[Windows Phone 7 General] thx1200:
Touchdown, specifically, is an amazing Exchange client. It's as functional as Wm6.5 and has a huge slate of futures on the 'todo' list. If I ever went to Android, that's where I would go. It will work on all Android devices, so you aren't married to an OEM like HTC.

Interestingly, I'm not sure why so much weight is put into bundled OS features. When you install Windows, you get zero Exchange support. You need Office to get that. I see the same thing with Android. I get a powerful multipurpose OS (like WinMo), but I just have to get a third party app to get my Exchange.

The devices tend to be cheaper than the WinMo counterparts, so as far as total price, it's a wash.

I saw the same thing and was very unimpressed. It's a slightly prettier WinMo 6.5 with the Outlook Mobile 2010 client and the added feature of multiple Exchange mailboxes. Big deal. That could be easily been added to 6.5 (but wasn't and now probably never will be), will be available in the afforementioned Touchdown. Not winning me over.

The Sharepoint service is a bit overhyped. It's good to get the enterprise docs on the go, I will admit, but the Word implementation on WP7 (no copy and paste -- here we go again) is so lousy, you might as well not have Word. You can use the online portal in your browser on any device and get better viewing capability, and then just download the doc from that to edit using the better word processor apps for other platforms (DOC/DOCX is supported on MANY). It's a few more steps, but 100x more useful than what WP7 looks like now. Still FAIL in my book. This OS is supposed to be revolutionary. Giving me what others are already providing (including your own predecessor OS), not much more, and yanking out a ton of features we are all used to, and doing this all after several years of development, is just flat-out FAIL.

I'm a little skeptical. I've talked with several developers who had some good ideas for iPhone, but never made a lot of money. I mean maybe your friend knocked it out of the park with a unique idea, it's always possible, but this is not a goldmine for most. More than likely you will make a little side cash, but not much more. Most of the statistics I've read is that if you are a top earner, you make a **** ton of money, but even at like the 90th percentile, you aren't making much. So basically, it's a crapshoot.

Sadly, the app store concept tends to create a "race to the bottom" where all apps are 99 cents. And since they are so cheap, no company really wants to invest a lot of time into making a really powerful app, like an office suite or whatever, because the return is so bad. So what you get is a million "weekend hacks" like you described. Some are great. But most are tip calculators and the like. Useful, certainly, but only in a very simple single purpose way.

The WinMo 6.5 marketplace certainly is not (yet) a race to the bottom. In fact, for quite a few weekend hacks, you still see $1.99 to $4.99 price tags, which is too much. But on the other hand, you can get some really powerful stuff, like all of SPB's software. With the $9.99 to $19.99 price tag (some would say too much), you get these larger more in-depth products. Yes, I know they exist in Apple's marketplace too, but they arne't selling like the 99 cent apps.

I don't know the answer to that problem. There's probably no good solution. I do think that allowing side-loading, so you can still go to Handango, or directly to the developer's website would help, as it would allow developers to think "outside the box" and develop apps that MS would not otherwise approve. In other words, allow developers to take risks.

Plus, then the R rated apps that tend to be filtered out have an avenue of distribution. Which is really quite silly that adults can't buy that stuff for iPhone. Silly.