[Windows Phone 7 Development and Hacking] style1:
yeah I feel you guys about the copy and paste even though I hardly use it, but my honest opinion about it is that microsoft didn't just get rid of the system of copy and paste and not give you any options. They instead implemented the "smart option" in which the OS tries to guess or assume (tough to swallow) what you want to do and give you available options. In the demo unit I saw, he was running through possible scenarios where people mostly use C&P(which I assume they have R&D dollars to back), it was for fowarding messages, forwarding addresses and numbers, copying links or locations into search engines, and a few other ways which slip my mind. The system was easily able to do all these simple things. However the only place it failed was when we asked him to copy a paragraph from the internet (which was quite the turtle BTW) and send it in an SMS. That was the ONLY place we could make it fail. So if you do that alot, then yep, be angry. Otherwise not an issue at all. The issues mentioned at the bottom of my original post pose far bigger issues than having copy and paste. But as I mentioned in my OP, I don't think MS intentionally got rid of the stuff we like, I think they tried to integrate something that is better, something for the end user instead of the the heavy user. If thats their ideal customer(everyday users), then yes, Automatic multitasking trumps the task manager style multitasking: active copy paste is useless. I guess...lol

BEGIN RANT/

On a different note, on the innovation side Android reminds me alot of the old WM. Palm/WebOS is a different beast all together. Nokia/Symbian owns majority market share even though its hardly innovative, Iphone has been largely innovative (face it...it is) and is the number 2 OS followed by WM. Image that as a marketer. There are like a million different types of WM phones made by dozens of different manufacturers and somehow they lose market share in 4-5 years to 1 phone made by 1 developer. How is that possible? There is something to be said for massive over-saturation and its effectiveness (NOKIA...I'm looking at you) but as far making hand over fist money, how can you not just look at Apple and say "genius?" 1 phone, locked down, hated by so many, number 2 marketshare in the world. I think if WM is going to get on top they have to attack Apple. Attacking Android does nothing...honestly I think pushing WM 6.5 beats android (Personal opinion) WP7 has to take those Iphone users away from apple. So they have to offer not just something similar, they have to offer something BETTER. So yeah, High level of social integration is BETTER, Simplistic design and text based smooth UI is BETTER, Stronger Hardware BETTER, Xbox integration and heavy game centric focus is BETTER. The Iphone is the enemy here. In order to beat Apple it has to be BETTER at what it does. So, we wont see 8 HTC WP7 phones every year (since there is no point considering WP7's high standards)...thats a good thing. WP7 is putting out a clear and sweeping OS that has one message WE ARE BETTER. I think the average user will be sucked away from Iphone back into Windows because Windows is totally committed to bring a user experience that is uniform across all platforms. If I have a PC and an XBox...WP7 is a no brainer. 23 Million XBox users...thats a lot of people. RANT END/

Thats all my personal opinion though. Butler youre right about not being able to set certain programs as default. As MS is using BING to search, and IE for internet etc....I don't think you'll be able to switch it to opera on the fly. But you can always just select Opera from the programs list or just tag it to HUBs and just select it from there. Although I believe that with the fact that MS has been sued recently in EU for not offering people a choice for their browsing for their PC I'm confident in saying that Opera might still have the option to set at default (as it currently does). We will see though. Its kinda a stretch to relate PC to WP7 as is because its still in rough beta.

~style1~