Windows Phone 7

I've spent the last week at the Microsoft Technology Center here in Atlanta. As you may have guessed I am surrounded by Microsoft Blue Badges*. As many of you may have heard Microsoft recently announced a program that would allow for full time employees to be reimbursed for the purchase of Windows Phone 7 device. One of the stipulations of this purchase was that it had to occur 10 days after the initial release of the phone.

Well here we are a little over ten days later and I have had the chance to get my hands on a couple of these devices. I must say that I came away quite impressed. The OS is pretty snappy and responsive. Its quite intuitive and definitely appears to be quite polished. I definitely liked the user interface more than that of my Android, and I couldn't help but think to myself: If this had come out when windows mobile 6.5 came out we would have had one hell of a phone war!

That being said Microsoft definitely has its work cut out for it as far as pushing this OS out to the public. The marketplace is obviously nowhere near iTunes or Android Market, but with it being built on the .NET platform it could probably have a fairly quick ramp up time. I found a free download of the Programming Windows Phone 7 ebook from Microsoft Press. I figure I may as well take a look at it and see what all an be (re)created for it.

*Blue Badge (or Blue Card): (sometimes, slightly derogatorily, blue badger, or just plain blue) Synonym for full-time Microsoft employees, the Brahmins of the deeply ingrained Microsoft caste system, whose card keys have a blue background rather than the orange used for contractors (see Orange Badge) and green for vendors. Derivative terms include "turn blue," meaning to earn full-time status.  [Thank you Microsoft Lexicon ]