[Windows Phone 7 General] spliffmonkey187:
If i were to tell you why to buy a WP7 phone. A number of things come to mind that you would have to consider.

As a consumer:

- UI design and homogeniality is well executed. If you are looking for something innovative, not too in your face and will impress your friends and family then Metro UI and its functionality is for you. If your friends own a iphone4 or premium android phone even they will take notice of your phone and its UI design i know mine have and they are all tech savy ppl (we are a bunch of engineers and IT pros). Customisation may not be as open as android but in all honesty the strength of Metro UI comes from the fact it looks and feels simple and does what it has to nothing more nothing less. With unlocks and sideloaded apps you can take your customisation further than what you have by default but it still maintains the Metro UI. This may change in upcomming updates but right now it works and works great.

- The integration of MS software and products like Zune, Hotmail & Outlook (Exchange not fully implemented but good enough), Office and Xbox Live services. Heck if you have the right monthly subscription with your network you can really put the integrated sky drive synching to good use :)

- Current generation of WP7 phones

They are equivalent in board component standards (basically all your cpu, gpu, and other integrated elctronic components) to any and all 'currently' available android and apple phone hardware(dual core cpus excluded as these are comming to market in the next cycle). I find it funny that people try to berate wp7 phone hardware when some of the highest selling android models are manufactured by the same manufacturers and their components are made by the same groups (arm, qualcomm ..etc) and in most cases are using the same generation technology and/or production tooling.

- Apps:

let noone sell it to you any other way the wp7 marketplace is doing fine, i dare say as good as Apple's AppStore in terms of quality of apps, albeit the appstore is a matured platform and has established itself with alot of top classs devs, but marketplace has started to pick up steam and while it may not have the number of apps that say android and apple have currently.

It is well on its way to those heights with the added benefit of not having alot of the junk that say android's market does which i have always felt inflates numbers since basically 'an app is an app' right? There are Apps on the marketplace that will leave you saying 'wtf' but they are in the very very small minority and the vetting process for the marketplace is stringent. Which in terms of developing apps is not cool but do you really need more iFart apps?

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I hope this helps you out with your choice mate. From a personal stand point I am not entirely satisfied (meaining i like it but i expect more) with the current feature set offered by vanilla WP7 and i would encourage you to wait for Mango if you have not got a developer unlocked phone. But if you can jailbreak your WP7 and get to sideload alot of cool apps then it really shows it can hold its own and punch above its weight as most of the functionality that should have been accessible in the first palce is locked away. With Mango WP7 will have nothing holding it back, it will no longer be about catch up but about taking the lead.