Windows Phone 7 review: email, calendar and Microsoft Office first look

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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.

You may have to get your own developers to do some work, or it might mean finding suitable, replacement third party applications in the new Windows Phone Marketplace. At the launch event Microsoft was tight-lipped about how many apps will be in the store when handsets go on sale. If your own favourites have not been updated for the new operating system, you will have to do without them or postpone upgrading.

There are three important areas for any enterprise or business smartphone user email, calendars and productivity. Let's look at each of these in turn to see how Windows Phone 7 stacks up.

The home screen on Windows Phone 7 phones have tiles'. These are basically icons which are automatically updated with live information, reminiscent of the Today screen familiar to users of Windows Mobile 5 and 6. Some of these tiles take you to hubs' - groupings of information that can be drawn from different applications. There are six hubs Marketplace, Games, Music and Video, Pictures, Office, and People.

Sandra Vogel
Sandra Vogel
Freelance journalist

Sandra Vogel is a freelance journalist with decades of experience in long-form and explainer content, research papers, case studies, white papers, blogs, books, and hardware reviews. She has contributed to ZDNet, national newspapers and many of the best known technology web sites.

At ITPro, Sandra has contributed articles on artificial intelligence (AI), measures that can be taken to cope with inflation, the telecoms industry, risk management, and C-suite strategies. In the past, Sandra also contributed handset reviews for ITPro and has written for the brand for more than 13 years in total.