[Focus General] Skex:
Just bought 3 foci (sp), Originally got one for my step father who had been working on some old handmedowns and wanted a real smart phone of his own and one for my wife who hated her Pure with such a purple passion that I was almost ready to overlook my no Apple rule and get her an Iphone. They both are loving it.

I went ahead and got one for myself. I have to admit I did a lot of waffling between the focus and the quantum.

Personally I think the quantum's size and form factor is slightly superior. It was just the right size to fit in my hand and be worked easily with one hand while the focus is just a tad on the large size to be truly comfortable.

That said I ended up going with the Focus because damn it's a huge gorgeous screen the potential for expansion and general overall ratings it's getting on the hardware side.

My past experience with smart phones has been with winmo and palm OS. Part of my decision to go with the Samsung was because of my experiences with their older smart phones. In fact I just ran across my old I300 the other day while sorting through some old boxes and the damned thing still runs just fine after a quick charge.

Pro's

that huge screen.

smooth seamless performance.

did I mention that huge beautiful screen?

Expandable memory

Con's

Bing button is too damned easy to hit.

form factor is just a tad to big to be used consistently with one hand.

Who thought putting the USB port on the top was a good idea?

Market place is buggy and has locked up on me several times requiring a reset of the device.

Other thoughts

As a former winmo user I'm definitely missing some of the features that I knew weren't going to make it into this os. I still think it was rather stupid to drop active sync and myphone for this platform. I understand some of the rationals but it's still missed.

Same goes for the lack of access to the files system (in particular the lack of drag and drop and real support for SD storage)

That said the phone is incredibly user friendly. My wife who hated the hell out of her Pure took to this thing like a duck to water and she's far from technically competent with this sort of thing in that she's a fairly typical user who's not interested in tinkering with a device just to get basic functionality. as such this works great for her.

For my part I very rapidly got my start page re-arranged the way I liked it with my tiles organized in the manner in which I typically need them.

I'm still learning things about it like it was a bit of a surprise when my step father showed me how to voice dial calls. (so damned easy it never even occurred to me to try.)

So far everyone I've shown the phone to has been impressed (primarily Iphone users) and several have already expressed an interest in switching to WP7 as soon as their contracts come up for renewal. Especially those who aren't using Iphones since they'll be able to keep their old unlimited data plans with these devices.

I have very high expectations for the future of this platform. As soon as MS gets a couple basic features pushed out (copy/paste, task switching) and developers start getting some quality apps out I see this platform being quite competitive with Apple.

I get that there are some things that it's just never going to match winmo on and that functionality will be missed but after watching Apple dominate the market so thoroughly and observing users such as my wife beating their heads against the WinMo experience I can't really fault MS for shifting design philosophy.

Considering the fact that this OS has only been out a couple months I'd say it's off to a nice start. Sure it would have been nice to have had cut/paste and multitasking so I wouldn't have to listen to the apple fanboi's teases (hey at least it's got MMS out the box) but it is a fully functional smartphone right out the box that can already do many things much easier than my old 6.5 phone could.

Now I just have to find a good case for it.