subject: How Excited to test All Features of Windows Phone 7 On PC [print this page] How Excited to test All Features of Windows Phone 7 On PC
Thanks to free developer tools, though we cannot get it,but you can get a first-hand experience of the basic Windows Phone 7 Series devices on your PC.If you simply want to play with Windows Phone 7, you can use the included emulator to try out the new Metro UI. Here's how to do this today on your Vista or 7 computer.
Tips: This modified emulator image is not official, and isn't sanctioned by Microsoft. Use your own judgment when choosing to download and use the emulator.
Some enterprising tweakers discovered that more applications were actually included in the emulator, but were simply hidden from users. Developer Dan Ardelean then figured out how to re-enable these features, and released a tweaked emulator rom so everyone can try out all of the Windows Phone 7 features for themselves. Here we'll look at how you can run this new emulator image on your PC, and then look at some interesting features in Windows Phone 7.
Setting Up Emulator Rom
You must first download and install the Windows Phone Developer Tools CTP (link below) to test-drive Windows Phone 7 on your PC.Once it's installed, go ahead and run the default emulator as we showed to make sure everything works ok.
Download the new emulator rom from XDA Forums (link below). This will be a zip file, so extract it first.
Remember the place you save the file,you will need it in the next step.
We need to open the emulator in command line and point to the new rom image to run our new emulator image. To do this, browse to the correct directory, depending on whether you're running the 32 bit or 64 bit version of Windows:
64 bit:
C:Program Files (x86)Microsoft XDE1.0
32 bit:
C:Program FilesMicrosoft XDE1.0
Hold your Shift key down and right-click in the folder. Choose Open Command Window here.
At the command prompt, enter XDE.exe followed by the location of your new rom image. Here, we downloaded the rom to our download folder, so at the command prompt we entered:
Let's make a shortcut on our desktop to load the emulator with the new rom directly.
The emulator loads with the full Windows Phone 7 experience!
Now, in the box, we need to enter the path for the emulator followed by the location of our rom. Both items must be in quotes. So, in our test, we entered the following:
Make sure to enter the correct location of the new emulator rom for your computer, and keep both items in separate quotes. Click next when you've entered the location.
Name the shortcut; we named it Windows Phone 7, but simply enter whatever you'd like. Click Finish when you're done.
You should now have a nice Windows Phone icon and your fully functional shortcut! Double-click it to run the Windows Phone 7 emulator as above.
Features in the Unlocked Windows Phone 7 Emulator
So let's look at what you can do with this new emulator. Almost everything you've seen in demos from the Mobile World Conference and Mix'10 are right here for you to play with. Here's the application menu, which you can access by clicking on the arrow on the top of the home screen, which shows how much stuff they've got in this!
And, of course, even the home screen itself shows much more activity than it did in the original emulator.
The new picture hub is much nicer than any picture viewer included with Windows Mobile in the past
Let's check out some of these sections. Here's Zune running on Windows Phone 7, and the Zune Marketplace. The animations are beautiful, so be sure to check this out yourself.
The XBOX hub gives us only a hint of things to come, and the links to games now are simply placeholders.
Here's a look at the Office hub. This doesn't show up on the homescreen right now, but you can access it in the applications menu. Office obviously still has a lot of work left on it, but even at a glance here it looks like it includes a lot more functionality than Office Mobile in Windows Mobile 6.
Stay productive, and on schedule with the new Calendar.
You can even activate the screen lock, and try out the lift-to-peek-or-unlock feature
Here's a look at each of the three apps: Word, Excel, and OneNote, and the formatting pallet in Office apps.
This version of Windows Phone 7 includes a very nice SystemInfo app with an advanced task manager. We hope this is still available when the actual phones are released.
This emulator also includes a lot more settings than the default one, including settings for individual applications.
Conclusion
Windows Phone 7 gives us another big surprise. We just try Windows Phone 7 on PC before , but now we experience more exciting applications, I believe that the real Windows Phone 7 will make us even more excited.
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