Agreed about the next device, my N95 recently died due to me dropping it after many years of usage. When the Nokias with WP7 come out I'll be looking at them real hard. In the meantime I'm trying to get comfortable with Android and I'm not too disappointed.
It's officially Windows Phone as of right now. All of the current numbers say 7.1 but I believe in another article from another site says that IE9 runs on 7.5. So, on release it should be 7.5 but does it really matter? It's the Mango update. Microsoft is probably trying to drop the numbers and have it "Windows Phone" for consumers. The tidbits and numbers behind it all is just going to make average consumers feel like they're outdated if MS ever chooses to not allow an update go through to their phone due to a lack of hardware. I doubt that would happen but its quite a lot to say when you start adding in fractions. Obviously MS is going for the "complete" look rather than... fragmentations.
windows phone 7.5 was actually in one of the picture as brian mentioned
then on another site i saw another pic of 7.1 so im guessing it's up there just to keep ppl guessing lol, but like KTGiang said they'll probably drop the numbers for completeness
as it's the only one that can take AGES to navigate on wp7.
try to read an article till the bottom, then chose the link to the next page, and then read that to the bottom, and then next page etc.. it can take over a minute to load + make the link clickable (and has huge delay in doing so).
you're one of the few pages i read on a mobile that behaves that slow. hope mango fixes that finally.
in your load time, try it out with browsing more than one page (as noted above, try to read an article). it should be much slower then.
omg thats horrid. I knew these crapphones were bad but not that bad. I would like to see more side by side desktop browsing vs smartphone browsing comparisons.
Anyway you can elaborate more? Such as your device/service etc? I am really confused as I am currently using the HTC Arrive on Sprint and I do not have any of the issues you mention. The load times are less than a minute and I have no issues with the links not loading quickly. The only issues I have that bothers me is when it starts to load a page with images, it sometimes blanks out the whole page for a fraction of a second and continues to load where it left off before that. It isn't even an issue.
Are you using it with 6 tabs open? Clearly, when you're directing towards anandtech.com itself, it might be good to make sure your post is obvious about it. From the other reply you got, it seems like the user believes it is all websites and the phone's fault as a whole. Though, for whatever reason, they had a bad opinion of the Windows Phone in the first place. I personally would hardly call WP a "crapphone". I also believe that they don't know about how articles are handled because this is just a report of news anandtech gets and writes for us. They have no direct influence of what comparisons they can make until they actually have the device in hand.
No, it's 7.5. All the internal version number reporters are 7.5, and almost all of the marketing promos with a release number say 7.5. It's true the dev tools package is called 7.1, but it seems much more likely that 7.5 will be the final name.
You state that separate tiles for each inbox is a new feature. Unfortunately, it isn't. Separate tiles for each email account is currently the only way that Windows Phone 7 can operate.
The good news (i guess) is that they have different, fancy icons for each service based on their logos.
Definately looking forward to just having a unified "mail" tile.
I believe the article is less clear than what was shown at the event.
You can combine your mailboxes to get a unified inbox, but you can ALSO set up individual tiles for a different mail "group.
So let's say you have 2 home accounts, two work accounts and an old student account- right now, you'd have 5 different live tiles. With this, you could have 1,2,3,4, or 5, depending on how you wanted to group them.
"The user agent on Mango reports itself as “Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; MSIE 9.0; Windows NT 6.1; Trident/5.0; XBLWP7; ZuneWP7)” in desktop mode, and “Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; MSIE 9.0; Windows Phone OS 7.5; Trident/5.0; IEMobile/9.0; Microsoft; XDeviceEmulator)” in mobile mode."
I'm really wondering where "Mozilla" comes from. Assuming it's not related to Firefox. Would someone mind explaining a little?
"IE 9 on WP7.5 performs almost identical to the desktop version of IE 9. Both score 130 and 5 bonus points, though the WP7.5 version of IE 0 doesn’t fully support @font-face as shown by the lack of custom font on the score report."
It's from the Netscape days. Lots of sites checked for Mozilla in the user agent string when using features introduced with Netscape. MS started adding these features to IE and therefore added Mozilla to the user agent string.
The biggest thing that I want to know about the browser is whether or not text is reformatted for the screen size when zoomed in. Reading forums and articles (particularly on anandtech) is rather difficult in my current phone unless I use a magnifying glass, or resort to zooming left and right for every sentance that I am reading. It also made me miss Opera from WM 6.x even more as that was one thing that Opera did perfectly. Any ideas on this? Thanks,
Should we take note of that it identifies as ZuneWP7? Could it be a hint of things to come? Or is it simply that the Zune app on WP use the browser to pull data?
