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CHAPTER 1 GETTING TO KNOW THE WINDOWS PHONE 7 DEVICE
The Lock screen secures your phone contents from prying eyes. It also keeps you from accidentally
“butt dialing” your mom while at the offi ce holiday party. Microsoft has also made the Lock screen
useful by incorporating status updates similar to what you would fi nd on the Start screen, just in a
smaller fashion.
Hubs
Instead of simply offering screen after screen of unsorted icons for all your various applications
and games, Windows Phone 7 organizes everything into hubs. These aren’t just program groups or
folders; they are actually highly interactive and quite revolutionary. You’ve never seen anything like
hubs on a phone, so let’s look at a few examples.
People Hub
The People hub pulls in contacts from a variety of social media sites (such as Twitter and Facebook),
as well as any e-mail services you use (including Exchange and web-based mail such as Gmail and
Windows Live). The People hub aggregates all your contacts, status updates, and images into a
specially tailored set of views.
The main view dynamically sorts your contacts by their update timeline and allows you to
quickly jump to their social network updates. In addition to letting you view the status updates
of all your friends, this hub contains an area called “me,” which allows you to view and update
your own status.
Pictures Hub
The Pictures hub contains exactly what you would expect — pictures, and plenty of them. In addi-
tion to local storage, pictures are pulled from a variety of sources you defi ne and control (including
Facebook, Windows Live, and various online photo services, as well as the feeds of your contacts).
The Pictures hub also offers tight integration with the previously mentioned services, allowing you
to upload and comment on photos directly from this hub.
Music + Video Hub
If you’ve seen one Zune HD, you’ve seen them all.
Seriously, this hub is virtually identical to the Zune HD, except that it’s in your phone, which has
the added bonus of making it way more useful than the Zune HD ever was. You also can use the
super-cool Zune Pass to download unlimited music and video over WiFi and 3G. Video support
includes the standard
.avi and .wmv fi le formats, as well as DivX.
Games Hub
If you’re not impressed by now, you will be shortly. The Games hub is made of 100 percent pure,
undiluted “Awesomium.” It integrates nicely with Xbox Live, featuring a 3D rendering of your
Xbox Live avatar (not to be confused with the 7-meter-tall blue people who run around half-naked
in the forest, or that little bald kid with the arrow tattooed on his head).
You also get Xbox Live games and achievements. Yes, you read that right. You’re probably thinking,
“Wow! Even the Xbox Live Indie Games developers don’t get achievements.” (Unfortunately, as of
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