Windows Phone 7: The AnandTech Guide

The Browser: Somewhere Between IE7 and IE8

I mentioned earlier that there were a ton of different builds of the WP7S running around on the ASUS-built phone hardware during MIX10. I think that's almost an understatement; I can mentally count at least three different builds from visual clues alone. If you watched the videos, you likely heard me allude to the "squeeze" effect that's been added to the tiles in the newer builds of the phone I saw on Monday. In these, the tiles compress like a spring, slightly, when you reach the end of the stacked list. The hardware demo I got hands-on with was a game demo phone, not an overall UI demo phone. This explains why it lacks the newer squeeze effect in the UI and was just a tad rougher around the edges in some places, but had all the game demos installed.

The other unfortunate consequence of this hardware being a game demo phone was that it lacked a SIM. Undeterred, I hastily popped the SIM out of my phone, which Andre graciously (and surprisingly) installed for me.

A paperclip, a paperclip, my kingdom for a paperclip!

I wasn't allowed to grab any photos of the phone with its battery cover off, though there's probably not much to be learned except for this phone's IMEI.

A few seconds later, and we had signal and were on AT&T's network. I fired up the browser first. WP7S ironically chose nyt.com as the default start page, likely a nod to Apple's prodigious use of the New York Times webpage in early iPhone marketing to demonstrate that it had a real browser. Initially, all of the status icons at the very top are hidden except for the current time. They gracefully slide down when this upper region is tapped. This is just another example of Microsoft's "Metro" less-is-more philosophy at work. Note the G to the right of the two signal bars; I'm speculating that G stands for GPRS, which partially explains why cellular data was so slow. I should note that AT&T's 3G and EDGE services were extremely slow in Las Vegas the entire time, and even worse at the conference venue. I rarely saw speeds above 150 kilobits/s on 3G or EDGE, if at all. I fully attribute the browser loading slowness to network connectivity.

It's difficult to get a good feel for the browser without a better network connection. There was also a bit of difficulty getting the screen to register my zoom out gesture. Throughout the conference, false touches on the demo hardware abounded. I did notice that this demo device had a plastic film atop the screen, which could have been a contributing factor. Whatever the case, touch recognition still needs - and likely will get - tweaking across the platform.

We eventually gave up doing a lot of things I wanted to do online because of how slow the network connectivity was. I didn't get a chance to run any browser standards compliance tests in person, however the emulator includes Internet Explorer. Sadly, WP7S' browser still doesn't pass the Acid2 or Acid3 tests:

Acid2 and Acid3 tests, respectively

I pulled the user agent out, which is: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows Phone OS 7.0; Trident/3.1; IEMobile/7.0). Picking this apart, we can see that it's reporting itself as Trident/3.1, which is essentially Internet Explorer 7.0. This mirrors what I was told by some of the Microsoft engineers in-person, that the browser was somewhere between IE 7 and IE 8.