This will be the first year that I will not buy a WM device. I've been off contract with Telus for about 6 months. They just don't offer (or stock) WM Pro phones any more. I think they have one or two that are recent. Both have tiny, low resolution screens.
I realize that in the US there are some decent offerings, but here the Canadian providers have pretty much abandoned the WM Pro phones with keypads.
When you walk into a Telus store, the push Blackberries like crazy. I've had more than one sales person tell me that they just didn't want to sell me a WM phone; that I'd be really unhappy with it.
When I tell them that I'm looking for a touch screen phone that runs WM, they tell me there is no such thing. Then when I push back, they point me to the P4000, which is my current phone. How many years old is that? And they don't stock them; they have to be special ordered. And therefore none of their in store promotions apply.
Then it's back to the BB. Usually they push the Storm or the Curve. AFAIK, I can't remote into a server using those.
I think what MS got wrong, especially in Canada, is cow-towing to the carriers. Can you imagine Apple agreeing to have an iPhone in Canada that:
- Has Wifi blocked?
- Has 30MB / month on their unlimited plan?
- Has a screen that is 60% the size of the screens in the US and the rest of the world, with a much lower resolution?
I do understand that to get a phone into the hands of consumers, MS is in a real bind: they must get their OS on a 3rd party hardware device that then must be sold to a carrier who has all the clout in deciding what features a consumer is allowed to have. Apple can control the HW, the SW, and the OS. Then they have the sex appeal that MS can't seem to muster. That combined ownership of the experience is why Apple can constrain carriers (Rogers in Canada, AT&T in US). MS just doesn't have that weight.
For me, it's all about the screen and the browser, today. I can't get a decent screen (size or resolution) in Canada, nor does WM have a decent browser. So it's just painful to use compared to my Touch.
Maybe next year or the year after WM will catch up. But to see so many diehard WM fans moving to other devices....well, I think I'm moving on with them.
K