Alex Stone

Oh snap! Dare I say it, I think I have finally found a phone that looks more promising than the (current) iPhone.

Before I get into how awesome the Windows phone is, I want to point out that Microsoft dropped Flash support because of how horrible Flash is AND they use the similar multi-tasking setup that the iPhone uses (using notifications and only running the built-in apps simultaneously).

Moving along. What I’m loving about the Windows phone OS is how connected the thing is to “the cloud”. For example, viewing your contact list, you can select a person and it will give you the standard contact info, as well as their Facebook news, with plans to expand this to Flickr, Twitter, and other services.

Suddenly Google Buzz makes sense (that’s another blog, entirely).

This kind of connectedness is a big deal for end users. Instead of bouncing from app to app to get this information, it’s just inline with the contact list. I love it.

Even the photos and music is connected. Browsing your photos on the phone, pulls galleries from your Facebook account, Microsoft Live account, as well as albums synced with the desktop.

What’s really interesting is how much they’ve really “borrowed” from the iPhone. As with Windows 7 OS, they’ve taken the right things from Apple and tweaked them just right to fit into their Windows family and it works well, from what I can tell from the demonstration videos.

For example, the browser is fully multitouch with “all of the things users expect a mobile browser to do”. Double-tap to focus on portions of text, pinch-zoom, tap to scroll, etc. They even use the subpixel method to make text look really crisp when zoomed in.

Now here’s my favorite part: Microsoft has a hefty list of minimum requires for phone manufacters to be able to put out handsets running their new mobile OS. Things like multi-touch screen, fast CPUs, high-end capable GPUs, and the list goes on.