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

An added advantage of having a Windows Live account is that you can perform some remote security functions that the small businessperson might find handy. You can, for example, locate your handset useful if you've left it somewhere by setting it to ring even if it is currently set on silent or vibrate. These things might help you recover a lost handset. If all else fails, you can remotely lock or wipe the handset, restoring it to its factory settings and thereby protect all your valuable data from prying eyes.

Email has its own tile on the main screen. Email support runs to both personal email accounts and Microsoft Exchange. There are different screens for all, unread, flagged and urgent messages, and you can easily delete individual messages from any list. Lists of messages show the sender's name in large text, then a preview snippet of the message content, with a colour change indicating if you've read a message or not.

Another central activity for enterprise smartphone users is calendar management, and here Microsoft has taken something of a leap forwards. You can have a calendar tile' on the main screen of the handset and this is a double width tile so that it has the space to show some information about upcoming commitments.