Review: Samsung Focus with Windows Phone 7
I expected a lot from Microsoft Office on Windows Phone 7, and the office suite failed me completely. I don't care much about writing a new Word document or creating a new spreadsheet, but I definitely want to be able to read, edit and comment on existing Office docs when they are sent to me as attachments. Unfortunately, Windows Phone 7 did a horrible job handling these files.
Large attachments obviously take a longer time to download, and I'm fine with that, but the phone did a poor job telling me how much time was left, leaving me wondering if the download had failed.
The Samsung Focus opened my Microsoft Word document with no trouble, but it failed to open both my Excel spreadsheet and my PowerPoint deck. I tried simpler spreadsheets with less formatting, and these came through, but my test sheet is not too complicated, and certainly not as robust as what you'll find in a real corporate ledger. Ditto my PowerPoint presentation. Also, though the Word document opened, it was reformatted to fit the Focus screen. I could not view the document in its “Page Layout” view to see how it would look printed, or on a desktop.
This is all inexcusable from Microsoft. I want Word documents to look like perfectly printed pages. I see this on plenty of other platforms, even using third party apps, and Windows Mobile 6.x had no problem with this. I'm also flabbergasted that my Excel and PowerPoint files would not open. I want to view perfect representations of these files on my phone. I'd also like to be able to perform simple edits and leave comments on both Excel and PowerPoint files.
Office on Windows Phone 7 does let you share documents using a SharePoint server. Using SharePoint, you can add notes for follow-up and detail edits for co-workers to read. You can also synchronize documents with a SharePoint 2010 server, or keep the files in the phone's memory to work offline. I'm sure this would all be very useful if the Office suite were able to actually open my Office documents.
The Samsung Focus has a nice looking calendar app, but it isn't as useful as I'd like. The calendar on Palm WebOS devices, for instance, shows you how much time you have between events. I'd also like to see more desktop-style features on this phone, like being able to see when my coworkers and event attendees are also free on their calendars. You can invite people to an event from the Windows Phone 7 calendar, but there are few advanced features for scheduling.
Windows Phone 7: Hands-On
Samsung Focus
