on the publication names.)

Boy Genius Report

Boy Genius Report's anonymous author comments that with Windows Phone 7, "Microsoft basically reinvents the mobile phone homescreen, and we're not sure we're in love with it." Calling the user interface too plain, the reviewer added, "One last thing that really bugs us with the UI is that there is no application switcher ... Just simply navigating back, back, back, back and back doesn’t really cut it, and during every day usage, it got tired quick."

BGR also criticizes the WP7 phone dialer, claiming that this cannot be set such that a keypad is the default, and was tepid about the operating system's web browser. On the other hand, the reviewer praised the included Microsoft Office software, says "using the email app on WP7 is nothing short of fantastic," called the music player "miles ahead of anything coming out of RIM or Android," and lauded the OS's virtual keyboard.

Concludes BGR, WP7 makes for "a fantastic featurephone, but as a truly competitive smartphone platform, we’re just not sure at this point in time."

CNet

CNET editor Bonnie Cha calls WP7's user interface "a refreshing departure" but suggests that it could quickly become unruly as more tiles and apps are added. She likes the platform's system of People, Pictures, Games, Music+Video, Marketplace, and Office hubs, however, saying "it was absolutely wonderful to be able to do so many things from one place."

According to Cha, WP7's People hub automatically draws contacts from Windows Live, Exchange, and Facebook (there's no Twitter support yet), and "immediately pulls in all information without any options to sync only existing contacts or the like." She warns, "If you have a Facebook account with hundreds of friends, you're going to have a pretty hairy contact list."

Cha notes that WP7's email, Office, texting, and web browsing capabilities are all robust, while SharePoint server documents can be accessed simply by entering a URL. The Zune software, related desktop syncing application, and picture-taking functionality were all praised, too.

But, Cha adds, "It's absolutely mind-boggling that Windows Phone 7 is missing some very fundamental features, like copy/paste, third-party multitasking, and universal search," not to mention HTML5 or Adobe Flash. She concludes that Microsoft still has a lot more work and fine-tuning to do between now and the holidays, when WP7 is released to the public.

Engadget

Engadget's Joshua Topolsky took a long look at WP7, posting his extensive comments just after what must have been the expiry of a 12:00 a.m. embargo. Conceding that WP7's user interface is an acquired taste, he has kind words for it, calling it "a tight cohesive whole" and saying he was "surprised and impressed by the software's touch responsiveness and speed."

Topolsky echos BGR in calling the Windows Phone 7 keyboard "really, really good," calls "email solid if not best in class," and is generally happy with the Office software Microsoft has supplied. He warns that PowerPoint presentations can't be created on the phone, but reckons that the device's slideshow capabilities will be very handy on retail device that have TV out. But Engadget criticizes WP7 for not offering multitasking of third party apps or any copy-and-paste functionality.

Engadget calls web browsing "rather pleasant," lauds WP7's Zune integration, and praises WP7's picture-taking and photo management capabilities (actual image quality wasn't critiqued because the hardware being tested won't be sold to the public, the author notes). But Topolsky, too, criticizes the OS's phone dialing capabilities, this time for the reason that Facebook "pukes all over" your contact list, and "there's not a whole lot you can do to stop that behavior without completely removing your Facebook account from the phone."

Topolsky concludes his review by writing, "What we've been presented with here doesn't exactly feel like a complete mobile operating system in many ways. Some parts of Windows Phone 7 are more like a wireframe -- an interesting design study, an example of what a next-gen phone platform could be."

Gartenblog

In his Gartenblog, analyst Michael Gartenberg also notes the passing of the Microsoft embargo, explaining that he's been using the provided Samsung phone with WP7 for "the past week or so." The OS's user interface is "not like anything on the market," he says, calling it "a solid experience that's both easy to learn and pleasing to look at." But, like CNet's Cha, Gartenberg opines that the UI could get unwieldy when a large number of apps is installed.

