Engadget Previews Windows Phone 7 On Samsung Taylor Reference Hardware

WP7 looks good.

Engadget’s Joshua Topolsky took a ref­er­ence hard­ware Windows Phone 7 Samsung smart­phone for a spin (source: Windows Phone 7 in-depth pre­view). The not-for-retail Samsung “Taylor” sports a 3.7-inch dis­play with a 800×480 pixel for­mat. Here’s the skinny.

Conclusion:

Seriously, if the WP7 team put their heads down and added a clip­board and some rudi­men­tary mul­ti­task­ing, Microsoft could have an excep­tion­ally solid version-one prod­uct in Windows Phone 7 — espe­cially when cou­pled with the company’s fierce out­reach to developers.

Pros

Metro UI: “Windows Phone 7 is eas­ily the most unique UI in the smart­phone race right now, and the real perk here is that it doesn’t just seem like an arbi­trary deci­sion to make things look dif­fer­ent than other OSs — there is real pur­pose and util­ity to a lot of what Microsoft has come up with.”

Keyboard: “We’re talk­ing nearly as good as the iPhone key­board, and def­i­nitely bet­ter than the stock Android option. …we think Microsoft got this aspect of the phone’s UI pitch perfect.”

The Email App: “… is pretty ter­rific on the whole, pro­vid­ing a clean, clear lay­out and upfront options for your most-used functions.”

Browser: “… web brows­ing on Windows Phone 7 is actu­ally a really pleas­ant expe­ri­ence. … Loading the desk­top ver­sion of Engadget was just a hair slower than an iPhone 4…”

Office: “Tight Office inte­gra­tion, com­plete with an awe­some on-phone doc­u­ment and view­ing expe­ri­ence, stands to be one of the biggest dif­fer­en­tia­tors for Windows Phone 7…”

Maps: “Though it’s not quite as full-featured as the lat­est ren­di­tions of Google Maps on Android have been, Microsoft’s Bing Maps imple­men­ta­tion on Windows Phone 7 is pretty great…”

Search: “Microsoft has done a neat job trans­lat­ing Bing’s well-known home page lay­out to the small screen, com­plete with gor­geous rotat­ing imagery and hotspots that reveal fac­toids when you tap them.”

Eh

Social: “Facebook just needs to be sand­boxed a lit­tle bit more. Optimally, Microsoft would go with the Android philosophy…”

SMS: “… fairly bare­bones, but it def­i­nitely gets the job done, and looks pretty good while doing it.”

Zune: “… we love hav­ing almost lim­it­less access to new music on a phone… though you’re adding another $14.95 on top of your exist­ing phone bill…”

Camera: “… Windows Phone 7′s min­i­mum specs should ensure that you’re get­ting at least mod­er­ately decent shots no mat­ter what device you choose.”

Cons

No copy and paste. No third-party mul­ti­task­ing. No Twitter inte­gra­tion. No uni­fied inbox, threaded mes­sag­ing, server-side search for email. Browser doesn’t sup­port Flash, Silverlight or HTML5.

Not Yet Fully Implemented: Marketplace, Xbox Live