After years of delays, Microsoft has finally stepped up to the plate and put forth a completely new smartphone operating system: Windows Phone 7. The Samsung Focus is one of the first devices to run on the platform, and it's a real charmer. It has good looks, great capabilities, and a brand spanking new OS.
The Focus has what it takes to battle the best smartphones on the market when it comes to specs. It is 10mm thick, features an auto-focus 5 megapixel camera with flash, and offers everything up on a 4-inch Super AMOLED touchscreen display. This part of the equation we know Samsung can handle - we've seen it all before.
But we all know that good specs alone don't win the battle, and luckily for Samsung, Windows Phone 7 seems to have the nuts to battle with the big boys on the usability and fun aspects of smartphone use, too. App support, however, is a sticking point.
Hardware
The Samsung Focus is an elegantly styled slab-type touchscreen smartphone. It looks very much like any of the company's Galaxy S Android smartphones, largely because it sports the same 4-inch
The thin nature of Samsung's 480 x 800 pixel touchscreen display enables the company to make the Focus itself quite narrow. The phone measures 125 x 65 x 10mm (4.9 x 2.6 x .4in) in size, which works perfectly for me personally, but might be a tad large for people with smaller hands. The phone's 120.8g (4.6oz) weight is right on the mark, though.
All Windows Phone 7 smartphones have the same button configuration. Dedicated back, Windows, and Search buttons up front, a power/standby button, a volume control, and a camera shutter button. They all work quite well on the Focus, and those on the edge of the phone blend in nicely with a stylish metal strip that covers the top edge and most of the left and right edges of the phone.
The Focus also features a very Galaxy-S like micro-USB charging/data port with a sliding cover and a 3.5mm headphone jack on the top. The 5 megapixel camera and flash are located on the back of the phone, which features a pin-stripe look to it. Underneath that rear cover, one will find the SIM and microSD memory card slots, above the battery.
Note that microSD cards are not hot-swappable, and must be inserted when the phone is initially configured (or after a master reset) to be used. Removing it will incapacitate the phone, so make sure you know what you want up front. The Samsung Focus comes with 8GB of internal storage.
The build quality on the Focus is amazing. It is a very solid and rich-feeling device. That it is good looking and features the best looking display on the market, in my opinion, certainly doesn't hurt.
Usability
Windows Phone 7 is different. Let's get that out of the way. Sure, it has a lock screen, a home screen, and a main menu like most other touchscreen smartphones today, but the way it handles, in general, is new. New isn't always good, but I think that in the case of WP7, most of it is.
The phone's lock screen is clean, and it shows the time and date, the next upcoming calendar appointment, and notifications of any missed calls or messages. If music is currently playing, one-touch controls are accessible as well. The phone's home screen, which Microsoft calls the start screen, is where things start to get a bit unusual.
The start screen is made up of tiles. Two square tiles or a single rectangular tile fill each row, and a virtually unlimited number of rows can be put on the start screen, which scrolls up and down. WP7 tiles are live in nature, and can show things like message counts, status updates, and photos. Many things in the phone can be "pinned" to the start screen as tiles, and tiles can be rearranged as desired. The start screen offers at-a-glance information and quick access to favorite functions/people/places, but is less configurable than a true widget-based system like Android or even Symbian^3.
The main menu is accessed by tapping on the right pointing arrow at the top of the start screen, or by swiping to the left. The main menu is a simple alphabetized list with small icons and offers no user organizations at all. This means the list can get very, very long and there is no indexing for jumping to a specific starting letter - at least it scrolls well. While pinned app tiles on the start screen show status information (ie. unread message count), the main menu icons do not. There is a lot of room for improvement here.
The apps themselves often feature different views that one reaches by pivoting (swiping) left and right. It is intuitive and fast. The lack of a task switcher means that the experience of using the phone is very linear - like an older iPhone, but better since it offers a functional back button. You'll find yourself going to the start screen quite often. This keeps things simple from a usability standpoint, but can get tiresome for more experienced smartphone users. More problematic is that, so far, there appears to be no background support for 3rd party apps. When you load the Seesmic Twitter/Facebook client, for example, it has to refresh its data every time, even if you were using it moments prior, and there are no background notifications of new tweets. The Slacker Radio app can only stream music while the app is on the screen, and stops if you tap on a notification for a new text message, for example.
The status bar at the top of the display generally only shows the time, and must be tapped to show Wi-Fi, 3G, and battery status. That's annoying. Inbound messages and similar events appear at the top of the screen, and tapping on one, if you catch it in time, will load the appropriate application.
