Windows Phone 7 (WP7) is the first release of the Windows Phone mobile client operating system, released worldwide on October 21, 2010, and in the United States on November 8, 2010. It runs on the Windows CE 6.0 R3 kernel. It serves as the successor to Windows Mobile 6.5.
Windows Phone 7 was a complete overhaul of Microsoft's previous mobile Windows platforms. It was designed with the distinct flat-style Metro interface. Due to shell changes, Windows Phone 7 cannot run Windows Mobile 6 applications. The first major update to Windows Phone 7 was Windows Phone 7.5, codenamed "Mango", which was globally released on September 27, 2011. Windows Phone 7.x was succeeded by Windows Phone 8, which was released on October 29, 2012; existing Windows Phone 7.x hardware could not upgrade to the incompatible Windows Phone 8 software. As a compromise to existing users, Microsoft released Windows Phone 7.8 on January 31, 2013, adding a few features backported from Windows Phone 8, such as a more customizable start screen and the new bootscreen.
Microsoft ended support for Windows Phone 7 on January 8, 2013, and for Windows Phone 7.5 and 7.8 on October 14, 2014.
History
The Windows Mobile 7 project was started in 2007. Later, because of smartphone patent wars, the Windows Mobile 7 project was cancelled in 2008, instead it was succeeded by the Metro UI designed Windows Phone 7. Microsoft officially unveiled the new operating system, Windows Phone 7 Series, at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona on February 15, 2010, and revealed additional details at MIX 2010 on March 15, 2010. The final SDK was made available on September 16, 2010. HP later decided not to build devices for Windows Phone, citing that it wanted to focus on devices for its newly purchased webOS. As its original name was criticized for being too complex and "wordy", the name of the operating system was officially shortened to just Windows Phone 7 on April 2, 2010.
On October 11, 2010, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer announced the 10 launch devices for Windows Phone 7 with HTC, Dell, Samsung, and LG Support, with sales beginning on October 21, 2010 in Europe and Australia and November 8, 2010 in the United States. The devices were made available on 60 carriers in 30 countries, with additional devices to be launched in 2011. Upon the release of Windows Phone 7's "Mango" revision, additional manufacturers became partners, including Acer, Fujitsu, and ZTE.
Windows Phone initially supported twenty-five languages, with applications being available through Windows Phone Store in 35 countries and regions. Support for additional languages and regions were subsequently brought through both the Mango and Tango updates to the OS respectively.
Features Core Windows Phone 7 is the only version of Windows Phone that features the Windows CE kernel, which was also used in Windows Mobile and Pocket PC systems.
User interface Windows Phone 7 features a user interface based on a design system codenamed and commonly referred to as Metro. The home screen, called "Start screen", is made up of "Live Tiles". Tiles are links to applications, features, functions and individual items (such as contacts, web pages, applications or media items). Users can add, rearrange, or remove tiles. Tiles are dynamic and update in real time – for example, the tile for an email account would display the number of unread messages or a tile could display a live update of the weather.
Several key features of Windows Phone 7 are organized into "hubs", which combine local and online content via Windows Phone's integration with popular social networks such as Facebook, Windows Live, and Twitter. For example, the Pictures hub shows photos captured with the device's camera and the user's Facebook photo albums, and the People hub shows contacts aggregated from multiple sources including Windows Live, Facebook, and Gmail. From the Hub, users can directly comment and 'like' on social network updates. The other built-in hubs are Xbox Music and Video, Xbox Live Games, Windows Phone Store, and Microsoft Office. Due to Facebook Connect service changes, Facebook support is disabled in all bundled apps effective June 8, 2015.
Windows Phone uses multi-touch technology. The default Windows Phone user interface has a dark theme that prolongs battery life on OLED screens as fully black pixels do not emit light. The user may choose a light theme instead, and can also choose from several accent colors. User interface elements such as tiles are shown in the user's chosen accent color. Third-party applications can be automatically themed with these colors.
Text input Users input text by using an on-screen virtual keyboard, which has a dedicated key for inserting emoticons, and features spell checking and word prediction. App developers (both inhouse and ISV) may specify different versions of the virtual keyboard in order to limit users to certain character sets, such as numeric characters alone. Users may change a word after it has been typed by tapping the word, which will invoke a list of similar words. Pressing and holding certain keys will reveal similar characters. The keys are somewhat larger and spaced farther apart when in landscape mode. Phones may also be made with a hardware keyboard for text input.
Messaging Windows Phone 7's messaging system is organized into threads. This allows a conversation with a person to be held through multiple platforms (such as Windows Live Messenger, Facebook messaging, or SMS) within a single thread, dynamically switching between services depending on availability.
