[Windows Phone 7 General] quicksite:
(First let me say I never knew you posted on subjects other than iContact AE ... )

I'm on my 2nd Android phone now (the new HTC Desire) after 5 prior years on WM ... with my T-Mobile MDA and my T-Mobile Wing.

I loved the HTC Hero (GSM) and just from that phone alone, I was never looking back. After 5 years of tweeking and modding on WM -- almost ALL for the sake of BASIC USABILITY like DIALING A PHONE NUMBER ??-- this is why your inherited app was invented, and why the various keyboards were developed, PLAYING MUSIC -- and why we got MortPlayer, S2P, and eventually Nitrogen --- usable players you could tap without putting the device up to your face and using a stylus. Well it's all been said before me 1000 times. But I'm never looking back and couldn't be happier with the ease of Android, especially with HTC Sense on top.... EXCEPT:

• I could draw a detailed sketch on my MDA over 5 years ago... Can't do that today, not even with my new Desire ... (and I bought the new HTC Capacitive stylus.... Interesting, but not nearly as helpful as I had hoped/expected.)

• I could take quick notes with a stylus much much faster than tapping or typing, and then character recognition to text was pretty damn good... I miss that a LOT

• 5 years ago my MDA, and the Wing, could use Voice Command to dial numbers, open apps, etc... and to me it was SMARTER TECH to enable me to record voicetags for each contact... so much simpler than all the backflips of speech recognition... The former gave exact matches 100% of the time.. 5 years ago, driving in the car, hands free. I miss that. They actually took that away with WM 6... dumb move.

• I can't take screenshots on my $525 Desire phone -- gorgeous display and just as amazing as all the reviews say. But I can't show you what my screens look like, unless I take out a camera and take a photograph of it.

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I cast my vote with: Microsoft blew it big time. Buried heads in sand when iphone reinvented the UI to exploit the inherent properties of a touch device -- your finger tips in motion. Lalalalalalalalalalalalalala, I can't hear you as I prep windows mobile 6.1 with no appreciable change..... Lalalalalalalalalalalalalala, I can't hear you as I hold the fort down with a honeycomb staggered column redesign -- that oughta hold em ....

I have read the good, the bad, the ugly about WP7 ... In some ways I see it as their Hail Mary pass, because the consumer marketplace today doesn't care about the legacy of WM --- nor should they, to be fair. They had their place in the sun, and they could have mopped up for this next decade were it not for that dumb **** in Redmond who admitted to that investor conference "we blew it, we shouldda put more resources on WM7 a lot sooner"... and you need to be a CEO to figure that out? Did anyone in the boardroom even LOOK at windows mobile 6.1 before they even staffed WM 6.5? What was the point?

By contrast, in an orthagonal industry, look what Motorola did in one year with a brand new CEO brought in to save the company known for "used to power the Macintosh" "invented the RAZR"... It's a great read to find the story of this guy, who was the CEO of Qualcomm -- he came to Motorola, saw how disparate the entire product development operation was, with too many phones and too many OSs, and then he happened upon one guy working on an Android prototype.... CEO was so impressed with the particulars of the phone this guy was working on that, in order to leverage resources and talent, and leapfrog back to to lead position of innovation in the industry, he ordered all other development stopped and 100% allocation of product development on the Android platform... He took a leap of faith based on what he saw, then he made strategic moves with Verizon, and this resulted in the biggest phone of 2009 -- the Droid.

And what did Redmond do in this same interval of time?

From what little I have seen, the new WP7 OS is attractive -- and I think it will be competitive as "something different" for people who want an iphoney androidy look but not the same as everyone else.... however i can just tell you now, from a usability designer's perspective, what looks so cool now with that allocation of screen real estate into those large blocks of color and text? That seems cool now, but it won't when people start using their devices and apps, and get tired of having the screen hogged by all that clever new "I'm different" design.

That's my take.

And I exit now with a genuflect toward Avian Waves for his picking up the stunted Burt's iContact and bringing it up to date a year or so ago. It got me through my last stages of WM... and I am not being snide... That was my most "MUST HAVE" app, along with keyboard. And btw, you're up for a Devvy Award for it too ... :)