Windows Phone is only slightly better off in this year's Smartphone Round Robin than Palm was last year -- like we substituted in the WinMo Treo Pro for the aging PalmOS in 2008, we're using two heavily HTC-skinned devices as WMExperts entries in 2009 -- the HTC Touch Pro2 and massive HTC HD2.
And I'm melancholy about that, because I kind of liked the unabashedly Windows Mobile tweaky, geeky Treo Pro last year, and was hoping to see a pure Microsoft Windows Mobile 7 device this year. Scrappy, underfunded Palm was able to deliver webOS after all, Google went Android 2.0, and Apple went iPhone 3.0. Instead we got Windows Mobile 6.5, which was decidedly bashed, and the aforementioned HTC Sense UI/TouchFlo shellacked over it -- a UI so opaque I think users might have trouble distinguishing HTC's Windows Phone devices from their Android ones going forward.
But those are the WinPhos we were dealt, and they're certainly tremendous in their own rights. To help me make sense of them (no pun intended), Phil Nickinson went over the finer points for me and the WMExperts Forum members really helped me out.
(And just a reminder, every day you post on that WMExperts thread, or any of the official Round Robin threads, is another day you're entered to win one of six (6!) new smartphones!)
Okay, enough preamble, it's time for the review... after the break!
