Windows Phone 7 is elegantly executed, incredibly intuitive, and straight-up beautiful at times. What it’s not, relative to the competition, is complete. The things it does, it does well — but the things that it doesn’t yet, tend to stick out. These things — third party app multitasking, copy and paste, or tethering — are things that people complained about other mobile operating systems lacking a year and a half ago.

via Review: Windows Phone 7.

Sad that Microsoft is so late to the party. The UI looks so elegant and so anti-Microsoft that it definitely intrigues me. I’d love to test one of these out. However, Microsoft is not only late to the party, they are late and incomplete to the party. All the things they are missing are the things the iPhone was missing on day one. Apple, to a point (I still feel multi-tasking on an iPhone is a cop out), has taken a long time, 3+ years, to get these things fixed or updated but they have.

Not to say I wouldn’t love to test one so Microsoft if you’re reading this, which is highly doubtful, send me one .

I found this through my co-worker Matt. I haven’t had the opportunity to try this out myself yet, but he has and he says that the pen writes better then any other pen he’s used before. I’ve always had issues with pens, I don’t know why but pencilsfor me always felt quite a bit more comfortable then pens. Maybe this will change that…

Over the last few months, while the Apple/AT&T hype machine was in full-motion, I was also following all the websites and all the blurbs on the phone closely. And let me stress that I was well aware of the drawbacks of a first-generation product, let alone a first-generation Apple product. The two things I wasn’t too keen on were the price and the specifications. I had initially convinced myself to not attempt to make a purchase sight unseen and had furthermore convinced myself to wait for the product to gain some maturity before handing over my credit card. This thought process evolved from the portion of my mind that loves to read reviews, understand all the intricacies of the product, the positives as well as the negatives, etc… I attempted to head to the Apple store the evening of the launch, about 7 o’clock or so, but scurried back home because the place was a mob-scene with a huge line filled with uber-geeks which was controled by the cops. So I went back the next day when the initial launch frenzy had calmed down enough to allow me to step through the front doors without a hassle. After about twenty-minutes of playing with phone, I knew I had to immediately have it. The want came from the irrational part of my brain, which is the early adopter. Everything must be bought first for the awe-factor. At any-rate, I can’t pin-point the reason or feature which caused my early-adopter part of the brain to immediately ask the nearest sales clerk to purchase the item, but it could have been the touch-screen, the iPod, the sleek design, or it may just have been the phone-call to my father, who convinced me to make the purchase. The thing that surprised me the most is that Apple has created a device, which on paper seems attractive but doesn’t scream “buy me” now (obviously it has decent specifications, but at the same time it’s also missing some core specs such as 3G), but once you touch it, once you play with it, you get goose bumps and then by some awkward magic trick by Apple or potentially the act of God your wallet springs open and your credit card pops out and mysteriously finds its way in the hands of a sales clerk. The event itself happens so fast that when you come to you find yourself sitting in your car mouthing to yourself “I just spent $600+ on a cell-phone?!”.

I’ve had the opportunity to now use the phone for just over a week and while there are cons to the device I personally believe the interface, the design, and the simplicity of the phone outweighs any of the negative aspects the phone may have. There are the obvious cons that have been discussed quite a bit: Safari crashes every now-and-then, web 2.0 apps are slow, there’s no way to search your contacts, inherent applications are limited and some what substandard, no SDK available for third-party development, etc… But these aren’t the cons I’m talking about here, so you may be wondering, “what are these cons you speak of Aakar?”

Well first and foremost Bluetooth is irresponsive at times. What do I mean by that? Well the iPhone pairs perfectly with my car, it offers all the necessary functionality that my previous phone was missing: address book, recent calls, top 8, etc… But while these two initially pair perfectly, there have been multiple occasions where I would get in my car, start the engine and wait for the two to pair only to find out that no pairing was occurring. I normally always leave my phone’s Bluetooth on, it’s an obvious battery drain, but I personally feel that trying to remember to take the phone out of my pocket and attempting to turn the Bluetooth on every time I get in my car is a nuisance. Why the irregularity in pairing happens is beyond me, but I’ve been able to determine that for whatever reason the iPhone tends to get confused over the course of the day with its pairing. At one point or another I’ll leave the car and the iPhone will still assume it’s still paired to the car. After which, if at any point I make or receive a call a menu pops up asking whether I’d like to hear/talk through the car, the iPhone, or the speakers on the iPhone. This leads me to believe that at some point the Bluetooth radio isn’t checking to see if the car’s signal is still active or within range and that the phone just assumes the connection is still attached. The only fix I’ve found is that I need to reset (turn off/on) the Bluetooth radio under the settings. This has also occurred a few times when I’ve charged the phone overnight. It’s not a huge deal but it is a bit inconvenient.

Still sticking with Bluetooth, the first few calls I received in my car were barely audible and were dropping a large amount of various parts of the conversation. I ventured onto the Apple support forums and the BMW forums and was made aware that for some reason the Wi-Fi was causing interference with the Bluetooth radio. Turning the Wi-Fi radio off solved the issue and gave me a stable call, but again just another inconvenience that I have to deal with.

Finally my last major gripe is one that’s been talked about constantly and that is there is no way to create third-party applications. There’s no SDK available, the closest you can get to actually creating an application is to create a web 2.0 app. This has its inherent issues such as its limited to Internet connectivity and the obvious limitations in dealing with web applications.

So far those are my three major gripes other then that I love the simplicity of the charging and syncing with iTunes, I actually do love the keyboard (it’s perfect for texting) and I love the idea that Apple has the ability to release updates for the firmware and potentially new applications through iTunes. I think that makes it far more of an attractive phone, because of the likelihood that it can and probably will be updated quite often.

So overall even with the issues I’ve run into I’m quite pleased with my purchase. I’m just hoping the updates and new applications start coming soon.