Windows Phone 7 Launch today

[localzuk]

But competition with Apple over operating systems brought us Vista and 7 - bells and whistles and style over substance, and a large chunk of us are left out in the cold.

 

Vista is slated due to it being a major change from what came before, plus the annoying over-active UAC. Windows 7 solved those issues, and is a very nice OS. I prefer it to OS X now. I even prefer it to Ubuntu, which makes me sad somewhat. The thing is, consumers demand bells and whistles, and it is Apple that taught them to do that. Before Apple's designs, computers were dull grey boxes. Then they brought out the first iMac and shocked the world into thinking home electronics could be nice looking. Bells and whistles are good!

[Tunster]

I'm not a fan of the interface myself, but it would work *really* well on a tablet device. Microsoft really need to get onto that to smack the iPad about

 

and yes, it's nice that MS have stepped up the game at last. I'm an unashamed iPhone fanboy myself, but competition is good and means Apple are forced to keep up. The better the competition, the better for us all.

Deffo about a separate OS for Microsoft based tablets. We've seen the Windows on a tablet before (which failed to take off!) and still the iPad will triumph because the interface makes sense. As much as I moaned about Apple backing out of making a Mac OS X version for the iPad initially and going lazy porting the iPhone's OS, why break something that doesn't need fixing?

 

However, Microsoft are always playing catch-up now. It doesn't look like WM7 goes one step ahead of Apples iOS in terms of it's usability and innovates touch screen software technology. iOS did that. It's just a different version of the same system. Apple aren't forced to keep up. They're leading the way unfortunately and setting benchmarks for the other companies. Android (which I used from its birth to version 2) is another adaptation and cheaper to deploy for other companies to use for their hardware that can't develop software to Apple's/Microsoft's/Google's/RIM's standards.