I foresee some serious cognitive dissonance playing out as Microsoft manages to do a whole lot better than hive-mind "HA HA too little too late / M$ sucks" sentiments have been allowing for. And frankly, Microsoft deserves the success they've got coming to them here. Somehow, the teams responsible for WP7 have been able to overcome the bureaucratic, backstabbing inertia that Microsoft is famous for, and they've produced something pretty damned good for a 1.0. Shame that so few people bother to actually examine the platform in any detail before pontificating about it, predicting its doom, etc.

* You've been shipping mobile software for years

* You have "version 7" in the name of your product

Not trying to be pedantic here -- I know what you mean when you refer to this new mobile OS as "1.0". I just think it's more appropriate to refer to, say, the original 2007 iPhone as 1.0 than the WP7 product.

But I didnt say it sucks, or that there must be something wrong with it, I said I couldnt trust them (with a lot or money) not to suck, and my opinion isnt formed from some hivemend, its formed from the last 10 years of my experience with microsoft products.

Actually you did, almost word for word: "there must be something wrong in there" :)

There sure is. It ships with a browser that's "halfway between IE7 and IE8."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Phone_7#Web_browser

Ouch.

This means that website owners who have already written advanced web interfaces for the mobile browsers on iOS, Android, and BB 6.0 will have to re-engineer their code base for WP7. That probably isn't going to happen until Microsoft establishes an impressive user base.

It's easy to optimize a subset when you can define the subset to exclude everything you can't make fast...

Personally, I doubt that MS will provide those updates. The reason they keep IE6 outdated is because large companies want it that way; that can't handle epic change or their apps will break. If MS is marketing this phone to businesses, you can bet that the browser won't change much.

Also, let's say that companies start buying WP7 phones for employees, and that they pay to build a mobile-friendly version of some internal webapp. If you were designing/coding a site today, and knew you didn't have to support IE6, you most likely code it in a fairly standards-compliant way so that it didn't break when browsers were upgraded; a lot of companies are stuck on IE6 because they didn't code their sites like that.

I wouldn’t say that anyone outperforms anyone else in that video – all three phones seem to be doing those tasks equally well (save for choppiness on Android).

I don't think companies are going to develop for just IE mobile like they did for IE6. And how exactly does adding support for HTML5 break the HTML for older web apps?

Companies who swallowed their poison pill in the early 2000's and built their intranets dependent on IE 6 are feeling the pain now, having to deploy intrusive security measures that don't really secure anything while shouldering the cost of "upgrading" the apps to browsers that run on the OS they want to deploy.

Edit: Add to this the long press of a list item, and between them, most actions are stuck behind an undiscoverable layer of UI.

Long press is the right-click of smartphones.

Yes. Maemo, for one, makes no bones about it: at the X windows level, a long press turns into an a right click.

Contextual knowledge, that's the phrase. With the iPhone, what you see is what you get-for better or worse. In Android, you need to press the menu button to discover the actions you can perform.

Also, I find myself constantly wanting to use Android's back button on the iPad. It's really become quite natural for me on my phone.

That said, I completely agree with the grandparent's comment about the menu button.

But the point remains, I also have a lot of annoyances with i-devices at the same time, compared to the two I prefer my HTC Desire, it would be nice to not be regarded as some type of idiot for possibly thinking that i-whatever arent the pinnacle of design that all things aspire to.