I really like my HTC HD7 phone. I bought it the day they came out (although I had to visit two or three different places before I could get it). I sure wish I got the OLED display in the deal but overall I’m pretty happy with the phone – although I haven’t had the time to develop the apps I wanted to for it. My only other qualm might be that it’s not very hacker-friendly and I dig being able to modify my hardware in ways to make it more useful to me.
Microsoft has been very aggressive in marketing their new platform and so far it’s been a mild success. Now that the copy & paste update has come out, there has been less mud for critics to sling. Well, this and perhaps the Nokia deal has made the seers at Gartner take notice. They predict that Android will become #1 with a commanding 48% market share in 2015, but also state that in that year WP7 will eclipse IOS to become the new #2 with nearly 20%. Whether you trust analysis from Gartner is another blog post but there are a lot of things going for Microsoft’s platform.
As an aside I currently own an HTC HD7 sporting WP7, a Xoom tablet featuring Android Honeycomb, and an iPhone 3G with IOS 3.x (jail broken). I go for what I think is best. Actually, I am selling my iPhone on eBay and I’ve never owned an Android phone but I consider myself somewhat technology impartial. I choose WP7 in some part because of the development experience (it’s fantastic) but haven’t done too much with that. I’m also enjoying my Xoom tablet a lot more than I expected – the experience is very smooth and it has made pulling out my 17lbs Alianware Laptop less necessary for a lot of things. While I may not be a fan of Apple or Google I can sure respect a well made product.
I guess only time will tell, but consider that in 2010 roughly 75% of the phone market were not smart phones and there is still a lot of virgin market left to capture. With WP7 available on all major carriers and with a wide verity of hardware partners, they may have duplicated the Android recipe for success.