Steve Ballmer announced Windows Phone 7 Series (Windows Mobile 7 to you and me) and promised some big changes – but has the overhaul worked?

Ballmer apparently pushed the development of the platform back by some time in order to get it to the point he felt it could compete with the incumbent dominant platforms (such as the iPhone OS and Android).

To that end, with Windows Phone 7 Series we get a radically overhauled UI, capacitive-only touchscreens with hi-res WVGA (800×48 pixel count) displays and multi-touch throughout.

We got some hands on time with the new operating system, and we were pretty impressed with the platform despite it being in its infancy.

Firstly, the home screen no longer has the boring icon layout – living tiles pepper the main display. These widgets draw information from the cloud to constantly update – so if you’ve pinned a favourite friend to the home screen and they change their Facebook profile picture, it’s going to update with new visage.

We like the design angle Microsoft has taken with this ‘breathing’ display, although it could get a tad annoying with all the motion going on, and we’d worry about the hammering the battery would get if it’s being updated constantly.

The main applications can also be viewed in one long list if that’s your bag, allowing the traditionalist to quickly scoot through and find what they’re looking for.

Microsoft has been hard at work making cross-platform integration a big part of the Windows Phone 7 Series, and the Bing integration (accessed by tapping the front search key, that along with the Start and Back buttons will be on the face of every such phone) works smoothly, quickly booting up a search box with text input.

The demo model we saw accessed the internet to search in an OK time – whether this will be indicative of all WinMo7 phones we don’t know yet, as this was very much a prototype device.

The Windows Phone 7 Series platform is divided into Hubs, as Microsoft told us in its presentation over and over again, and essentially this divides the phone up into important areas.

The People hub was pretty cool – contact pictures were displayed in a decent resolution, and the status updates next to each person ape HTC’s Sense UI offering.

It could be said that a lot of Microsoft’s ideas in WinMo7 seem a little ‘borrowed’ from other platforms, but we don’t really see a problem with that. If social networking integration has worked for one manufacturer, and it’s openly available to use it, we applaud anyone that replicates that idea to give the consumer a better experience.

The Xbox Live integration was obviously highlighted strongly in the press conference, and for good reason – being able to see your avatar from your Xbox experience is cool and the availability of Achievements will spur a great number of users on to playing games far longer than they might on a mobile phone.

But there’s more the Gaming Hub than just Xbox integration – users will be able to play turn-based games directly from their Windows Phone 7 Series device, thanks to increased cloud dependency.

We sadly couldn’t see this in action on the demo model, but the Hub will also apparently feature tips and tricks for gaming, as well as additional purchases, such as clothing for your avatar, right from your mobile device and synchronised with your Xbox too.

The other talked-about offering is the Zune platform, which makes up the Music and Video Hub. Put simply, this is the same as a Zune HD media player being packed with mobile telephony skills, in the same way as the iPod touch and iPhone co-exist.

The interface is clean and simple to use with a number of offerings available from the large and legible main menu. Video, podcasts, music, radio and Wi-Fi synchronisation with other devices is all offered from the opening screen – again, not original but one of the simpler ways of doing things.

Opening an album doesn’t ape the iPhone in spinning around to look at track listings, rather just sliding across to start up the basic music player – animated transitions are a big part of the new Windows Phone 7 Series UI, and will likely make the casual user just picking up the device for the first time think it’s pretty cool.

Next up we checked out the internet browser on the new range of phones, as this is quickly becoming a key area of smartphone use.

Microsoft declined to answer our questions on which version of Internet Explorer formed the basis of the browser on its new devices, but we’d say this element was probably the weakest part of the demonstration.

The browser skin looks a lot like the older Pocket Internet Explorer programs we’ve used through gritted teeth, which doesn’t bode well.

While multi-touch is enabled on board throughout the Windows Phone 7 Series, the pinch-and-zoom functionality on the browser didn’t work too quickly in our demonstration, showing some signs of stutter.

Some pages also took an age to load, and as we’ve heard, Flash isn’t enabled either from the outset, so we’re not thinking the internet experience is going to be a winner initially unless Microsoft gets it act together over the next nine or 10 months.

The Office section of the phone was also absent from our demo, which was irritating, but we did see the Exchange server in action, showing a decent enough list of messages that were easy to scroll through, and pulling up the ‘advanced’ tab at the bottom allowed access to basic functions, such as forwarding or replying to email.

We’re not sure how good the keyboard is on the Windows Phone 7 Series phones, although it’s early days yet. Initial indications hinted that text input was OK, although some level of inaccuracy means it’s nowhere near as good as the eerily clever predictive keyboard on the HTC range.

Overall, we’re very impressed with this new take from Microsoft – the UI was our main gripe with previous iterations of Windows Mobile, and this is certainly a lot better than we expected from the next release.

However, while the UI looks slick, there are a lot of unanswered questions – how much will third party developers be able to sink their teeth into it? Where will it go in the future? Why is there no Flash support on board?

We’ll give Microsoft the benefit of the doubt for now, but the company needs to get this release right if it’s to have any hope of staying competitive in the mobile game.

Hands on: Windows Phone 7 Series review via http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/techradar/phone-and-communications-news/~3/X9LB1isfizc/story01.htm TechRadar Mobile

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