First Look: Windows Phone 7 Series

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Give or take a few versions, Windows Mobile has nearly looked the same for the past ten years, going back to the Pocket PC days. Today at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain, Microsoft took the wraps off its latest iteration: Windows Phone 7 Series. With the new platform comes a whole new user experience and operating system. The home screen is no longer reminiscent of that 4×4 row of icons you’re used to seeing on nearly every smartphone these days. Instead when you unlock the device, you’ll see a series of brightly colored tiles displaying various “live” content. The UI is clearly inspired by the user interface of the Zune HD, with large typefaces, smooth panning and dimmed-out graphics behind the content.

Everything is centralized in a variety of Windows Phone hubs, like Pictures, People, Games, Office, and Marketplace. A hub isn’t just an application with one sole task but multiple tasks inside of one. For example, the People application has your contacts, but also has ties to Windows Live and Facebook. Another unique thing with Windows Phone 7 Series is that there is no desktop syncing application for your PC, it’s all seamlessly synced to the cloud (over-the-air). Music and movies are synced to the phone using the Zune Desktop application, though it won’t be long until we see some sort of third-party iTunes syncing application.

Microsoft is also “taking more accountability” as CEO Steve Ballmer says, for the new phones running Windows Phone 7 Series (that’s seriously starting to become a mouthful, where are the abbreviations?). Each phone must have three buttons (start, search [with Bing, of course], and back), a multi-touch screen, accelerometer, 5-megapixel camera and an FM radio.

There’s nothing better than watching a video and looking at stills of the new user experience, so we’ve included a few of them below.