It will be interesting to see if this hits BB m.s. in any significant way. Nice platform and GUI although I would be more interested in the biz apps included.

I'm disappointed personally, no innovation from MS as usual, sigh.....

^

10 Hot Questions About Windows Phone 7, Answered

by Sascha Segan

After years of watching its Windows Mobile operating system languish behind sexier products from archrivals Apple, Google, and Palm, Microsoft launched the Windows Phone 7 platform Monday morning. Why is it important? Does it live up to the rumors? And more to the point, what can you expect? Here are the top ten questions about the new Windows Phone 7 OS, and their answers.

1. What is Windows Phone 7? It's Microsoft's new mobile-phone operating system. A total break from the past, it focuses your smartphone life around "hubs" rather than apps – the people you talk to, the pictures they post, or the games you like to play.

2. Is it a "Zune Phone?" No, but Zune is one of the built-in "hubs." So is XBox Live. So is Bing.

3. What will the phones look like? There will be many form factors, but they all have to have capacitive, 800-by-480 or greater touch screens and have three buttons at the bottom: Home, Back and Search. They will all have four-point multi-touch displays, compasses and accelerometers. You'll see phones with and without sliding QWERTY keyboards, but no BlackBerry-style candybars or non-touch phones.

4. What carriers will they run on? All four major U.S. carriers, but AT&T will get the first crack with an as-yet unannounced phone.

5. How's the Office and e-mail support? Looking great. WP7 - that's the new official acronym - supports OneNote, Office, multiple Exchange accounts and SharePoint. But the interface is definitely more about communicating and having fun than about doing spreadsheets.

6. Can it sync with a Mac? Not initially. WP7 will require the Zune software to sync, and there's no Mac Zune software. Look for third parties like Mark/Space to fill in the gaps with a syncing solution.

7. Will it run old Windows Mobile apps? I don't think so. The interfaces are very different. Microsoft promised we'd find out more at their MIX developers' conference in mid-March.

8. Does it have multi-tasking? We can't tell, but Microsoft said you'd be able to "play music in the background".

9. How about Adobe Flash? Not at launch, but Steve Ballmer himself said that he doesn't have anything against it.

10. When's it coming? For the holidays, 2010.

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2359365,00.asp

I highlighted The features that interest me the most. I'm sure the manufacturers can add there own camera's and whatnot also. A Sony Camera would be nice. I'll be looking forward to what Sony and HTC has to offer. The Garmen/Asus combo seems interesting too, maybe they are just providing the GPS chips. Also, previous WinMo phones only had single touch screens, the 4 point multi-touch is going to be a major step up. Imagine using 4 fingers to do something on screen. I think the Zune HDs also have 4 point multi-touch.

This has to be one of the dumbest post I've seen on this site.

If only but alas it is quite intelectual compared to some comments.

Huh? It's well known fact, there will be NO backward compatibility. New Windows will require new apps, old ones won't run.

^^Windows Mobile Marketplace Apps/Games might work. NON-marketplace apps most likely, will not. We'll see how they handle it.

well, first, they need to rework the GUI a lot, second, they need to make the GUI work in a way that it would appeal to a mass market, it's all about the user interface with mobile devices, all they are doing is slapping services and features in there in a cluster fucked presentation. If they fix that at least, then I'd be way more interested, I'm just a normal consumer when it comes to smart phones, and I don't like what I'm looking at. So it's disappointing to me at this point in time, there is of course time for it to improve, and it does lack innovation, I have said nothing wrong as they are really just my opinion on this new OS.

They are basically using the ZuneHD UI, which people have already had their hands on for quite a while and the majority of people thinks it rocks.  It is actually fun to use.