At this year’s Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Microsoft showed off the latest version of their Windows Mobile operating system. Named Windows Phone 7 Series, which sounds like a mangled project code name they ended up deciding to keep instead of coming up with something good or original. The obviously question is why didn’t they just call it Windows Mobile 7, you know, their successor to Windows Mobile 6.5. They must have the worst marketing team ever. But I digress, name aside, it actually looks functional for once. The people forced to use the God awful Windows Mobile platform has normally been delegated to corporate business users with HTCs or Samsung devices. Now, with this new operating system, I kind of want one because I’m tired of the iPhone, and this seems like a good change of pace, and yes Windows Phone 7 Series is my idea. 

Windows Phone 7 Series is based on one of Microsoft's cooler looking interfaces, giving it the Zune sense of style. I know what your thinking, “Marvin, they’re just reusing one interface to replace a broken one.” First of all, no one has a Zune, which makes the Zune interface new to most people, and lucky for them it’s a good one. It’s like a cross between the Palm card view that the recent Android phones have been imitating, and a pinch of Media Center, wrapped in a stylish package filled with big Lucida Grande font and smooth multidirectional animations. Pretty and unique, until people start copying it. 

For you gamers out there it integrates your Xbox live gamertag, so you can show off your gamerscore wherever you are. This also means the possibility of gaining gamer points through mobile games, which sounds good to me, because any excuse to stop what I’m doing to make more points is always a good thing. Beside the mandatory Facebook and Twitter apps, it seems developers are starting to build stuff, or at the very least retrofitting their existing iPhone apps to work with Mobile 7. Let’s not forget Microsoft's other recent pet project, Bing in the form of mobile Bing. Here’s there chance to finally show off Bing properly and get it out to more people. 

If you’re in the market for a new phone or are like me and are just tired of all the iPhones you see, pick up a Window 7 Phone, don’t worry its finally not terrible. See that’s a better tag line than “it was my idea.”