Instinction

Windows Phone 7

HTC’s PR and community manager Eric Lin has revealed the company’s Windows Phone 7 details.

Lin told Pocket Lint that HTC will be on Windows Phone 7 “on day one.” Lin spoke to the website at Qualcomm’s Uplinq conference in San Diego. However, Lin did bring up the subject of the restrictions Microsoft has applied to the new OS.

“We won’t be able to change the core applications. We won’t be able to put a skin on top of the operating systems like we’ve done in the past,” Lin told Pocket Lint. “However, that doesn’t mean that we can’t do anything. We can add. We can’t cover, we can’t change, but we can add. So we’re going to look at how we can add, and how we can add value because of that. Even for the homescreen (Microsoft) is pretty prescriptive. But we can still add to the homescreen, so we can add our own tiles to that. It’s going to be a lot more adding than changing”.

We’re pretty sure HTC can afford to be positive about its Windows Phone 7 plans – after all, HTC has been the Windows Mobile market leader for quite some while now, and the hardware restrictions Microsoft has applied to the platform will surely spawn some truly range-topping devices.

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Microsoft is deeply rethinking its Marketplace strategy for Windows Phone 7 right down to the name. It’s now officially “Windows Phone Marketplace,” a minor tweak from the Windows Marketplace for Mobile moniker they’d used before. The revised Marketplace will be much more than an app store. Instead, it’ll be billed as a one-stop shop for a variety of content from apps and Xbox games to music, and carriers will also have the ability to customize it by adding their own highlighted content.

The People hub might be the best social networking implementation yet on a phone. Windows Phone 7 has it!

It’s a single place to see all of your friends’ status updates from multiple services in a single stream, and to update your own Facebook and Windows Live status. Needs. Twitter support. Badly. But you have neat things going on, like the aforementioned Live tiles—if you really like someone or want to stalk them hardcore, you can make them a tile on your Start screen, which will update in realtime with whatever they’re posting, and pull down their photos from whatever service. There’s also your very own profile page, where you can scan your current social state and post updates to multiple services simultaneously.

All of your contacts are synced and backed up over-the-air, Android and webOS style, and can be pulled from multiple sources, like Windows Live, Exchange, etc. Makes certain other phones seem a little antiquated with their out-of-the-box Contacts situation.

It’s different. The face of Windows Phone 7 is not a rectangular grid of thumbnail-sized glossy-looking icons, arranged in a pattern of 4×4 or so, like basically every other phone. No, instead, an oversized set of bright, superflat squares fill the screen. The pop of the primary colors and exaggerated flatness produces a kind of cutting-edge crispness that feels both incredibly modern and playful. Text is big, and beautiful. The result is a feat no phone has performed before: Making the iPhone’s interface feel staid.

If you want to know what it feels like, the Zune HD provides a taste: Interface elements that run off the screen; beautiful, oversized text and graphics; flipping, panning, scrolling, zooming from screen to screen; broken hearts. Some people might think it’s gratuitous, but I think it feels natural and just…fun. There’s an incredible sense of joie de vivre that’s just not in any other phone. It makes you wish that this was aesthetic direction all of Microsoft was going in.

Windows Phone 7 is connected in the same sense as Palm’s webOS and Android, with live, real-time data seamlessly integrated, though it’s even smoother and more natural. Live tiles on the Start screen, which you can totally customize, are updated dynamically with fresh content, like weather, or if you’ve pinned a person to your Start screen, their latest status updates and photos.

The meat of the phone is organized around a set of hubs: People, Pictures, Games, Music + Video, Marketplace, and Office. They’re kind of like uber-applications, in a sense. Massive panoramas with multiple screens that are each kind of like individual apps. People, for instance, isn’t just your contacts, but it’s also where social networking happens, with a real-time stream of updates pulled in from like Facebook and Windows Live. (No Twitter support announced yet, it appears—a kind of serious deficiency, but one we’re sure will be remedied by ship date.)

As another example, Music + Video is essentially the entirety of Zune HD’s software, tucked inside of Windows Phone 7.

A piece of interface that’s shockingly not there: A desktop syncing app. If anyone would be expected to tie their phone to a desktop, you’d think it’d be Microsoft, but they’re actually moving forward here. All of your contacts and info sync over the air. The only thing you’ll be syncing through your computer is music and videos, which is mercifully done via the Zune desktop client.