Symbian and Windows Mobile have had video calling for 4 years, and there's a reason the new versions of those OS don't have it - NO ONE USES IT. It's a "me too" feature that Apple is touting, and no one uses it.
Last night I was out with several friends, many of whom have iPhone 4s. Not a single one had used video calling, mainly because of the requirement to only talk to another iPhone 4 user AND be in WIFI.
Unused feature, non-issue.
Limited third-party apps availability
For now, it's growing. It doesn't really matter how many programs are out there, it's if there are productive, useful ones. That 250,000+ "app store count" that Apple loves to tout? 90% of apps in the App Store are basically unused. You don't need huge volumes, you need quality. Not quantity.
No Bluetooth file transfers
GOOD! It's slow and power-hungry. WP7 is all about the cloud, auto-syncing and even auto-sharing. I've got a few dozen hours hands-on with RTM systems, and it's seamless. You want a file from my phone, like a picture or Word doc? Great - I just send you a link (auto-sent by just touching the file and selecting you as recipient). And if you have a WP7 phone, it just appears on your phone. Nothing to do.
If you have a non-WP7 phone, then you get an SMS or e-mail (depending upon the default contact method for you) with a link. Click it, you have it.
Bluetooth file transfer is gone - no need to pair phones, or leave your Bluetooth in promiscuous mode. Just decide what you want to share, and it shares.
No copy/paste
Wait a few months. Given that iPhone users lived for 3 YEARS without it (and Apple's mantra at the time was "you don't need it" until, of course, they added it then it was "you have to have it"), 3 months is a blip in time. Irrelevant after January 2011.
And you don't have to "hope" your phone maker offers the update - it's OTA update on the OS, so when it's released by Microsoft, everybody gets it.
No sign of free Bing maps Navigation so far
It's there, on the phone. Used it last night here in Shanghai, going from the Jazz Festival to meet some friends at a small restaurant 20 km away.
New ringtones available only through the Marketplace
False. You can assign any media file - including video - to be an alarm/annunciator/tone for any event, and do so on a person-by-person or event-by-event basis.
I guess I could pull the common AppleFan approach and declare your entire post as nothing more than FUD, but hopefully it was posted out of ignorance not spite.
I bet most people in this thread have less than zero time on a Windows Phone 7 device, yet they believe the crap and garbage spread out there. This is a serious phone, and it's got some things going on for the social networking that are light-years beyond what anyone else has.
For example, the deep-integration of Facebook with the phone. LAYERS beyond any Facebook app for the iPhone or Android - it's actually a key component of the phone. This IS the Facebook phone. For a lot of people that's irrelevant, but there are 500 million ACTIVE Facebook users - that's 14% of the world's population! It's huge, and it's growing.
Windows Phone 7 is all about simplifying your social connections and connectivity. And it does it in a stunningly seamless way. It's scary good at that. For me, that's not a big deal - I don't Facebook. But I know lots of people who do, and this phone completely merges anything you want to do with or on your phone with Facebook if you want. In any way you want. With a VERY slick and easy UI.
Spend some time with the phone and the UI - it's a definite game-changer, and on the strength of the integration with the entire Microsoft Live (a real, living, operating cloud system that is fully integrated for just about anything you want - Microsoft Live has rapidly changed and grown up) infrastructure, this IS the first phone that really is a simple portal to your cloud.
Live Mesh is amazing in auto-syncing any device you have, seamlessly. Your data follows you, you don't worry about transferring/transporting it. It just happens. Add in the meshing of your laptop, office computer, home computers, phones, etc. and it's a really freeing experience. Data just exists for you to access how you want and where you want.
Why are you going line-item on the list with me? It was from for-q-clinton’s source. I just pared the source list down to things that aren’t opinion and apply to both competition platforms.
I notice you don’t seem to mind that WP7 doesn’t multitask. Didn’t you think that was a serious iPhone deficiency a while back?