Fired Up for Windows Phone 7

This week, Microsoft took the wraps off Windows Phone 7, as reviewers have begun publishing in-depth reviews of the new experience from Windows Phone (congratulations to our colleagues over in Windows Phone Team ). Like lots of others at Microsoft, we’re device geeks who couldn’t wait to get our hands on what is shaping up to be an elegant, intuitive experience spanning lots of the common things we all need to get done each day.

Not surprisingly, what excites us the most is what the team has done with Bing on the Windows Phone 7. There have been some very positive reviews of the experience as a whole and it’s great to see how the team’s work integrating a native Bing experience has been received. Here are a few highlights:

· “Bing Search is a beautiful experience on the Windows Phone 7 device with amazing background images, fun trivia associated with the images, and a powerful search/decision engine.” Matt Miller/ZDNet

· “Naturally, Bing and Bing Maps are built into the phone as the default search and maps services. They’re nice, smartly contextual, and very location-oriented.” Matt Buchanan/Gizmodo

· “The Bing UI has been neatly brought in line with Microsoft’s Metro design language, and there are numerous neat animation touches.  Zooming out, for instance, eventually flips the map from normal to satellite view, while there’s similarly clever use of zooming to show your own location in relation to search results or destinations. Vincent Nguyen/Slashgear

Here are some screenshots that will give you a feel for Bing on Windows Phone 7.

First, the team delivered nice fidelity to the Bing homepage.

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With some common tasks like weather, Windows Phone 7 provides a visually compelling view on weather data from Bing. Notice the beautiful Swiss-inspired typography.

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The Windows Phone team included access to some very useful task completion features like flight status answers.

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Mapping is well integrated, including elegant navigation for driving or walking.

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Windows Phone 7 has a smart experience for finding local listings like restaurants and attractions.

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And the team did a beautiful job bringing reviews into the business details.

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As you can see, there is lots of cool stuff coming from our friends at Windows Phone. What we can’t show you here is the amazing impact that touch, animation and interaction have on all of these search experiences. Windows Phone 7 is a very different approach to elegant interaction design; it’s almost painful to flatten these designs into screenshots.

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It’s great to experience Bing on Windows Phone 7. We can’t wait until these devices are in the market and see what you think.

Erik Jorgensen, Corporate Vice President, Online Services Division

 

Other posts of interest:

Windows Phone Blog

A Couple of Snacks to Finish the Week