Web browser
Windows Phone 7.5 features a version of Internet Explorer Mobile with a rendering engine that is based on Internet Explorer 9.
The built-in web browser allows the user to maintain a list of favorite web pages and tiles linking to web pages on the Start screen. The browser supports up to 6 tabs, which can all load in parallel. Other features include multi-touch gestures, a streamlined UI, smooth zoom in/out animations, the ability to save pictures that are on web pages, share web pages via email, and support for inline search which allows the user to search for a word or phrase in a web page by typing it. Microsoft has announced plans to regularly update the Windows Phone web browser and its layout engine independently from the Windows Phone Update system.
Contacts Contacts are organized via the People hub, and can be manually entered into contacts or imported from Facebook, Windows Live Contacts, Twitter, LinkedIn and Gmail. Contacts may be manually imported from Outlook using Windows Live Contacts or Gmail. A "What's New" section shows a news feed and a "Pictures" section shows pictures from contacts on those social networks. A "Me" section shows the phone user's own social networks status and wall, allows the user to update their status, and allows checking into Bing and Facebook Places. Contacts can be added to the home screen by pinning them to the start. The contact's "Live Tile" displays their social network status and profile picture on the homescreen and the contact's hub displays their Facebook wall as well as all of the rest of their contact information and information from their other social networks.
If a contact has information stored on multiple networks, users can link the two separate contact accounts, allowing the information to be viewed and accessed from a single card. As of Windows Phone 7.5, contacts can also be sorted into Groups. Here, information from each of the contacts is combined into a single page which can be accessed directly from the Hub or pinned to the Start screen.
Email Windows Phone supports Outlook.com, Exchange, Yahoo! Mail, and Gmail natively and supports many other services via the POP and IMAP protocols. For the native account types, contacts and calendars may be synced as well. Users can also search through their email by searching in the subject, body, senders, and receivers. Emails are shown in threading view and multiple email inboxes can be combined or kept separate.
Multimedia
The Music + Videos hub allows the user to access music, videos, and podcasts stored on the device, and links directly to the Xbox Music Store to buy music, or rent with the Xbox Music Pass subscription service. When browsing the music by a particular artist, users are able to view artist biographies and photos, provided by the Xbox Music. This hub integrates with many other apps that provide video and music services, including, but not limited to, iHeartRadio, YouTube, and Vevo. This hub also includes Smart DJ which compiles a playlist of songs stored on the phone similar to the song or artist selected. Purchased movies and other videos can be played through Xbox Video.
The Pictures hub displays the user's Facebook and SkyDrive (Now OneDrive) photo albums, as well as photos taken with the phone's built-in camera. Users can also upload photos to social networks, comment on others photos, and tag photos on social networks. Multi-touch gestures permit zooming in and out of photos.
Media support Windows Phone 7 supports WAV, MP3, WMA, AMR, AAC/MP4/M4A/M4B, and 3GP/3G2 standards. The video file formats supported include WMV, AVI, MP4/M4V, 3GP/3G2, and MOV (QuickTime) standards. These supported audio and video formats would be dependent on the codecs contained inside them. It has also been previously reported that the DivX and Xvid codecs within AVI are also playable on the system. Unlike the previous Windows Mobile operating system, there are currently no third-party applications for handling other video formats. The image file formats that are supported include JPG/JPEG, PNG, GIF, TIF and Bitmap (BMP).
After the "Mango" update, Windows Phone 7 added the ability for users to have custom ringtones. Ringtone audio files must be under 1MB and less than 40 seconds long. Custom ringtones still cannot be used for text messages, IMs or emails.
Games
The Games hub provides access to games on a phone along with Xbox Live functionality, including the ability for a user to interact with their avatar, view and edit their profile, see their achievements and view leaderboards, and send messages to friends on Xbox Live. The Games hub also features an area for managing invitations and turn notifications in turn-based multiplayer games.
Search
Microsoft's hardware requirements stipulate that every device running Windows Phone 7 must have a dedicated Search button on the front of the device that performs different actions. Pressing the search button while an application is open allows users to search within applications that take advantage of this feature; for example, pressing Search in the People hub lets users search their contact list for specific people. This has been changed in Windows Phone 7.5 however – as the search button is reserved for Bing – so applications that previously used this feature (such as the Marketplace) now include soft search buttons.
In other cases, pressing the Search button will allow the user to perform a search of web sites, news, and map locations using the Bing application.
Windows Phone also has a voice recognition function, powered by TellMe, which allows the user to perform a Bing search, call contacts or launch applications simply by speaking. This can be activated by pressing and holding the phone's Start button.
Bing is the default search engine on Windows Phone handsets due to its deep integration of functions into the OS (which also include the utilization of its map service for location-based searches and queries). However, Microsoft has stated that other search engine applications can be used.