A Year in Review of Windows Phone Part 2

      Hello again!! Just to recap, I had my new Windows Phone loaded with contacts, Facebook friends, pictures and music at the end of the last post. In this post I will talk about navigating the phone since this user interface is far different than any other. Like I said before, at first glance, it looks like a bunch of boring square tiles. Now that I had all of my information on the phone though, the tiles came "alive". Alive?? What do I mean by that??
     Well, generally speaking, these tiles take place of the "icons" you would be used to if you owned am iPhone or Droid. These are a mix between the iPhone icons and the Droid widgets. Take for instance the "Messaging" tile, it displays the number of unread messages on it and the face changes from happy to sad if you have unread messages. The "Phone" tile displays missed calls or unheard voice mails. My Weather Channel app tile displays weather conditions and also flips over to show the weather map. I know that none of this sounds great or extremely useful, but, I can unlock my phone and see everything I need to see in a glance without opening any of the apps. I have contact groups that I made and pinned them to the start menu. In doing that, these tiles will show if there are any updates from anyone within the group, such as a wall post on Facebook or a new picture they've added. There's just too much for me to describe here, just today I found something new on my phone. I was looking in the pictures hub and clicked on "People". There I was greeted with tiles representing myself, my groups, and any contacts that had photos that were "tagged" on Facebook. How cool is that?? I can see a ton of photos in an instant without them even taking up memory on my phone! I can even tag people in the photos that I take and post them on Facebook. No app needed! Cool. Which brings me to the last thing that I was talking about in my previous post, about how you can store photos and music on what Microsoft calls the "skydrive" which is a part of your Live ID functionality. Your Skydrive is 25gb of online storage for anything you want, photos, documents, music, whatever. As you put files in the Skydrive, you can access them from your phone, meaning that you can view photos, listen to music, or view/edit documents in an instant without ever having to save them to your phone. How cool is that??? The best part about it is that it's really fast, you won't believe how quick you can view an entire folder of pictures with your phone. I think this is one of the best features Microsoft offers!
     So, what to talk about next?? I've got a really cool feature in mind to talk about next time, it involves using your voice and only your voice to interact with the phone. Until next time!!