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.
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.
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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.