Did you hear the news? A new model of a certain black, rectangular, touch-screen smartphone has just arrived. Its new software contains what the company says are hundreds of new features. The most eye-popping enhancement is speech recognition: You can tell this new phone to call someone, text someone or give you driving directions.
I refer, of course, to Microsoft’s Windows Phone 7.5. Gotcha!
Yes, Microsoft is belatedly trying to take on the iPhone and Android phones with its own phone software. It’s available on several phones from Samsung and HTC, at prices from $50 to $200 with two-year contracts; each major American carrier offers at least one. (The Windows Phone 7.5 software, code-named Mango, is also available as a free upgrade for older Windows Phone 7 phones.)
Windows Phone 7.5 is gorgeous, classy, satisfying, fast and coherent. The design is intelligent, clean and uncluttered. Never in a million years would you guess that it came from the same company that cooked up the bloated spaghetti that is Windows and Office.
Most impressively, Windows Phone is not a feeble-minded copycat. Microsoft came up with completely fresh metaphors that generally steer clear of the iPhone/Android design (grid-spaced icons that scroll across home pages).
The home screen presents two columns of colourful tiles. Each represents something you’ve put there for easy access: An app, a speed-dial entry, a web page, a music playlist or an e-mail folder.
More than ever, the text on them conveys instant information, saving you the effort of opening them up. A number on a tile tells you how many voice-mail messages, e-mail messages or app updates are waiting. The music tile shows album art, the calendar tile identifies your next appointment. A tile for your sister might display her latest Twitter and Facebook updates.
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Windows Phone first appeared, incomplete, a year ago. There was no copy and paste. No way to add new ringtones. No multitasking. No visual voice mail. No tethering option (which lets you use the phone as an internet antenna for your laptop). No unified e-mail in-box for multiple accounts. No message threading. No Twitter integration. You couldn’t see multiple categories at once on the calendar. In Mango, Microsoft has addressed all of these shortcomings.
Most of them bear that new Microsoft finesse and excellence, but there are some footnotes. For example, you get tethering and visual voice mail only if your cellphone company offers it; so far, only T-Mobile offers the latter.
Another example: You enter the multitasking switcher by holding down the phone’s Back button. But this ‘multitasking’ is the iPhone variety: When you switch out of an app, it doesn’t keep running in the background, draining the battery. (There are the usual exceptions: for example, music keeps playing, and GPS navigation keeps running.)
Instead, the app you’re leaving goes into suspended animation. It’s supposed to spring back instantly when you return. Unfortunately, Windows Phone apps must be rewritten for this multitasking feature; until then, they can take several seconds to wake up again.
Meanwhile, there’s still no way to create folders to organise your apps. There’s no way to send videos to other phones as MMS messages. There is still no built-in video chat app. And, as on the iPhone, you can’t watch Flash videos on the web.
But the drawbacks column is still much shorter than the goodies column.
The Bing searching app now offers audio and visual searching. That is, you can hold the phone up to any pop song playing wherever you go; in about three seconds, it identifies the song and offers the chance to buy it online. It’s just like Shazam on iPhone or Android, but built in. Visual search is a lot like the Google Goggles app for iPhone or Android: You can aim the phone’s camera at a bar code, a book cover or a DVD cover, and the phone identifies it by product name and company.
You can even aim the camera at any printed text, and marvel as the Bing app translates it into typed text, ready for pasting into an e-mail message or Word document. There’s even a translate button if you want the scanned text flipped roughly into another language.
©2011 The New York
Times News Service