Windows Phone has a poor history of support for landscape handsets, despite some of the first devices released with Windows Phone 7 being landscape sliders.

As the picture right demonstrates, the operating system did not make much accommodation for the hardware, resulting in oddities such as a landscape keyboard and portrait start screen.

What however if the start screen did rotate? With Windows 10 Mobile to support small tablets, which are much more likely to be used in landscape mode, this seems to be a coming necessity.

Ryo Qqo have posted the above concept designs of what a landscape start screen should look like, and importantly rotating the screen would not result in the relative position of the Live Tiles changing at all.

The content of square live tiles would simply change orientation, while rectangular live tiles would simply become tall instead of wide, and their content would revert to what would be shown if the live tile was square.

This elegant solution has also been proposed by ex-Microsoftie Nawzil who tweeted some time ago:

The app list an be dealt with equally elegantly as Ryo’s mock-up shows.

See more “screen shots” in the gallery below.

Gallery

What do our readers think of this solution? Let us know below.