I agree with a lot of what was said in that article. Specs only confuse even savvy people in most cases. This processor has a better SPECint than this one. This dual core SoC has a better efficiency than this one. Or this phone does this... and that. It's great to know the capability but ultimately it is about user experience.

It helps to have variety, no doubt. But ultimately if somebody could write the OS to the chipset and optimize the ever-living hell out of it, nobody would care if it were single core with 512mb of RAM. Throwing superb hardware at an unoptimized system is where we're at now - reminds me of the gigahertz races between Intel and AMD. They kept charging for 1ghz, the OS's stayed the same - very bloated and unoptimized.

Let's put it to you this way. I own an Atrix. Dual core, awesome graphics - play 9mm by Gameloft on it, looks incredible - and a full gig of RAM. Under 2.2.1, I didn't even have full usage of the friggin' gigabyte of RAM! Under 2.3.4, it shows up - but in both instances, I cannot tell you if it were beneficial to have that much RAM or not. And I'd consider myself a power user; the OS just really is either that good at putting services/applications that are not in focus to sleep, or the fact that I've trimmed down my starting services to something very minimal to begin with worked in my favor. Either way, I cannot say I've run into a benefit or negative with that phone and the amount of RAM.

I've actually switched back to my Dell Venue Pro as of last night. It has the standard fare 1ghz Qualcomm processor, internal 16gb memory (non-expandable) and 512mb RAM.

After the official Mango update - I was already using the dev version a while back - the phone seems snappy and never lags. But, like Android, it places stuff in the background into sleep. That's the argument around multi-tasking - and honestly, it's still serial tasking. But for the last 24 hours, 8 updates, I've listened to music, used the map(s), used 5 accounts on Gmail, watched YouTube videos, surfed the web, answered phones calls, and can go back and switch between those without any issue. In fact, it's as fast, if not faster than my Atrix in terms of perceived speed.

To get in and out of a tweet, SMS or whatever... it's speedy. The UX, user experience is much better. The processor helps in all of this, so does the RAM. But Microsoft has been trying to optimize the OS.

Something that Harmattan has all the others beat on, imho. It's optimized, lean and seems to be running quite speedy on just a single core, 1ghz, 1gb of RAM device. I mean, crazily fast - and with proper multi-tasking.

So yeah, variety is great, Mango is a bit more optimized that folks are paying attention to, larger screens with better cameras all help the user experience. I agree with his point.

Again, agree. The UI is pretty standard so far on WP7. So... where should you differentiate? The stuff that draw people in... like the N8 had shown, you add a decent camera on a phone, it will become the highest used Nokia Flickr phone camera - higher than the oft used N95. Or if you add a (for instance) a AMOLED screen like on my Dell Venue Pro, it looks leagues better than the standard LCD. Building materials - metal instead of plastic, et al - and stuff like that helps too. Not sure if I want a solid gold piece of crap, but I'm sure there's a market for even that.

It's much better than the oft used "more apps" logic. Refine the OS, get the popular apps that people use - Facebook, Twitter, Flickr - as well as make the geeks happy (good luck with that) and you have something that will sell. Microsoft has turned a blind eye to people hacking on WP7. In fact, they've actually helped folks. Unprecedented by most folks - Nokia/Maemo excluded.

I disagree. It's not as feature-laden as iOS or Android yet. In fact, I know that I'm missing out on quite a few apps, Adobe Flash (important to me since I dev the stuff) and a few other applications. But... as a phone, as a social network capable phone, as a way to quickly get myself out of being lost somewhere... it works great. If I had to admin a remote server, pull from git and push up to a new server via capistrano, or ssh into a server, I'm **** out of luck or I better have my rooted Xoom with me, or my N900 (which I no longer have).

But this isn't for that level of geek. Yet. Let's hope that Panic comes out with Prompt for WP7 as well as they did for iOS.

Good article, I can support about 60-70% of it, the lack of things for us geeks though lessen the appeal. The stuff that it brings to the table for the average consumer outweighs us geeks (in numbers and spending power) but I'm here; not an average consumer.