Application specific buttons that appear at the bottom of the screen are limited to 4 in number, with more functions being accessed by tapping on the "..." button. The buttons are a bit too closely packed for my liking, though I approve of the look and nature of the buttons in general. Long pressing on some items, like the large font text at the top of many screens (like People), will provide access to settings, but this is far from universal.
Microsoft has integrated support for Facebook and Windows Live into the phone, and can pull contacts from there or from Gmail or Exchange email accounts. The People app, which is where one finds the contacts, also provides a view to the social networking status feeds. Twitter and MySpace are not currently supported. The people app does have a nice indexing system, though, and the search button can also be used to find things quickly.
Limited theme support exists in the phone, allowing users to choose from dark and light backgrounds and to select the accent color used throughout the phone. Voice search and command is present, and effective, but profile support is lacking. The same volume setting is used by notifications, call ringtones, and music/media playback. It's not possible to have a loud ringer and a quiet game, for example. Another problem is that not all apps, or even core OS features, run in landscape mode on the phone, which can be cause for a lot of phone rotating.
Windows Phone 7 is a very visually appealing smartphone OS that has a slight learning curve, like webOS and Android, but is easier to use overall. It's on par with Apple's iOS in terms of simplicity and usability. The touchscreen calibration and accuracy, as well as the speed of scrolling and similar tasks, is really top notch.
Calling / Data
I have found the Samsung Focus to be an excellent device for making phone calls. Call audio was quite clear, and the phone's reception on AT&T's 3G network was very good indeed. The speakerphone feature performed decently, but was somewhat inconsistent sounding to the remote caller.
The Samsung Focus supports both 3G data on AT&T's network as well as Wi-Fi connections. My experience is that data on the device is somewhat slower than that of the competition. 3G data download speeds were generally in the 1,400Kbps area, with Wi-Fi being much faster.
Bluetooth wireless is supported by the Focus, for use with headsets or stereo headphones. While the phone can be used with a USB connection to sync with Microsoft's Zune software, there is no USB mass storage mode support in WP7. Microsoft doesn't want you messing with things, it seems.
Messaging
The Samsung Focus and its Windows Phone 7 operating system offer quite solid messaging support, if you can ignore the total lack of Twitter/MySpace and instant messaging functionality. Third party apps are likely to pick up the slack, but as of this moment, you are limited to text, picture, and email messaging with a dash of Facebook and MSN Live.
The email client on WP7 is a class app. The interface is gorgeous and easy to use, and the support for Exchange and Gmail accounts includes contacts and calendar synchronization. IMAP and POP accounts are also supported, of course. My only complaint is that while the app supports syncing Exchange folders and showing the number of new messages in each, it only notifies the user of new messages that appear in the main inbox. A combined "all folders" view would have been useful, and, on a related note, there is no universal inbox for seeing messages from all accounts at one time.
Text and picture messaging on Windows Phone 7 is also very good. The messages are threaded nicely, and pictures can be inserted into a conversation with ease. Facebook and Windows Live social networking support is integrated into the People (contacts) application. You can comment on posts and even "like" items on Facebook, and all items come through in one combined stream for easy viewing.
Text input and editing on WP7 is both a mixed bag. The virtual keyboard offered by WP7 is very, very accurate. Among the very best. What's lacking, though, is support for third party input systems (Swype, anyone?) and copy/paste functionality. Microsoft knows that copy/paste is needed for real editing work, though, and is already testing the functionality for a future update (I've seen it and it looks good).
Apps / App Store
Likely the biggest issue for potential Windows Phone 7 users coming from Android or iPhone is going to be app support. There are currently few apps to choose from in Microsoft's Marketplace. There are some fun Xbox Live games and other apps, but they are all very new - just like the OS.
Another issue with apps purchased from the Marketplace is that they are not able to run in the background. That means that startup times can get annoyingly long. I suspect, but have no official indication, that Microsoft will have to pull an Apple and allow some sort of background app support in the future.
Microsoft's Marketplace has another issue that I find distasteful. It combines apps with music. When you are on an app hunt, the search results in the Marketplace will often be filled with songs that match based on title or artist. I see no scenario where I would be interested in apps or songs on a given subject - it is always one or the other. That has to be addressed.
Microsoft does come through with brilliant Office document support, though. You can view and edit Word DOC/DOCX files, Excel spreadsheets, and even create and edit PowerPoint presentations with full animation support. The calendar application is also fabulous looking, though it lacks a week view. Microsoft's Bing mapping is also fine, but offers no turn-by-turn voice prompts and won't run in landscape mode for some reason. The included AT&T Navigator software offers turn by turn voice prompts, but also fails to work in landscape mode. AT&T includes some other apps, like U-verse streaming video, too.