Praising the concept of hubs "moving beyond silo apps into integrated services," Gartenberg says "Microsoft’s doing the right things here with Windows Phone 7. It’s visibly differentiated from the competition but the challenge that comes with that will be explaining to the market why that difference is better than what we’ve seen before."

PCMag.com

A PCMag.com hands-on by Lance Ulanoff starts by saying that WP7 is so different from Windows Mobile as to be unrecogniable, adding "there's a lot to like and dig into here." He praises the phone's dedicated search button and voice search functionality, though dings the latter for an "animation of garbled-up letters ... [during a search that] ... made me think the phone didn't know what it was doing, even though it did."

Ulanoff seems impressed by WP7's People functionality, which "seamlessly connects existing contacts," integrating Facebook profiles, Hotmail accounts," and more. "Microsoft execs tell me they're working on" direct access to LinkedIn, MySpace, and Twitter profiles, he adds.

The virtual keyboard on WP7 met with praise from Ulanoff, who writes that it "feels about as good as the iPhone to type on." Drawing a further comparison with Apple's product, Ulanoff says "I actually find the Zune interface cleaner and easier to use than iTunes. It encourages dragging and dropping files onto the little Windows Phone icon."

Concludes Ulanoff, "Microsoft is clearly -- and finally -- heading in the right mobile direction. Now if they could just nail down that ship date."

SlashGear

SlashGear reviewer Vincent Nguyen serves up a multitude of photos and an uboxing video (below), plus a discussion of WP7's "distinctive ... software aesthetic." Noting that hubs can be thought of as wide panoramic desktops across which the user pans the display "viewfinder," he praises how they can eliminate "app hopping," but says there needs to be greater breadth and customization (such as the Twitter and MySpace integration others also called for).

A Windows Phone 7 unboxing video
(click to play)
Source: SlashGear

Regarding the omission of copy and paste, Nguyen says this isn't often an issue due to some reasonably intelligent linking abilities: "Addresses, for instance, are automatically linked to the map app, while links always open up the browser and phone numbers are spotted and triggered by a tap."

Like several of the other reviewers, Nguyen praises OneNote as being the most successful of the included Office apps. It lets users combine text, images and audio together into a virtual notebook, complete with basic text formatting and lists, and which is then synchronized with Windows Live. "You can log in and see your notes from a browser, email them, or pull them down into OneNote on the desktop via SharePoint, he explains.

Unfortunately, Nguyen adds, mainstream consumers aren't likely to have access to SharePoint, and the provided Zune desktop syncing software has no Office section for managing personal content. The WP7 email client is competent, but there's no unified inbox, he charges.

Nguyen concludes that while WP7 shows promise, the support of third-party developers will be key: "The encompassing nature of the Hubs means that, if a careful and clever developer chooses, the empty spots could be fleshed out with broader functionality. That’s certainly different to, say, iOS, where Apple’s core applications are sacrosanct and new third-party abilities are offered alongside -- rather than integrated with -- the core tenets of the platform."

ZDNet

Finally, ZDNet's Matthew Miller has posted a massive "technical preview" that includes eight pages, about 90 photos, plus six different YouTube videos. In an extremely positive review, Miller says he was "blown away" by how stable WP7 is, and reports encountering no slowdowns or lockups whatsoever.

Miller adds that he loved the Zune integration, and enjoyed watching video content, listening to music synced from a PC, and streaming music wirelessly. Addressing WP7's social networking capabilities, Miller says that at first glance, the user interface and functionality appear to be similar to Microsoft's failed Kin device, but in WP7's case "You are not force fed social networking status and information and it is easier to control what is going on with your phone."

Miller, who appears to be WP7's most enthusiastic supporter of all the reviewers cited, does conclude his review by providing the following list of issues and concerns:

• lack of Twitter service support or third party app
• lack of USB drive mode or other method to transfer Office docs
• no landscape support for Office documents
• lack of ability to search your Exchange email server for email
• no copy and paste
• no multi-tasking of apps

Further information

Two reviews not summarized above may be found on Paul Thurrott's SuperSite for Windows and Wired, here and here, respectively.

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