As stated in the article, it cant be stressed enough how important it is having a proper browser. I just read this article on my Motorola Atrix and its a downright horrible experience. Scrolling lags, zooming lags, putting the cursor in front of a word to edit is impossible -the cursor finds its own word, and the screen doesnt follow the input being made, iow i often cant see what i write -like right now!
You should try out Opera Mobile. I've been using Mobile since my first smartphone (stock Symbian browser isn't in the same league), Mini some years before that. Impressive how they actually made the web accessible without mouse / touchscreen, on a 176×220 display. Almost as much of an improvement as Opera 9 was over IE6, from my experience.
"The result is that there’s now more screen area dedicated to actual browsing, something I think other mobile browser still need to pay attention to. "
Safari on the iPhone always only had a bottom bar with common buttons like back,forward, bookmarks and such, the address bar is at the top but hides when the page is finished loading... Don't quite know how the default android one is, I've only really seen the browser on the SE x10 mini pro and X8 (not a whole lot on other phones) and I have a feeling they aren't quite default...
As for the html5test.com and acid3 test, the improvement is rather impressive, seems MS is doing some good work, however, Mobile Safari is 76 points and 2 bonus points ahead in the the html5 test (surprising seeing how Safari is pretty bad at HTML5 animations at least) and gets a solid 100 from acid3 (and android probably does too, as their default should be using webkit too as chrome and safari does)...
It's a big improvement, no denying that, still far behind though. Are there any custom browsers for WP7 that use their own rendering engine? Would help a lot when the default is so far behind.
Most browser backends are C++ based. Since nobody gets to write native code on Windows Phone except for Microsoft and the OEMs, it's unlikely that we'll see a new browser backend any time soon. Unless Nokia feels like doing one.
Microsoft's position on Acid3 is that any score above 95 is meaningless, since the other 5 points come from transitional specs that will probably not end up in the final standard. See: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ie/archive/2010/08/04/html...
Does the Mango aka WP 7.5 update provide Bluetooth file transfer and USB Mass Storage(since pdf, doc, txt, etc. documents cannot be transferred using Zune) features? I am thinking about getting a HTC HD7 if these things are taken care of.
Just got Samsung Focus with WP 7.5. I was very happy with the transition from iOS until I discovered that I cannot read Arabic websites. Probably not a problem for many, but seems short-sited from Microsoft given that there are 300 million Arabs out there. Will likely abandon this OS if support doesn't come quickly.
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erwos - Thursday, May 26, 2011 - link
Congrats to Microsoft - if they can improve those load times, they might have the browser to beat in the mobile space.I recently skipped WP7 for Android in my last phone search, but I really think that WP7 might be the key contender when I upgrade again next year.
nitrousoxide - Thursday, May 26, 2011 - link
It's run on emulator. So the benchmark doesn't represent final product's performance.niva - Thursday, May 26, 2011 - link
Agreed about the next device, my N95 recently died due to me dropping it after many years of usage. When the Nokias with WP7 come out I'll be looking at them real hard. In the meantime I'm trying to get comfortable with Android and I'm not too disappointed.eddman - Thursday, May 26, 2011 - link
I thought it's now called 7.1, not 7.5. Which one is it then?robbase29a - Thursday, May 26, 2011 - link
it's 7.1 i think it's just a mistake in the article.niva - Thursday, May 26, 2011 - link
I heard the same, a bit confused too.hvakrg - Thursday, May 26, 2011 - link
Pault Thurott brought up a good point about this a couple of days ago. Windows 7 is actually Windows 6.1 if you look at the build numbers.So it'l probably build number 7.1, but marketed as Windows Phone 7.5 or just Windows Phone.
