Reviews

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.

15 Oct 2010

The Office hub is the one you'll use for many productivity functions. Within it you can get to the all important document editing and creation features. It is easy to create new OneNote, Word and Excel documents and see others that have already been created. Cutting, copying and pasting of text and images is currently not possible, although Microsoft has announced a software update, due in the New Year, that will add these essential features.

When it comes to PowerPoint, you can do some basic editing and the viewing experience includes support for animations in presentations. Presentations looked pretty slick on the demo we saw, though it remains to be seen how well Windows Phone 7 will cope with real world presentations. We don't think you can actually give presentations from a phone we've not seen any evidence of Windows Phone 7 devices with video-out ports for connecting an external screen or projector.

Most importantly for enterprise users, Windows Phone 7 integrates with SharePoint 2010 so you can access shared office files and keep them synchronised. For those who don't have access to SharePoint 2010, there's Windows Live SkyDrive which is Microsoft's consumer online storage service. Free space is limited to 25GB and can be used for a range of different files across a handset not just for work-related documents but for photos as well, for example.