[General Topics] eaglesteve:
Very briefly:

1) Inconsistent performance and freeze prone. Sometimes it is okay for days, sometimes I feezes 20 times a day.

2) Slow. Microsoft was too relaxed when specifying minimum hardware requirements. Hardware vendor did'nt want to beef up the hardware because they try to keep the profit high.

3) Passive screen was no match for capacitive touch screen

4) User interface was based on desktop windows - not optimised for finger use.

5) Most programs have ugly user interface.

6) Many programs no longer works in newer ROM. Too easy to pirate the software so software vendors not motivated to update them.

7) iPhone's application store was a game changer. There are now 185,000 applications to choose from. MS was not able to put together something similar.

8) iPhone's firmware support and upgrade was impeccable. In contrast, window phone vendor almost never support any upgrade. XDA ROM cook had to do this job for them. I think it''s fair to say that without XDA, winmo would have died much much earlier. Ironically, MS didn't express any thanks to the people here. In fact they even tried to threaten them with legal action in the beginning.

9) iPhone has far better ecosystem of accessories such as speaker system that allows you to dock the iPhone.

10) User interface design of iPhone is hard to match. Not just because it uses passive screen and does pinch and zoom. Some applications also use true multitouch UI such as two or three fingers swipe and touch for webpage navigation, thus making it really enjoyable and easy for the user. The keyboard accuracy and forgiveness is great. Webpage scroll down for example, is 100% vertical without having any slight left or right movement. Size of controls, size of text, colors, are all done right. It is easy to accurately click on even extremely tiny link on webpage without being any need to be accurate. In short, everything feels right and works right.

11) MS took too long to react, and did too little too late. Worst, they became very confused.

I was honestly a person who absolutely wanted to stick with MS and had despite iPhone when it was first released. Who wanted a phone with no third party sofotware, right? But then, when things became to change, MS was still complacent, and arrogant. I always told myself that WM7 would blow iPhone away very very soon, so be patient. Then when WM7 was delayed again and again, and when I saw how crappy the new desktop in 6.5 was, I began to doubt the capability of MS and begin exploring iPhone. The other important factor that drove me away was when I saw MS not knowing the direction by pursuing WM7, Zune, and Pink phone simultenously, and that made me lose confidence in MS significantly.

Winmo does have things to its favour though. For example: You have the chance to select the style of phones exactly to your taste. E.g. having hardware keyboard, having hugh or smaller screens, having flash in the camera, having higher megapixel camera. HTC also did a splendid job with its TouchFlo/Sense UI, and in hiding the ugly OS as much as possible from the end user. Unfortunately, the moment you start using your applications, all the ugly UI come back in its full force. Also, Sense UI is not very customizable or flexible for the end user beyond just hiding the unwanted tabs. So, unless your requirements are more or less totally satisfied by the functions of features on TouchFlo/Sense, then you'll still be dealing with the old ugly stylus based user interface.

Winmo is considered to be extremely attractive to people with technical skills to cook/flash ROMs, and for people who wish to keep using the programs they had developed for it. For the ordinary users who just want to get things done easily, quickly, reliably and also with lots of fun, iPhone seems to be able to cater to what they were looking for better.

Hope this give you something to write about.

Cheers.