A more or less devastating review of Windows Phone 7.

I was really cheering for this product to be the winner. I built a few simple apps for the phone with the beta developer tools and found it a really easy system to program.

Sadly, initial sales figures for the phones are abysmal, in the tens of thousands where they needed to be in the hundreds of thousands. The domino effect could be devastating: few phones are sold, so few developers bother creating apps for the platform; few apps are created, so few phones are sold...before you know it, Windows Phone 7 marks Microsoft's exit from the mobile market. It'd be a humbling blow, despite the company's continued huge success with the Windows OS and Office suite.