Shaun2k5 wrote:Own a HTC HD 7.
If you want an opinion, it's better than Android but not as developed as iOS.
We've been comparing some Android and WP7 handsets at work, and I use Android myself, and I can certainly see how WP7 is better in some ways. Microsoft have ensured that the software experience is pretty much identical on every handset for a start, so there aren't any skins and custom launchers to get passed. It's also a very slick experience, and the UI is absolutely gorgeous. It's also much much more robust, thanks to MS's Apple style approach of restricting what can run in the background.
Of course, the flipside of all that is that WP7 is far less customisable, and less versatile than Android. Android is generally uglier and less intuitive out of the box, but you can tweak pretty much everything about it to create an experience that's perfect for you. There's even a WP7 style launcher in development! Then there's multitasking of course. As far as I'm aware, WP7 currently limits background processes and save states to first party apps. Close a third party app, and you need to load the whole thing up from scratch if you want to use it again. On Android, idle apps will only be cleared out of RAM when something new requires it, and background tasks are open to anything. The downside of this is that a bad app can potentially cripple your user experience if a background task uses too many resources, resulting in sluggish performance and terrible battery life, something that's simply not possible on iOS and WP7. As such, WP7 can be said to be a genuinely better choice for people less inclined to get into the nuts and bolts of their handsets.
Personally I think iOS, Android and WP7 are all pretty great in their own way. I do think Apple need to give the former a bit of an overhaul though, as like OSX its starting to suffer from new additions being shoehorned into an interface that was never designed to handle them.