[Windows Phone 7 General] PoisonWolf:
Don't mean to burst your bubble....

Android still wins in terms of features. Their openness provides for the perfect breeding ground in terms of having creative people just do things on the platform.

But....you really need to see the WP7 UI in your own two hands two understand the difference. I didn't really "get it" before. I'm not saying WP7 is better. I'm saying that in terms of the fluidity at least, they've got the butter nailed down so smooth and fine it's like they've used lubricants designed for manless space-ships that will travel to Uranus/Saturn and never make it back. It's that good that you can expect the fluidity to last indefinitely. I've been using the HD2 with WP7 for a day now, and I've just kept pressing home after home after home from many applications and not once has the damn thing stuttered (I don't even know how to close apps, something I would keep in check on Android). This is the benefit of WP7. While the feature set is not higher than Android, it does what it can do, very nicely. Similar to iOS, you could say, but with the upside of being on many manufacturers.

I've often used the same points to show a lack of HW acceleration on Gingberbread. In any type of launcher on Android that doesn't do "page flipping" (as these type of launchers can mask what I'm asking of really well) of the Apps, such as Launcher Pro, go to the App screen, and scroll up and down SLOWLY. Do it as slow as you can. Now, if you take the same phone (naturally, only the HD2 can do this now:P), and do it on WP7, you will instantly notice what people mean by smooth. On Android (on Gingerbread, I can't speak for ICS as I understand ICS has HW acceleration now), it almost becomes evident that it's jittery, akin to being frame by frame, or at least, insufficiently fast such that the eye is capable of detecting each frame, thus resulting in the jittery effect. You will find this same effect even in Gingerbread's setting screen. Of course, the degree to which this jittery is evident is masked by the strength of the CPU.

Android will jitter (on gingerbread) because there is no HW acceleration. It is software rendering. Remember the old days of GPU drivers where you'd need to choose the actual 3D driver and not "Software Rendering"? Sure, the software rendering can play the games, but it's really the 3D driver that shines. The analogy is akin to that.

Therefore, today, Android phones are given such beastly specs, such as 1.5 Ghz dual-core processors....I've often thoughts (even before trying WP7) that it is due to this annoying lack of HW acceleration, that they would require faster and faster CPUs to give the illusion of Hw-accelerated smoothness when it's actually not. Android definitely gets the job done in terms of UI fluidity. That's no question, and it does not pretty well.

Now, don't get me wrong. I still disagree with the OP that WP7 is king, etc. I see a lot of benefits and strengths for both platforms. But for me, I realized that I rarely used the market, and that the calendar, email-syncing, and money-tracking was all that is important to me, I decided to be a little open-minded that see what WP7 was all about. I can say it's definitely impressive and something I want Google to strive to be in terms of aesthetic performance. I mean, heck, I saw stuttering on the Galaxy Nexus videos and it has HW acceleration!

At the end of the day, just pick what OS you like but as an Android lover to another Android lover, if you can play with WP7 for a prolonged period of time without committing to a 2-year contract or having to buy a new device, do it. It won't hurt you.

If you guys want, I can try to take a video for you to demonstrate what I mean by the fluidity of the device on a technologically ancient device like the HD2. Smoothness + speed with no problems whatsoever.

P.S. In this instance, smoothness relates to fluidity. For the time I've used it, everything on the phone opens up just as instantaneously as it did on Android. I didn't expect too much of a difference since both WP7 and Android was tested on my HD2 (i.e., hardware held constant). Therefore, by holding the device constant, the difference in UI experience can be mostly attributed to the respective operating systems (I say mostly because one could argue that the drivers are <insert reasons for either here>).