Windows Phone 7 Review describes as “pig in lipstick”

Infoworld columnist Galen Gruman says think again after attending Microsoft’s in-depth demo at this week’s Mobile Beat conference: “Windows Phone 7 is a waste of time and money. It’s a platform that no carrier, device maker, developer, or user should bother with. Microsoft should kill it before it ships and admit that it’s out of the mobile game for good.”

Likening the operating system to a “pig in lipstick,” Gruman notes that the user interface is awkward and unsophisticated.

Worse, the underlying technology is terrible.

“Under the hood, Windows Phone 7 rests on creakingly old technology that the main competitors have all moved past. I was appalled, flummoxed, and stupefied by what I saw and the answers to the questions from the 15 or so developers in the audience,” says Gruman.

“The bottom line is this: Windows Phone 7 is a pale imitation of the 2007-era iPhone,” Gruman concludes. ” It’s as if Microsoft decided in summer 2007 to copy the iPhone and has shut its developers in a bunker ever since, so they don’t realize that several years have passed, that the iPhone has advanced, and that competitors such as Google Android and Palm WebOS have also pushed the needle forward. Microsoft is stuck in 2007, with a smartphone OS whose feature checklist might match that era’s iPhone but whose fit and finish would look like a Pinto next to a Maserati.

Ouch. If later reviews follow suit, Microsoft’s in trouble: there’s no way they can sell licenses to an operating system this bad when Android is free and the iPhone rules the roost.