Christina Warren on Mashable:
Rather than the phone being the center of your life, your life is the center of the phone. The phone is able to be there when it is needed, but it also lets you live your life and focus on actual connections in the meantime. The tone and the focus of the campaign is coming from a very different direction of Verizon’s ads for the Droid, the HTC ads or even from Apple’s vision of iUtopia.
There will be nine new Windows Phone 7 smartphones available October 21st. All of the following WP7 phones have a 800×480 pixel format:
- Dell Venue Pro: 4.1-inch AMOLED, portrait QWERTY slider, T-Mobile (US)
- HTC 7 Mozart: 3.7-inch, Orange (France, UK), Deutsche Telekom, Telstra (Austrailia)
- HTC 7 Pro: 3.6-inch, Sprint (US)
- HTC 7 Surround: 3.8-inch, slideout speaker, AT&T (US)
- HTC 7 Trophy: 3.8-inch, SFR (France), Vodafone (Australia, Germany, Spain, UK)
- HTC HD7: 4.3-inch, T-Mobile (US), O2 (UK, Germany), Movistar (Spain), SingTel (Singapore)
- LG Optimus 7: 3.8-inch, Telus (Canada), America Movil (Mexico), Movistar (Spain), Vodafone (Germany, Italy, Spain, UK), SingTel (Singapore)
- LG Quantum / Optimus 7Q: 3.5-inch, landscape slider, AT&T (US), Telstra (Australia)
- Samsung Focus: 4-inch Super AMOLED, slate, AT&T (US)
- Samsung Omnia 7 (i8700): 4-inch Super AMOLED, Orange (France, UK), SFR (France), Movistar (Spain), Deutsch Telekom
Except for the Dell Venue Pro and the Samsung phones all are making use of LCD technology. All of the phones have 5 megapixel image sensors, except the HTC 7 Mozart, which is 8 megapixel.
Steve Ballmer:
Microsoft and its partners are delivering a different kind of mobile phone and experience – one that makes everyday tasks faster by getting more done in fewer steps and providing timely information in a ‘glance and go’ format.
Xbox Live Integration: This is going to be big for you Xbox gamers. EA Games will be bringing these titles to WP7 soon: Need for Speed Undercover, Tetris, Monopoly, The Sims 3. On AT&T in the US there will be access to fee-based U-verse Mobile media service. There is no copy-and-paste, just like what Apple did, and it is coming in a January 2011 update.
Geek.com on the HTC HD7:
Overall the screen looks great, the phone is thin, and it has a solid camera that can record HD video. I am a bit concerned about the kickstand getting caught on something and bending or even breaking, but the people at HTC and T-Mobile seemed really confident in the design. If you are looking for a Windows Phone 7 device, this seems to be one of the top picks so far.
Tim Carmody on Wired.com regarding the Samsung Focus:
This was by far my favorite of the three phones. It has a 4-inch touchscreen with beautiful color fidelity. The three hardware buttons don’t depress, but each provides a little buzz of tactile feedback. I even found using the software keyboard and switching from portrait to landscape much easier on the Focus than on the other two phones. That extra half-inch really does make a difference — and the image quality shows off just how graceful the WP7 OS is.
Kevin C. Tofel on Gigaom regarding WP7:
The interface is more unique than any we’ve seen since the original iPhone, with tiles and hubs instead of icons and apps. Dare I say: the Windows Phone 7 user interface is actually a feature and one that will get consumers interested in Microsoft-powered handhelds. A panoramic navigation method both uses limited screen space intelligently and doesn’t force users into deep, cascading menus. And the integration with Microsoft services appears top-notch, ranging from OneNote in the cloud to Zune for media, Xbox Live for gaming and Bing for navigation and search.
