Disclaimers: I’m not an Apple pundit, hardcore fanboy (only partially a fanboy), and I don’t think everything Microsoft does is crap. And I haven’t actually used this thing.

That said I spent a chunk of time perusing the WP7S reports this morning, along with the official site, and here are my thoughts. Some of these are compiled from the Twitter. A lot of these are snarky and based on Engadget’s screenshots.

Really curious about how Windows Phone 7 Series (gah)’s “phone is just a small viewport onto a wide screen” UI will work. This feels like an old school web convention to me - remember when we really had to care about viewport size? Yeah, here it is again.
Here’s the demo video from MS. The flipping tiles/squares aesthetic is nice but feels like it’s a little more in the way than the iPhone/iPad’s animations. It seems like they’re less grounded in functionality here.
I’m totally not sold on the GIANT CUT OFF TEXT aesthetic. This is particularly problematic in lists. I mean, this is embarrassing shit. “Anonymous Ca?” And the icons look… Windows Mobile 6-ish.
Interesting prioritization in the Inbox: name is GIANT, subject is tiny. The iPhone’s inbox also emphasizes the name of the sender but the proportions are far, far different.
I guess one plus of the “too big UI” is that it lends itself to scrolling around a lot of things and sets a precedent. It looks like a lot of the UI is built around the zoom and pan actions.
The trouble of not having captions. What are those games? “Look! It’s shield force! And NEW WORD GROO!”
Nice line height. Sheesh.
The main Zune app “play” UI is pretty good.
“Hey, what appointments do I have on February 5th?” “Looks like I need to see the eye doctor!”

All in all, it feels like this is a big update from Windows Mobile 6 but when you have such a ridiculously low bar, nearly anything is an improvement. And again: I haven’t used this, so my impressions will likely change once I try one out.