I'm from the UK, I remember windows mobile in shops everywhere. If you were after a smartphone back then you would have come across it everywhere you went. It's just that smartphones are becoming more mainstream, it's not that you couldn't find WM in UK stores. There were plenty, and I remember the sony ericsson ones they had. In fact if you didn't buy a Nokia smartphone you were more than likely buying a Windows Mobile smartphone. Windows mobile was fairly popular once but in a very bad decline, which prompted MS to rebrand it as Windows Phone and drop photon. Make no mistake, wndows mobile DID leave a bad taste in some peoples mouths. The reason you don't see it in stores NOW is because it's not being released on new phones anymore but there were as many WM phones in stores as there is WP7 now. BTW, Symbian 3 was also redesigned from the ground up and reason b) makes no difference to the low sales of WP7.