KTGiang - Thursday, May 26, 2011 - link
It's officially Windows Phone as of right now. All of the current numbers say 7.1 but I believe in another article from another site says that IE9 runs on 7.5. So, on release it should be 7.5 but does it really matter? It's the Mango update. Microsoft is probably trying to drop the numbers and have it "Windows Phone" for consumers. The tidbits and numbers behind it all is just going to make average consumers feel like they're outdated if MS ever chooses to not allow an update go through to their phone due to a lack of hardware. I doubt that would happen but its quite a lot to say when you start adding in fractions. Obviously MS is going for the "complete" look rather than... fragmentations.Nataku - Thursday, May 26, 2011 - link
windows phone 7.5 was actually in one of the picture as brian mentionedthen on another site i saw another pic of 7.1 so im guessing it's up there just to keep ppl guessing lol, but like KTGiang said they'll probably drop the numbers for completeness
notebookgrail - Thursday, May 26, 2011 - link
7.1 - Its the WP Developer Tools version #.7.5 - Its the OS revision #. Though, MS decided to just call it Windows Phone.
davepermen - Thursday, May 26, 2011 - link
as it's the only one that can take AGES to navigate on wp7.try to read an article till the bottom, then chose the link to the next page, and then read that to the bottom, and then next page etc.. it can take over a minute to load + make the link clickable (and has huge delay in doing so).
you're one of the few pages i read on a mobile that behaves that slow. hope mango fixes that finally.
in your load time, try it out with browsing more than one page (as noted above, try to read an article). it should be much slower then.
Shadowmaster625 - Thursday, May 26, 2011 - link
omg thats horrid. I knew these crapphones were bad but not that bad. I would like to see more side by side desktop browsing vs smartphone browsing comparisons.Griswold - Thursday, May 26, 2011 - link
Get shotdavepermen - Friday, May 27, 2011 - link
as i said, only on anandtech.com, other than that, the phone is very fast, perfectly smooth and a great experience.KTGiang - Thursday, May 26, 2011 - link
Anyway you can elaborate more? Such as your device/service etc? I am really confused as I am currently using the HTC Arrive on Sprint and I do not have any of the issues you mention. The load times are less than a minute and I have no issues with the links not loading quickly. The only issues I have that bothers me is when it starts to load a page with images, it sometimes blanks out the whole page for a fraction of a second and continues to load where it left off before that. It isn't even an issue.Are you using it with 6 tabs open? Clearly, when you're directing towards anandtech.com itself, it might be good to make sure your post is obvious about it. From the other reply you got, it seems like the user believes it is all websites and the phone's fault as a whole. Though, for whatever reason, they had a bad opinion of the Windows Phone in the first place. I personally would hardly call WP a "crapphone". I also believe that they don't know about how articles are handled because this is just a report of news anandtech gets and writes for us. They have no direct influence of what comparisons they can make until they actually have the device in hand.
davepermen - Friday, May 27, 2011 - link
samsung omnia 7. no tabs open.and no, it's just anandtech.com, and i thought i was quite clear about it.
i love my wp7 and it's fast for about everything else. it's just that page, reading articles on it is hell.
LaMpiR - Thursday, May 26, 2011 - link
Guys, it is 7.1, not 7.5?drothgery - Thursday, May 26, 2011 - link
No, it's 7.5. All the internal version number reporters are 7.5, and almost all of the marketing promos with a release number say 7.5. It's true the dev tools package is called 7.1, but it seems much more likely that 7.5 will be the final name.ts1279 - Thursday, May 26, 2011 - link
You state that separate tiles for each inbox is a new feature. Unfortunately, it isn't.Separate tiles for each email account is currently the only way that Windows Phone 7 can operate.
The good news (i guess) is that they have different, fancy icons for each service based on their logos.
Definately looking forward to just having a unified "mail" tile.
Operative Me - Thursday, May 26, 2011 - link
I believe the article is less clear than what was shown at the event.You can combine your mailboxes to get a unified inbox, but you can ALSO set up individual tiles for a different mail "group.
So let's say you have 2 home accounts, two work accounts and an old student account- right now, you'd have 5 different live tiles. With this, you could have 1,2,3,4, or 5, depending on how you wanted to group them.
Unified inbox is the default now.
davepermen - Monday, May 30, 2011 - link
You can now have different tiles for different folders in your mail account. F.e. your work inbox, and your 'private' folder in your work account.KZ0 - Thursday, May 26, 2011 - link
"The user agent on Mango reports itself as “Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; MSIE 9.0; Windows NT 6.1; Trident/5.0; XBLWP7; ZuneWP7)” in desktop mode, and “Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; MSIE 9.0; Windows Phone OS 7.5; Trident/5.0; IEMobile/9.0; Microsoft; XDeviceEmulator)” in mobile mode."I'm really wondering where "Mozilla" comes from. Assuming it's not related to Firefox. Would someone mind explaining a little?