And if you are worried about bloatware from AT&T, don't. Anything AT&T (or anybody else) installs, the user can easily uninstall.
Browser
Microsoft's Internet Explorer on Windows Phone 7 is very close to being great, but doesn't quite get there. The application is really fast, and even allows for full interaction with the page before it has finished loading. Multi-touch zoom, pan, click a link - it all works right away. That's great. There's also multiple window support (6 max), and you can tap on a word to highlight it and then use the search button to do a Bing search quickly. Nice stuff.
But the browser doesn't re-flow text to adjust for new zoom levels, so some pages can be hard to read. The browser does try to adapt font sizes on a page to make it usable while maintaining the original layout, but that doesn't always work, getting it all wrong on some pages. The lack of WebKit support means that pages specially designed for iPhone and Android won't work, resulting in some rather poor looking, by comparison, mobile sites. Wikipedia comes to mind, for example.
There also appears to be neither Adobe Flash nor Microsoft Silverlight support for web pages, which is a surprise. What really surprised me, though, was the lack of a back function. Sure, you can use the back key, but if you leave the browser and jump to the start screen and then re-load the browser to continue your work, you will not be able to go back since the back button will take you to the start screen. That's dumb. There's also the issue I've had with some of my favorites disappearing mysteriously. The Samsung Focus' 4-inch touchscreen does go a long way towards making the user forget about these problems, but in the end, it's a only good browser, not yet a great one.
Camera
The camera on the Samsung Focus is superb. It can't match the raw photographic power of Nokia's N8, but it is otherwise at the top of the heap when it comes to smartphones today. The camera's focus is accurate, if a tad slow, and the images it creates are better even than Samsung's own Galaxy S and Wave (though only slightly). The flash works pretty well, as you can see in the sample photos at the end of this review. The 720p HD video that the Focus records is also very good.
One of the cool features of Windows Phone 7 is that the camera can be launched by long pressing the shutter button - even while the phone is locked. I must admit that this didn't always work for me, though. The phone offers settings like anti-shake, ISO, and various metering modes, but the settings reset to default values every time the camera is started. Since the default setting for video is VGA resolution, you will have to remember to switch the camera to 720p HD every time you activate the camera if you are like me and demand HD all the time. This has caused many a video I've shot to be less than acceptable.
Photo organization is pretty solid, and photos are automatically uploaded (in a down-scaled size) to Microsoft's SkyDrive website, where they can be easily accessed by a web browser. Microsoft's Zune software can be used to sync full res images and video to a PC, and you can always just share them via email. Microsoft has promised a Mac solution for syncing pictures and music sometime before the end of the year. The phone's Picture application will also pull in photos from Windows Live and Facebook, and is overall very well organized.
Music
The Zune player in WP7 is very capable, but doesn't offer the most straight forward user interface - even if it does look very cool. Once you get used to it, though, you'll find you have good access to your music and information (from the Marketplace). If you add a Zune Pass subscription to the equation ($15/mo), then you get unlimited streaming music from the entire Zune catalog, and can download songs or albums of your choosing for offline-access. You also get to download - and keep - 10 tracks per month. Purchased songs otherwise are available for $.99 to $1.29.
Songs in the phone's collection are organized by artist, album, and genre. While you can create playlists on a PC using the Microsoft Zune software, there is no apparent way to create one on the phone itself. Both Bluetooth stereo wireless headphones and standard 3.5mm wired headphones can be used to listen to the music from the Focus.
The coolest music related feature of the phone, however, is probably the Wi-Fi based music sync. You can queue up music in Zune on your computer and it will sync automatically to your phone once it is connected to a charger (and your Wi-Fi network) and sits idle for a few minutes.
Battery
The Samsung Focus features a large 1,500mAh battery that is rated for 3 hours of 3G talk time or 10 days of 3G standby time. That's not a lot, but the battery is very capable of powering through a day of heavy use, as long as multiple hours of voice calls are not part of the equation.
Reviewer Spin
In the first 3 days of use, I went back and forth between just liking Windows Phone 7 and really liking it. Samsung's Focus hardware is an obvious winner, so it was up to the OS to determine whether or not I could use the Focus as my own device.
After messing with it for days, I think I can safely say that I could do just that, and enjoy myself in the process. WP7 is really nice. It is a bit less power-user focused than Android, but it is damn pretty to look at and is an obvious result of a lot of attention to detail and good, hard thought.
It's a cool phone. You owe it to yourself to check it out.
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