[Windows Phone 7 General] addicus:
I have been using Mango on my HD2 for the last 2 weeks. I upgraded for 2 main reason. WM6.5.x is viciously unstable and the constant reboots and freezes are inherent no matter how good the chef of the custom roms I used are at their hobby. Next is the platform is dead with no support from MS or developers and sometimes in life you just have to move on or get left behind.

In my short experience what I've found is all the things I complained about WP7 not having from day 1 really didn't mean ****. Here's why.

While I would prefer to have BT transferin addition to the other transfer methods, over the 4+ years I was using my smartphone I never used the feature beyond sending files to my wife's HD2 from mine. You have to really trust someone to give them access to your phone through BT and honestly, people here in So. California don't trust each other that much or get to know each other that well or even know wtf the damn feature is. Emailing or messaging is much less obtrusive, although needing cell service is a bad drawback.

Stability is awesome. With Mango my phone rocks and rocks hard all damn day. I get a total of about 100 emails a day and 300 text a day along with some lengthy phone calls (3 or 4 for 20 minutes or so), extensive internet browsing, gaming (me and the kids) and the phone doesn't freeze. Battery wise, my phones have always been connected to a power source so I doubt they would last all day (gaming is a battery killer!).

Also, I don't have to go searching for the information that is important to me. The live tiles update is superior to every other news feed implementation I have seen or used. I have 3 emails and my SMS messages on my live tiles screen. The only improvement I would make is having my email messages scroll atop the screen the way the SMS messages do for easier previewing and reading. My coworkers, who like myself, are crazy multi taskers due to the amount of commitments and assignments we all have come by my desk and are wowed on how much more integrated and complete the usage of WP7 is than their phone OS's (iphone, android, blackberry). IT hates Android security so much they tell people our Outlook servers don't support their phones. Granted these guys are Apple fiends, but it's the point that matters. The real scary part is I am extremely vocal (and against the trend @ work) on my stand that Apple is overrated, Android is extremely fragmented (like my WM phones had been for years) and Blackberry is not a full functioning "life phone" (good for exchange, but not for every day life living) and guess who everyone calls for assistance when their products break down? Me. Thank you for letting me brag a little.

The real point being - this **** just works and works great. 3 years ago I loved tinkering. Now my life is so busy I really don't have the time or desire to always be fixing my fixes. My wife is team manager of our daughters soccer team and deals with 30 parents and coaches all day. She needs stability and functionality. The "pretty" **** goes out the window when you are on an important call and the phone freezes, can't send or receive the emailed document you need to exchange and can't type a professional note on the fly and get it to the tournament heads you are dealing with. That's real life. WP7 does it better and more simple for her because she wouldn't ask God for directions to the pearly gates if she were lost. We don't need 5 different home screens or 600 program icons. We need information and we need it now - clearly accessible.

If Windows Phone couldn't do that, it would be a dead in the water **** program. Luckily for MS that got that right and when you get it all up and running the damn live tiles look good too. Applications and development are coming at a quick pace and look good also. No complaints here, but hey I didn't jump ship right away either. I knew without Mango it wasn't going to be effective for me (no Groups for email/texting).

My only major complaint is MS not putting out the product in the Mango form originally. There was enough work and experience with Windows Mobile to know what the **** we needed from the get go. It should have come out of the box kicking ass and taking names instead of ramping up into the monster it is becoming. MS needs to recognize the people who are going to push the average user to the platform have a very, very, short transition period (basically 1 week) and not giving us the basics we were used to is a slap to the face. I know the other platforms did the same thing, but let's be real, MS really is the reason we even know about 90% of the features we have on smartphones. Dual cameras, multi email accounts, sms texting, multi media video taking and playing, etc.... are things we have been doing on Windows Mobile since 2005 at least. Android and IOS weren't even created yet. If they are going to be the leader (if that is truly their desire), they need to also come out of the gate with the proper style and function that dictates they aren't playing around. No disrespect to Belifore or the other guys over there at MS, but watching them explain the greatness of this platform isn't intriguing. They seem to be playing around with how damn functional this product is and not really getting to the point that Windows Phone is a kick ass product that allows you to more successful in your every day life without that extremely steep Windows Mobile learning curve. They really need to step up their game.