Window Phone 7

The first thing you notice about the Windows Phone 7 is it’s amazingly smooth interface. It does not matter if you’ve used older Windows Mobile phones because this is something straight out of a wormhole from the future.

To start using (or unlock) the phone, you simply lift the wallpaper upward. Yes, the whole screen raises up like a curtain to reveal an incredibly simple, yet totally functional “Start Screen”.

Instead of a home menu which reveals a grid of 20 icons, you see a maximum of 8 large squares which contain a mixture of icons and information you’ll need to get going. Each of these squares is an application. Messaging has one, email has its own, calendar has another. Each square is so large that even a person with super-fat thumbs can’t get it wrong.

Apart from the “Start Screen”, the Windows Phone 7 doesn’t give you any other options for customisation. Shift the screen to the right, as the white arrow shows, and you’ve got the rest of your apps in an alphabetically ordered list. No folders, no sorting, nothing. One icon per app in a long, long list.