Windows Phone 7 review: email, calendar and Microsoft Office first look

Microsoft may be aiming Windows Phone 7 at consumers, but there are plenty of features that will appeal to the business user. Sandra Vogel takes a sneak peek at the email, calendar and Office apps included with Microsoft's latest smartphone operating system.

By Sandra Vogel

published 15 October 2010

in News

Ata-glance calendar information is not particularly novel, but Microsoft takes the idea a step further in that the lock screen on a handset shows your next calendar appointment, so that you don't have to go through the bother of fully unlocking your phone and opening an app to check where and when your next time commitment is.

A real innovation is that a Windows Phone 7 device can display data from two calendars at once showing the pair vertically side by side. This means you can match up a work and home calendar, or maybe a calendar for yourself and your partner in order to avoid any scheduling conflicts.

Verdict

From what we've seen of Windows Phone 7 so far, the new smartphone operating system looks like a mixed blessing for business users. The interface has been significantly improved over previous Microsoft smartphone operating systems, but users dependent on third party apps, as well as copy and paste, may want to postpone upgrading for now.

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Sandra Vogel is a freelance journalist with decades of experience in long-form and explainer content, research papers, case studies, white papers, blogs, books, and hardware reviews. She has contributed to ZDNet, national newspapers and many of the best known technology web sites.

At ITPro, Sandra has contributed articles on artificial intelligence (AI), measures that can be taken to cope with inflation, the telecoms industry, risk management, and C-suite strategies. In the past, Sandra also contributed handset reviews for ITPro and has written for the brand for more than 13 years in total.