[Windows Phone 7 General] N8ter:
HD Video is more important for the average consumer, because they want people to see what's going on when they upload it to FaceBook or YouTube, or make a DVD of the wedding and insert some clips taken from a phone of a hillarious moment. Have you seen HD2 video uploaded to websites? 480p (VGA Video) looks terrible, especially when blown up to full-screen.

High Megapixel cameras are much less important, since the only time someone will seriously shoot at > 5MP is ... I dunny. If they love wasting space or want to print it on a poster...

The average consumer can care less about mass storage, because most of them don't drag/drop files from the computer to their phone. Plugging it in and letting Zune automatically copy media/etc. from the phone/computer and keep the two in sync is much easier. Most normal consumers don't multitask all that much. WinMo/Android phones slow down for them because the average consumer just presses the home key and ends up with 20 things running in the background.

By Local ActiveSync, I assume you mean Local Outlook Sync since Zune does everything ActiveSync did except Syncing outlook data and those crummy ActiveSync Installations. Well, Outlook isn't necessarily a consumer product, so I dunno what else to say there. Last time I checked, Microsoft wasn't even putting it in the Office Home and Student edition of Office.

Is it just me, or do you seriously think Windows Mobile devices appealed more to the Mass Consumer market than Apple's closed-off, barely moddable/customizeable iOS devices? Pass me some of what you're smoking. Microsoft sees market trends. Most Android users don't mod their devices, and even Android vendors like Samsung are modeling their UIs to closely resemble iOS.

It has to do why they had to get rid of WM6.5 and start over. When you ditch one platform and start over, you typically drop things, like DOS support in Windows, and later Win16 support.

Nope. I'm just not oblivious to the way business works, and as a software developer I tend to know more about that line of thinking than many of you guys.

But if you look at an N8 the user interface is crappy, I believe it has no external MicroSD port, the screen is small, etc. It makes a great camera, but the rest of the hardware leaves a lot to be desired. They're also quite overpriced, at least in the US, but hey, you can use it on any carrier!

Windows Mobile is like a decade old. Comparing it to WP7 just seems ridiculous. Yes, WP7 has a better foundation. It has a better foundation at ~2 years of development than Windows Mobile has after 10 years of development. That's why Windows Mobile has to go. A better foundation leads to a better product.

They are getting the best start possible. The End-to-End experience of WP7 is better than that of any other smartphone platform released, and that's what matters to consumers. Being able to go to one source and getting most everything you need (Mail, Cloud Storage, Calendar, Contacts, Music, etc.). It's why Google is trying to work on a Music store, and it's part of the reason why Apple has been so successful.

The OS is smooth and perfromant. The phone hardware is good. And people don't need to scour the market for apps to provide (in this day and age) expected functionality. They just Get their iPhone, MobileMe account, and install iTunes and they're good to go.