#FF00AA

I don’t find it too visually enticing, but it seems like everything is well integrated and should be plesant to use; look at that home screen, a million times more functional than the iPhone’s — maybe Apple will see how it’s done, now, and not change anything for OS 4.0 because that would be admitting that Microsoft did better than them.

Not gonna get excited about anything Microsoft releases on a phone (except that the lack of Flash deserves celebration, I guess), but I must say that having Xbox Live achievements on the phone’s games is genius. It’s odd, though, how much they’ve downplayed third-party apps.

All in all, it’s a good answer to the iPhone, but I’m not sure who this is for — even with Xbox Live, it’s not going to grab the attention of casual users away from the iPhone, and the new OS’s emphases aren’t too professional, so I’d be surprised if businesses didn’t prefer to stick with 6.x.

YouTube video here (Silverlight not required for that).