Windows Phone 7 and why it doesn’t suck!

Now let’s be honest, Microsoft didn’t do itself any favors with their foray as a modern mobile phone OS baker. They started with a name that was so long you never knew if you were saying it right and then proceeded to shorten it at least twice that I know of. It took them an extra year (2 depending upon when you start counting) to get the phones out the door and quite honestly no one believed they could do it.

But do it, they did, and late last year they came out with the first WP7 phones. They weren’t much different than the first iPhone in that they were missing lots of features (does anyone still remember complaining that how dare Apple release a phone without Cut and Paste) but the good news were that the phones worked and came in a bunch of flavors – even if they were all based upon Vanilla.

People don’t realize it but Microsoft actually came to the gunfight with a gun, not carrying a knife as most people expected. The stunning part of what Microsoft did with WP7 was they didn’t start out building their OS to look like an iPhone. They actually brought some new ideas to the table and what cool ideas they are. You home screen isn’t a bunch of programs but tiles, and the tiles can be active – so really you have a home screen of widgets. Now very few of them in the first generation of WP7 are actually live as Microsoft likes to refer to them, but you can see the power behind this. Information is communicated to you without going into the application itself – makes it easier to decide if you need to get into it. Android approaches this by allowing you to create widget and IOS uses badges but the intuitiveness of Microsoft’s system is more powerful.

Where this is going in the future is pretty compelling. They have since released Windows Phone 7.5 or Mango. They have finally lived up to the promise of the tiles being live – although we are still waiting for many apps to implement the system. They have integrated social into the phone (stealing borrowing many ideas from the almost defunct WebOS) pretty well with both Facebook and Twitter and enabled the grouping of contacts, which is a pretty powerful tool. Who needs a third part app to send group text messages when that is already included in the OS.

I am looking forward to seeing where Microsoft decides to take Windows Phone in its next iteration known as Apollo and am optimistic that it will make better in roads in its second year as a mobile OS.