You’re right that Windows Phone shows some promise, but the excuse that it’s young isn’t good enough anymore. We’re rapidly approaching a duopoly between Android and iOS. The only way for a third competitor to enter this space is going to be for them to blow past the competition. In 2012 Windows Phone is still behind webOS in terms of notifications and multitasking. That’s not good. 

Last year, while I was still stuck in my AT&T contract I was looking for a viable alternative to an Iphone, but I couldn’t find a good android phone with a physical keyboard and a good camera with a flash (on AT&T) at that time. Eventually I ended up stumbling upon LG’s quantum running windows mobile 7, I saw that it iwas a brand new OS, probably with lots of issues but I decided to take a risk on it and I am glad I did. I’ll talk more about that later

 I agree that a lot of your complaints are certainly accurate, the multi tasking in particular is something that could be fixed, however a lot of your”needs to be fixed” or “doesn’t make sense” complaints are rather flawed or maybe just a little arrogant. The comment about the inconsistency of the physical buttons in particular makes me think you don’t understand a fundemental part of the UI. Tap and hold is a significant part of the UI. You can press a button, touch a contact or just about anything and it will open, start an application or do a  basic function, but if you touch and hold your finger on any of these things a whole new set of options opens up.  This is true of the physical buttons as well, it works the same on almost everything on every single phone and eliminates a need for additinal menu links and it is used throughout it a way that unifies the os, so calling it inconsistent makes me think you didn’t figure out how to take the best advantage of the UI.

Another thing that I think you just didn’t seem to like for no good reason was that games were put in a sepearate spot from other applications, I can easily say why not? and I’ll have all the same reasoning that you did lol. however, as you said you can pin any game to the metro page, and it keeps a potentialy long app list from adding to another potenially long list, the rest of the apps. This is a very small gripe that seemed silly (along with the volume gripe lol).

I agree that the the internal search could be  better, however you can search the for individual apps in the same way you can search for contacts. Unfortunately, you can only do that once you have a certain number of apps. How that number was chosen seems flawed but at least the function is available. 

I’ll just mention a few things that I really like about the OS that I really like but most people seem to disparage. Firstly, the notification system works in an excellent manner, at least for me. The notification bar pops up and my phone either make s asound and or vibrates for a moment, but then quickly fades away. All these things happening at once makes it impossible for me to miss that I recieved a notification, but then they go away and I don’t have to deal with them if I don’t want to. Then when I go to my home page, or tile page i have all my notifications availalbe laid organized in any way I choose within the metro system. I know someone else talked about this earlier but I can’t emphasize enough how well this works. Part of this is how I can put whole groups of people right on my main page. I have a group for work, a group for family and a group for others. If I get a tex, call, email facebook message or whatever, I can immediatly see how I have been contacted but from what part of my life that I have been contacted all without opening any apps.

Part of all this notifications is the way that facebook, twitter, email, and other messanger client have been put into one thread for each contact, while still showing me in a clear cut way which way the contact messaged me; whew tongue twister there lol. I can’t think of a more solid way that social networking has been built into an os, and that’s including all the ways you can customize these things within android. It just works beautifully.  

The metro UI itself, is as many have called it is elegant. But why is it so elegant? The live tiles are so uselfull because of the key work “live” constantly updating and changing the way they look without losing their identity is extremely usefull. Those large tiles that you don’t like for their large text seem pretty good on a contact group that constantly updates new pictures from that group of people.

These are just a few of small ways in with the metro os works very well. I have typed the length of a novel, so I’ll cut myself short, but very happy to talk about others if anyone is interested.

Lastly, I will say that customization is needed within the UI and could be done very easily in Microsoft wants to do it. you could change the shapes of the tiles, Fonts, background etc.. There are lots of ways it that it could (and in my humble opinion should) be done without changing the integral value of the Metro UI. We’ll see if it happens. 

Remember, this is an OS in its toddler stage, and that although it has a long way to go, it has advanced quite a bit within its first year. 50k apps in (less than?) one  year is an acccomplishment worth mentioning. This new windows phone OS has a lot of growing to do, but my oh my does it have promise. Thats something I remember hearing in android’s first year as well… sorry this was sooooo long.

The big thing is that when people criticize Android is they are usually critizing it out of the box. Even though it has it’s flaws with the level of customization you can usually just download an app to get rid of that problem. I am running Launcher Pro and JuiceDefender on mine. Mine is very smooth and has been off the charger for 32 hours and now it is down to eight percent.

That is the problem with WP7 is it is a one size fits all deal. If don’t like something you don’t have very many options.