Windows Phone 7

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Microsoft has just launched their new Windows Phone portal which heavily features Windows Phone 7 and provides a load of content for prospective buyers and owners. This portal has actually launched earlier than many would have expected, considering that Microsoft will be announcing the availability of Windows Phone 7 on Monday.



The portal is designed with a heavy focus on squares, rectangles and the Segoe font, in essence the Metro UI used on the devices. The portal has 4 main areas for both Windows Phone 7 and 6.5 devices. The areas are “discover”, “buy”, “how-to” and “applications”.

The discover page allows users to watch videos of the some of the features of Windows Phone 7 with a great focus on the Live Tiles and Hubs which aren’t found on other mobile platforms. There are even walkthroughs for the email and calendar functionality, searching and maps, and the accompanying Windows Live service which incorporates Find My Phone.

Currently there is nothing listed in the buy section of the site although it is expected that this page will be populated on Monday after Microsoft hold their event in New York and London.



Microsoft appears to have gone all out on the amount of topics covered within the how-to part of the portal. All hubs have about 20 different help topics, plus there are many basic, and getting started, help areas. There are also several videos which expand on the help topics, such as showing users how to customise their device. Microsoft will provide “featured topics” and “popular topics” lists to surface key things on the mobile OS.

The final area of the portal has some information about the apps that will be featured on Windows Phone 7; however, currently there isn’t much information. There are small blurbs about some of the Xbox Live games that will feature on the devices and more information for each game can be found on the Xbox site. There are even links to help and how-to topics on this page.



There are some showcase pages too which show off key applications such as Office. On the Office page, all 5 of the applications have a small blurb and also have a corresponding “help and how-to” page with many features documented.

From digging around this new portal, some small pieces of information have been discovered. It is now possible to download the Zune PC Software outside of the US (without needing to change one’s location on the website). This is only version 4.5 of the Zune software and not 4.7 which will be necessary to sync with Windows Phone 7.

It appears that Office will get a new page or site at office.com/mobile of which its purpose is currently unknown. It might be a way to access documents stored in the cloud on mobile devices or it might just be additional information on how to use Office Mobile.

It looks like Microsoft will use this portal to ensure that new users can find out how to do anything they want on the device and will even point out some features users might not have realised.The portal could yet prove to be even more interesting when all the links are working and the “buy” page is populated with devices that can be purchased.

Windows Phone 7 devices are expected to be announced on Monday and Neowin will be covering both the New York and London events.

Source: Neowin

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Windows Phone 7 and removable storage

Posted on October 12, 2010 by Paul Thurrott
So, there’s been some confusion around Windows Phone 7 and its support of removable/expandable storage. As is so often the case, this confusion comes from Microsoft: The company told me specifically (and repeatedly) that the OS would not support this. But it sort of does.

Here’s how it works.

Supported devices (not all Windows Phones will be expandable) will include a micro-SD card slot, which by Microsoft’s requirements must be placed under the battery cover (i.e. next to the actual battery) and not be externally accessible. That’s because this functionality isn’t designed to be something that is swapped out, used with a PC, or whatever. Instead, the micro-SD-based storage will work in tandem with whatever storage is available inside the device. So let’s say you get a device and it has 8 GB of storage internally plus an empty micro-SD slot. You could add a memory card (with 8 to 32 GB of storage) to dramatically expand the storage (to up to 40 GB).

What you can’t do is swap it out without hard resetting the device. That’s because the storage on the card and the internal storage is comingled, and the system makes no differentiation. There’s no way to know where something (an app, song, whatever) is stored, and if you do pop out the card, the phone will complain. And it won’t be readable on your PC, so you can’t use it to transfer content in either direction.

There are technical reasons for these limitations, but I can’t discuss them until my review can be published. (Sometime next week.) For now, let’s just say that Microsoft has cut an interesting compromise here by allowing users to expand the storage, and dramatically, on supported devices. But it’s not as free floating as, say, external memory card support on Android devices or whatever.

So, to put it accurately, Windows Phone does support expandable storage. But it does not support removable storage.

By the way, the Samsung Focus does provide a micro-SD slot. This is still very much the device I intend to buy.

-Paul Thurrot

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Dell Venue Pro (aka Lightning)

You see that? That, comrades, is what happens when Lightning strikes! Or, you know, when Venue Pro strikes. So, it doesn't quite have the same ring to it, but no matter what you call Dell's Windows Phone 7 portrait slider, it's downright awesome. We got a chance to play around with an early build of the phone a few weeks ago -- as you'll hear us say in the video below, it was still codenamed the Lightning -- and we haven't been able to get it out of our minds since. The handset has a very similar look and feel to its Android brother, the Thunder -- its rounded chrome sides are reminiscent of an iPhone 3G/S, the black contoured back has a nice grippy feel, and the curved, WVGA AMOLED, Gorilla Glass screen is just stunning. The 4.1-inch capacitive, multitouch display is joined by additional back, home and search touch-sensitive buttons, all of which seemed responsive in our short time with the device. The back is also home to a 5 megapixel cam with flash while there's a 3.5mm headphone jack on the top of the device and a micro-USB port on the bottom edge.

But obviously, it's that glorious slide-out QWERTY keyboard that makes the Venue Pro, well, so pro. The rubber-feeling keys remind us a lot of those on the Droid 2 -- though, they feel a bit firmer -- and the slider mechanism felt sturdy when we slid it open and closed a number of times. On the spec front, we were told it was packing a Snapdragon processor, and while the phone seemed to briskly run an early build of WP7, we didn't get to test much out as Dell was lacking both a SIM and a nearby WiFi network. We'll be hoping to grab some more time with the T-Mobile version today, but from what we've seen so far we're fairly confident that Dell's struck pretty darn close to gold here. Oh, and don't forget to hit the break for a short video walkthrough of the hardware and keyboard.