KZ0 - Thursday, May 26, 2011 - link
"IE 9 on WP7.5 performs almost identical to the desktop version of IE 9. Both score 130 and 5 bonus points, though the WP7.5 version of IE 0 doesn’t fully support @font-face as shown by the lack of custom font on the score report."IE 0?
Brian Klug - Thursday, May 26, 2011 - link
That's a typo, should be fixed now!-Brian
Spivonious - Thursday, May 26, 2011 - link
It's from the Netscape days. Lots of sites checked for Mozilla in the user agent string when using features introduced with Netscape. MS started adding these features to IE and therefore added Mozilla to the user agent string.Myrandex - Thursday, May 26, 2011 - link
The biggest thing that I want to know about the browser is whether or not text is reformatted for the screen size when zoomed in. Reading forums and articles (particularly on anandtech) is rather difficult in my current phone unless I use a magnifying glass, or resort to zooming left and right for every sentance that I am reading. It also made me miss Opera from WM 6.x even more as that was one thing that Opera did perfectly. Any ideas on this? Thanks,Jason Cook
Brian Klug - Thursday, May 26, 2011 - link
There's no text reflow in the new browser like what Android does by default, if that's what you're referring to.Currently it's only iOS-like functionality where double tapping zooms you to the proper size for a given element, without text being resized.
-Brian
hvakrg - Thursday, May 26, 2011 - link
Should we take note of that it identifies as ZuneWP7? Could it be a hint of things to come? Or is it simply that the Zune app on WP use the browser to pull data?Myrandex - Thursday, May 26, 2011 - link
dang. That is still going to make certain sites unusable :-/ We need a m.anandtech.com :)Thanks for the response,
Jason
snoozemode - Thursday, May 26, 2011 - link
As stated in the article, it cant be stressed enough how important it is having a proper browser. I just read this article on my Motorola Atrix and its a downright horrible experience. Scrolling lags, zooming lags, putting the cursor in front of a word to edit is impossible -the cursor finds its own word, and the screen doesnt follow the input being made, iow i often cant see what i write -like right now!Horrible horrible web browsing.
KZ0 - Friday, May 27, 2011 - link
You should try out Opera Mobile. I've been using Mobile since my first smartphone (stock Symbian browser isn't in the same league), Mini some years before that. Impressive how they actually made the web accessible without mouse / touchscreen, on a 176×220 display. Almost as much of an improvement as Opera 9 was over IE6, from my experience.Leonick - Saturday, May 28, 2011 - link
"The result is that there’s now more screen area dedicated to actual browsing, something I think other mobile browser still need to pay attention to. "Safari on the iPhone always only had a bottom bar with common buttons like back,forward, bookmarks and such, the address bar is at the top but hides when the page is finished loading...
Don't quite know how the default android one is, I've only really seen the browser on the SE x10 mini pro and X8 (not a whole lot on other phones) and I have a feeling they aren't quite default...
As for the html5test.com and acid3 test, the improvement is rather impressive, seems MS is doing some good work, however, Mobile Safari is 76 points and 2 bonus points ahead in the the html5 test (surprising seeing how Safari is pretty bad at HTML5 animations at least) and gets a solid 100 from acid3 (and android probably does too, as their default should be using webkit too as chrome and safari does)...
It's a big improvement, no denying that, still far behind though.
Are there any custom browsers for WP7 that use their own rendering engine? Would help a lot when the default is so far behind.
talzara - Monday, May 30, 2011 - link
Most browser backends are C++ based. Since nobody gets to write native code on Windows Phone except for Microsoft and the OEMs, it's unlikely that we'll see a new browser backend any time soon. Unless Nokia feels like doing one.Microsoft's position on Acid3 is that any score above 95 is meaningless, since the other 5 points come from transitional specs that will probably not end up in the final standard. See: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ie/archive/2010/08/04/html...
asad.khan87 - Tuesday, June 14, 2011 - link
Does the Mango aka WP 7.5 update provide Bluetooth file transfer and USB Mass Storage(since pdf, doc, txt, etc. documents cannot be transferred using Zune) features? I am thinking about getting a HTC HD7 if these things are taken care of.ShakaraEP - Sunday, January 1, 2012 - link
Just got Samsung Focus with WP 7.5. I was very happy with the transition from iOS until I discovered that I cannot read Arabic websites. Probably not a problem for many, but seems short-sited from Microsoft given that there are 300 million Arabs out there.Will likely abandon this OS if support doesn't come quickly.