Credit where credit is due, Microsoft have done a good job with Windows Phone 7. It has to be one of the most original interfaces for a Phone I’ve ever seen. What’s more, they resisted the urge to blatantly copy the iPhone like everyone else. It certainly looks a hell of a lot better than most of the Android Phones out there. While I’d never give up my iPhone I think Microsoft have taken a good step in the right direction. Of course by the time this is released, Apple will have released iPhone OS 4 and the goal posts will have moved again, but it’s good to see someone else thinking outside of the box for once.
[UPDATE]
Having seen the hands on demo video over at Gizmodo I’m less impressed. Apparently, according to Giz anyone who’s not impressed is just stupid, so I guess I’m just stupid then. But childish gadget blogging aside, while it looks nice and slick in the carefully edited and faked official demos, the hands on unit looks flakey and difficult to use. It seems that they’ve created something that’s very clever from a design point of view but the implementation hasn’t been fully thought through. Many elements look too small for fingers. In many of the screens too it’s not immediately clear that you’re supposed to scroll across, as there doesn’t seem to be any visual clues. I can’t help but think that some of the animations are much too long too. They’re nice, and animation to add visual clues is cool, but some seem to just add delays. In fairness, it’s a long way away from being released, so I guess much of this could be beta issues, but still.

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