Since Microsoft is basically starting from scratch in terms of the user experience of their mobile operating system, many of you might be wondering: what’s the SMS messaging experience like on Windows Phone 7? I may be a tall, wide shouldered, burly man in my mid 20s, but I text like a 13 year old girl who is captain of the cheerleading squad, so SMS is important to me. The video below, recorded by the awesome folks from Pocket Now, shows what it’s like to receive an SMS when the screen is off, when the screen is on, what the conversation UI is like, how to send an SMS, MMS, and everything else you need to know about how enjoyable it’s going to be to blast 160 character messages to all your friends.
I have to say, I’m impressed. It’s so clean that it hurts. It makes Apple’s iOS look dated, Google’s Android OS look like MS-DOS, and Symbian … well Nokia hasn’t change the UI of their SMS application since it first introduced color screens. They say that Symbian^3 devices have built in threaded text messaging, a feature that was introduced by Palm with the Treo 600, but I don’t know whether that means Nokia rewrote the messaging application or they simply installed the “Conversation” application by default. If it’s the latter, I’m going to be pissed. Maemo, or MeeGo as it’s now called, has threaded SMS built in right from the start.
What do you think? Are you going to buy a Windows Phone 7 handset at launch just to see what it’s like? I no longer call myself an early adopter and often wait for the 3rd generation of a product before even considering purchasing it, so I’m not going to touch Windows Phone until version 10. That is unless Microsoft does something so amazing that they’ll have me foaming from the mouth.
For now Android 2.2 on my Google Nexus One is good enough.