Windows Phone 7: Very sim­i­lar to Zune HD. Complete revamp of start screen. “METRO” UI that is “very clean”, “soul­ful”, and “alive.” No mul­ti­task­ing and no Flash. Full Xbox gam­ing and Zune inte­gra­tion. The METRO UI is expected to be unveiled at Mobile World Congress, not hardware.

I must say Zune HD has more hard­ware fire­power than the iPod touch. If only Microsoft had some­thing as big and good as the iTunes Music Store the Zune HD would see con­sid­er­ably more sales. I am not sur­prised to see that a future Windows Phone 7 will make use of the Zune HD as well inte­grate Xbox gam­ing. The Zune HD UI is quite nice and sim­ple and gen­er­ally works quite well. There’s also a fairly large Xbox fol­low­ing. Taking advan­tage of just those two would be a solid start for Windows Phone 7.

Apple doesn’t have an Xbox-equivalent gam­ing expe­ri­ence. Sure the iPhone and iPod touch can game but the expe­ri­ence falls short of an Xbox or a PlayStation. I’m not a hard­core gamer but my pref­er­ence is to mash a phys­i­cal but­ton to kick things into gear. Unfortunately the Windows Phone 7 will lack that phys­i­cal con­nec­tion too. But I have hope, in a Xbox con­troller you can stick the Windows Phone 7 into. Or maybe you can use a Xbox con­troller to con­trol the Windows Phone 7. I’m sure there will be an enor­mous num­ber of pos­si­ble solu­tions, all being rather inel­e­gant but utilitarian.

The METRO is code­name for the UI that will be bet­ter than what you find on the Zune HD. I’m not sure what I should think when I hear words like “soul­ful” or “alive” to describe a UI. But here’s hop­ing the METRO UI will be a wor­thy com­peti­tor to the iPhone OS or webOS. I don’t doubt it will be infi­nitely more pol­ished than Android since Zune HD’s UI is much bet­ter already.

Lastly, I hope Microsoft sees it fit to change the entirely awk­ward Windows Phone 7 name to some­thing more cool. How about some­thing like Xphone? Source: PPCGeeks via Engadget