Why I'm investing in Windows Phone and skipping Android

I funnelled some of the cash I received from Microsoft to swombat. Win, win situation.

  Microsoft has seen what Apple and others have done,
  and have made something along the same line,
  but daring and new.

Daring and new is fine, but in this case daring and new is not enought, it must be useable too. Too many copycats failed for the very simple reason: copying the superficial aspects and having no idea about the essence why the things they copy work in the first place.

  Microsoft is investing in the right type of
  future oriented technologies

I'd say that one of the killer apps for iPhone is Mobile Safari. Why one cannot argue about MS effort, sorry, but anything they can put on the device won't stand a chance compared to WebKit browsers.

  Microsoft has a huge marketing and development budget
  to push anything they want

That may be the problem, not a solution. Thinking that marketing can fix a bad product, or thinking that innovation is proportional to money thrown on the problem. Usually it is the other way around: restrictions sprak innovation.

  Microsoft has integrated its programming languages across all platforms,
  implying a huge number of devs will program for their platforms

This is two sided also. Brought back memories of Win shareware.

I want to like the new Windows Phone interface, but I hate it. I want to like it because I want there to be competition to the iPhone and Android is so... crummy. Android phones are still unresponsive, clunky, unpolished and just... bad.

Take a look at the Engadged video Max links to. There's no way easy way to navigate through the Windows Phone. Animations everywhere that take seconds. Did you notice that opening the address book took 5 seconds? I sure did. Everything is moving and shifting permanently -- so you'll get nauseous if you put it on your desk. The web browser? Checkerboard all the way through the moment you start scrolling, and you can't even zoom in and out before the page has loaded. And the responsiveness was bad too. Tap on a caption. Wait two seconds. Tap again. Wait. See animation. Scroll. Urgh.

Note the guy didn't mention anything about 3rd party software. Where are those apps going to end up? Will you be able to install/uninstall easily? And so on.

I think it's going to flop.

He makes a really good argument. I agree with most of his points, especially this:

Technology people tend to vastly overestimate the things that people look at when deciding if a phone is good or not. They care about how polished the outside looks, how thin it is, and how smooth and fast the user interface is. There is really not much more! They don't care about multi-tasking or open source or any of that stuff - they care about how impressed other people are when they look at them using the phone.

I started with a MyTouch and moved to a Nexus One (which I have now). The more I use Android, the less appealing it becomes. Honestly... who cares that it's open source? It's a novelty. The AOSP stuff for 2.1 has been out forever, yet the only device to be using it is the Nexus. The fragmentation is killing it. I think a lot of Apple's success with the iPhone comes from a lot of it's restraints.

In the long run I still think Apple is always going to have the upper hand.. not only because it was first in this new generation of smartphones, but because they control every aspect of the device. OS, Hardware, Applications and App Store.

I wasn't even considering the Windows phone... but now it's definitely in the back of my mind.

The downside of Windows Phone 7 is that it is the most limiting and sandboxed development platform of all mobile operating systems. No native code execution like Android, no multitasking, no direct access to the camera, no sockets support and more. Even Silverlight has less restrictions.