[Windows Phone 7 General] N8ter:
I can't reply to all the parts of that. Will take too long.

The build quality of the HD7 is terrible compared to the Dell Venue Pro. HTC was never known for having superior build quality. The HD2 was pretty good, though. Don't know why they paid so little attention to the HD7...

The HD7 has basically the same LCD panel from the Evo and/or HD2. It's not a good panel. It has bad color saturation and terrible viewing angles. It's also overly reflective. Size can only make up for so much, but you can get a Dell Venur Pro 16GB on contract for $50 less than an HD7 and the screen is only 0.2" smaller. The HD7 is a pretty bad phone by current standards. They used parts from last year to build a phone this year, and it's pretty apparent if you look at it next to other WP7 devices.

You can harp on the oversaturation in sAMOLED panels, but the fact and the matter is that it blows this crappy HD7 panel out of the water in almost any category. Viewing Angles, Brightness, Color Representation, etc. It's a bad screen. You can't make excuses for that... It almost looks foggy compared to an AMOLED panel (even something like the MyTouch 4G screen is obviously better).

Also, it has a smaller battery than some Blackberry Curve smartphones. 1150 mAh... Seriously? Anyone who uses their phone moderately will not be able to get good battery life out of that. It may be fine for YOU, at least now, especially with no third-party multi-tasking (this also makes WP7 perform artificially better compared to competing products - it only has to do one task at a time), but once that update comes and you're running 3-4 apps concurrently it will nosedize. All reviews has been pretty negative on the small battery in the phone.

The camera also isn't anything to rave about.

The materials used to build the phone are pretty dubious.

Build quality means the hardware build quality. It has nothing to do with the software.

Moving on to the software (WP7). Yes, they dropped the ball. They missed an opportunity to get a ton of frustrated Nokia and RIM users, as well as pick off more Android/iOS users when they decided to rush the OS out 6-12 months early with entire classes of functinality missing.

WP7 fails as a business phone right now, and Microsoft saying they're focusing on consumers is nothing short of an excuse. They said it will take almost a year to bake the business into the phone, so obviously that was in the roadmap. What they did was rush it out to try to save face while they "finished' the job. Coming from Android and Windows Mobile, some people are tired waiting on Manufacturers, etc. to "finish the job" while they sit there with a down syndrome phone saying "look how smooth it is, it's worth it!"

No HTML5 in the browser. No multi-tasking, C&P, embarassing Exchange Policy Support for a Microsoft OS, a user interface that in several areas looks like only 5 minutes was dedicated to design (Calendar, Dialer, etc.), lack of Flash (oand/r Silverlight), etc. Even blackberries have an HTML browser, now O.o Not to mention WP7 didn't evne attempt to really exploit the enhancements made in Microsoft Exchange to convince business users to use it instead of RIM/Nokie/WM6.5 devices...

If you read my posts in this thread, you can clearly see that I'm not some Anti-WP7 fanboi.

But I think some people are making this OS to be way better than it actually is.

It really isn't revolutionary in any way, and falls on it face in many areas given what competing products can do and [rightfully] assuming competing products will improve as well.

The only thing that's really good about WP7 is the fact that it doubles up as a ZuneHD.

But a ZuneHD is cheaper than a whole smartphone and at this point in time it's almost worth buying an Andriod/iOS device and carrying a (much smaller) ZuneHD around than buying a WP7 device.

The hardware isn't all that good right now (will probably make a lot of "early adopters" mad at CES), and the manufacturers are paying little attention to what they're putting out.

If the Dell Venue Pro was in T-Mobile stores they would hardly sell any HD7s.