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Comment by glhaynes | Hacker News Reader

I think they could've made a bigger splash if they'd had some particularly fancy must-have hardware to sell it on - at least one model with something absolutely outstanding about it.

As far as I've heard (admittedly I haven't followed it very closely), all the Windows Phone 7 phones [wow, that's awkward] are pretty similar to existing handset hardware, so this just feels mostly like an OS release. An OS that has some interesting features (and a few important things missing, too) and very few apps. And a shitty (at least from a dev standpoint) browser grrrrrrrrr.

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Meet the Dell Venue Pro. No other handset on the market like it today:

http://en.community.dell.com/dell-blogs/Direct2Dell/b/direct...

An iPhone4-ish display excepted, what's so outstanding in it?

First, it's 4.1 inch display, not an iPhone-ish display. But the real meat is the full size 800x480 display with a portrait keyboard slider. That's a pretty big deal, if that's something you're into as there is no other device on the market, that I know of, that has someting similar.

It also has what looks like a half inch of wasted margin space at the top and the right. It's shiny, but looks like a very big phone by today's standards.

That margin on the right is actually part of the UI. The screen has probably symmetrical margins.

So, the GUI wastes the screen real-estate that goes beyond what the iPhone 1 offered a couple years ago...

Something is wrong here.

Oh... It has a tiny keyboard...

The case could certainly be made that the Windows Phone 7 UI in general has a rather low information density. I very much enjoy the aesthetics of the UI – I actually prefer them to what iOS or Android have to offer – but I’m not sure whether all their decisions are practical. Good looks alone don’t make for a good UI. I will have to try one soon.

OK. A slightly larger screen with pixels I can't resolve.

Wait... It's just 800x480?! The Nexus One had a screen like that more than a year ago and the Droid had a much nicer keyboard to go with a better screen. And a real software library.

So, this is the phone that makes it worth to switch to WinMo 7? Really?

The Nexus One has a completely different type of screen, unless the only thing you mean is that they're the same resolution, but I know you're not that ignorant when it comes to mobile phone technology.

Odd that you can claim that the Droid has a much nicer keyboard, when you've never used this keyboard. But in anycase it's a slider portrait keyboard, while the Droid is a landscape keyboard. Different stroes for different folks.

And I'm not sure what you mean by a real software library, but on launch day of WP7 there are already 2000 apps, and its relatively small game lineup already trumps Android in quality (although not the iPhone's game lineup).

But lets be clear rbanffy we already know that even if the WP7 device made you stunningly attractive, gave you eternal life, some decent dev chops, and $5B in your bank account, you'd still hate it and get an Android phone :-)

I am sorry, but I don't get what's so amazing in this phone except the fact that Microsoft managed to persuade Dell to build it.

That was some serious play with Windows OEM licensing...

And, BTW, I could use the eternal life and US$ 5B bank account, but I already am stunningly attractive... ;-)

A lot of people have been asking for portrait sliders. The only ones that are out right now (at least that I know of) are the Blackberry Torch and Palm Pre line.

The Torch is a 480x360 device, and the the Pre is a 480x320 display.

AFAIK the Venue Pro is the only device on the planet that has a full size touch screen (800x480 like the Samsung Galaxy S line, Nexus One, etc...), but yet is a portrait slider.

Beyond that, virtually everyone who has used it, has been impressed with the build quality of the device.

Now you may not prefer a portrait slider, but it's absurd to say that its not a device of interest. I don't like virtual keyboards, but I won't sit around saying the iPhone has no interest because of my personal preference.

Don't get me wrong: it's not a bad device. It's just that's not an awesome, must-have, world-changing one.

And, this morning, it came to me it has, indeed, a killer feature for corporations: lots of Visual Basic programmers will be able to write code for it. With so many of them already hired, it could be a no-brainer to target WinMO 7 for internal development.

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