A little over a year ago when I was still working at MSFT, I couldn’t wait to get my hands onto the new Windows Phone.  A year later, and alot of abuse from friends & colleagues I’ve moved onto the iPhone4s.  I have to admit, the Windows Phone was a great leap forward over the previous OS’s and all in all — I’d recommend it to anyone who is in the market for a great device.  FWIW, I feel like most comparisons are by folks that have spent 15 minutes with the Windows Phone, after more than a year as a heavy user, I thought I’d share my thoughts .

Where Windows wins (Mango build, on Samsung Omnia):

• Live tiles and home screen are a slick and intuitive way of getting me the right information at a glance.
• Keyboard is bigger and more responsive to my meat claws.  Why in gods green earth do I need to shift to get to common punctuation?
• Zune software.  There I said it, I miss the all you can eat music (connected to my shazzam app) feature on my windows phone.  Trying to replace this with spotify on the iPhone, but still not there yet.
• Facebook integration is freaking awesome.  Type in a contact, and automatically see everything I need for that person.  Don’t have someone’s number in out outlook contacts?  No problem, if it’s in facebook — you’re set.  Facebook integration is the MOST underrated feature in the windows phone, and is what I miss the most.
• Camera button.  Seems dumb, but I found myself wanting the camera button a bunch of times this weekend.  I HATE unlocking my phone to snap a picture.

Where the iPhone wins:

• App ecosystem — hands down.  I have 4 pages of apps that I’ve downloaded in a week.  Most importantly, I can test drive app’s for Dogpatch companies, friends, etc.  This was the #1 reason I made the switch — I simply needed to be on the platform where innovation is happening.
• Hardware.  Say what you want, I love the look and feel of the apple hardware.  For a chubby non-cool kid, having the iPhone makes me feel cool again.
• Bluetooth sync.  It actually works flawlessly with every bluetooth device I own (including the Sync system in my Ford Truck — which is a MSFT product).  I had 10% success at best with the Windows Phone syncing w/ bluetooth devices.
• Siri.  Siri rocks.  I could never get the Tellme application in my windows phone to understand what the hell I was telling it.  After a few hundred tries, I finally got it to understand one saying “WTF, you’re a piece of shit”.   Great youtube video of a side by side comparison.
• Camera quality is magnificent.  I’ll never feel the need to own an actual digital camera ever again.  Now only if they made the camera more accessible and usable from an out of pocket state.

A little more than a week into the iPhone, and I really love it.  I do miss a bunch of features from my Windows Phone, and it was my last piece of nostalgia from a 5 year career at Microsoft.