Buy your Windows Phone 7 handset on Monday, Nov. 8 and start sorting through the phone's Marketplace hub for more than 1,000 initial games and apps. In alphabetical order, here's what stood out for us, in usefulness, innovation, and in exploiting the unique qualities of Microsoft's (MSFT) innovative mobile user interface. (Or access Marketplace via Microsoft Zune software on your PC.)
AuthAnvil Softokens | Scorpion Software | Category: Business | Free
Use this app to turn your Windows Phone into a two-factor authentication device. It creates unique one-time passwords for logging into stuff like Windows servers, and provides credentials for VPNs, WLANs, and Web applications, including Outlook Web Access and SharePoint. Required: corporate subscription to the vendor's service.
Adobe Reader | Adobe Systems (ADBE) | Category: Productivity | Free
Windows Phone 7 doesn't yet support Adobe Flash for video, but this version of Adobe Reader (9.0) lets your phone open PDF files from e-mail, the Web and the phone. Supports full range of PDF specifications, and multi-touch gestures, in portrait and landscape views.
Congress | Sunlight Labs | Category: Productivity | Free
Talk about timely, given the new faces in Washington. The Congress app is almost literally a "window" into the U.S. Congress: using your location, it can list your federal legislators by your location, by state, by name or by committee. Each one has a profile, with photo and other info. It tracks the official's tweets, or tweets about the official and it creates a list of linkable relevant videos. [There's a very similar 99 cent app, Congress 411.]PHOTO CREDIT: Architect of the Capitol
eBay | eBay, Inc. | Category: Lifestyle | Free
Rated 4 out of 5 stars by users. The app completely adapts the full eBay experience to the Windows Phone 7 user interface, apparently successfully: users repeatedly praise its speed and functionality. A few say some navigation is "rough around the edges."
Fast Message | Freier Niels | Category: Productivity | 99 cents; free trial
This app creates and saves templates for SMS and e-mails. You can pick a template and send it, instead of typing, yet again, "In a meeting, call you back later."
Flickr Manager | Asim Goheer | Category: Photos Free
User reviews on Zune praise the clean user interface, ease of use, and wealth of features to fully manage your Flickr account and photos. Some say it can be slow in viewing pics.
GoVoice | Nick Yu | Category: Social | $2.99; free trial
GoVoice is a third-party app for Google (GOOG) Voice: you first create a Google Voice account, then GoVoice on your phone displays the Google Voice in-box, with call history, transcribed voicemails, etc. Reviews are generally good, currently with a rating of 3.5 out of 5 stars. Some of the complaints: slow at times, no background notifications currently, scrolling is occasionally problematic for some users.
Group Text (apparently formerly called Text Message Secretary) | LmOffice | Category: productivity | $1.99
Create and organize groups and contacts for sending SMS text message en masse, including pre-defined messages; create as many groups as you want, using as many of your contacts needed; groups can be color coded for visual organization. BrightKite is another group texting app, free.
Loopt | Loopt, Inc. | Category: Social | Free
Loopt uses phone locations and identity to create a network of your friends on Loopt: you can see who's nearby, and "what's happening" via this social network. The app's live tile lets you see whether you have updates (friends sharing their location, commenting etc) without having to log in.
Mental Paper | NTkachov | Category: Productivity | Free trial: unlimited, supported by ads; purchased app, for $0.99, eliminates the ads.
This is one app that really needs to be seen, and tried out: the developer bills this as the "thinking man's note pad," a free-form note-taking user interface, with rudimentary copy/paste [take that, Microsoft!]. You can start typing anywhere on a Mental Paper "page" and build lists, tables, check lists, trees and other formats. It seems to let you type thoughts almost randomly, keeps them separate, and lets you expand them by adding a checkbox, or other feature to further unpack the idea.
Netflix | Netflix, Inc. | Category: entertainment | Free
Your Netflix account for your Windows Phone 7 handset, including the ability to instantly watch streaming TV shows and movies from Netflix. It's part of the Netflix unlimited membership. Zune reviewers praise the "cool," easy-to-navigate pivots, "flawless" video performance, good performance over both Wi-Fi and cellular connections. One nit: 1.0 won't let you edit your Netflix queue. (Check out Ustream's Ustream Viewer, a free app for following live video broadcasts.)
PC Connector | RBear.net | Category: Tools | free trial; $4.99;
You need to add a client to your PC, as well as this app on your Windows Phone: then you can download/upload files remotely, e-mail files from your PC, manage multiple downloads from your PC and the Web. One user, in the reviews section, says the app works exactly as advertised but is not for the faint of heart: he had to fiddle with the configuration of his home wireless router to get it working. And the app's user interface is "weird" but "it works."
Shazam | Shazam Entertainment Ltd | Category: Entertainment | Free
Formerly also on Windows Mobile, Shazam lets you use your phone's microphone to 'hear' a music track, even a song on a movie soundtrack. Shazam then identifies it almost instantly, and can link you to Microsoft's Zune music and media service for detailed info, purchase and download.
Twitter | Twitter, Inc. | Category: Social Version 1.0.0.0 | Free
At this writing, there are about two dozen reviews of this app and 17 give it a 5-star rating. It's generally praised for performance, wealth of features, the clean Windows Phone 7 interface.
YouTube | Microsoft | Category: Music & Video | Free
There's a debate whether this is really an app: essentially, you click on the icon, and it redirects you to the m.youtube.com site for mobile users, through the greatly improved mobile Internet Explorer. Users slam it as "lame" but it's won 3 stars for doing "the job of bringing YouTube to Windows Phone" and for good streaming performance.
WeatherBug | WeatherBug | Category: News and weather Version 1.0.0.0 | Free
Puts a local weather summary on your home screen, updated immediately via the Windows Phone 7 push capability, with such information as severe weather alerts. Rated 4 out of 5 stars by users who like that the "live tile" approach keeps the information current on the phone's start screen. Some said it can be slow starting, and when switching between cities for information.
Buy your Windows Phone 7 handset on Monday, Nov. 8 and start sorting through the phone's Marketplace hub for more than 1,000 initial games and apps. In alphabetical order, here's what stood out for us, in usefulness, innovation, and in exploiting the unique qualities of Microsoft's (MSFT) innovative mobile user interface. (Or access Marketplace via Microsoft Zune software on your PC.)
