8 Reasons Not to Replace Your iPhone with a Windows Phone 7 Handset [Does Microsoft Really Want to Be(come) Apple?]

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The iPhone has been around for three years so far and we’ve had to deal with plenty of iPhone related issues since then. But still the device grew very popular and Apple made a fortune off its new toy. And so did the carriers that partnered up with Cupertino. Nobody seemed to care that the iPhone wasn’t able to offer video conferencing, Copy and Paste features, multitasking or Flash support and even customers overlooked these issues hoping that Apple will address them at some point in the future.

Our iPhones still lack some of those features so if you’re looking to replace your iPhone with, say, a Windows Phone 7 Series handset, think again before making such a decision.

Windows Phone 7 had been thoroughly analyzed at Microsoft MIX10 and, besides all the glamour and the hot things we liked, we uncovered 8 reasons for you not to replace the iPhone with a Windows Phone 7 handset when the later one arrives:

1) There’s no true multitasking. Your Apple iPhone already comes with no multitasking features preinstalled so why replace that with another phone that can’t run apps in the background?

2) There’s no Copy and Paste. Your iPhone has been doing Copy and Paste for quite a while now so why switch back to a no Copy and Paste handset?

3) There’s no Flash support. Your iPhone does that already and it’s quite successful at it. Sure Steve Ballmer assured us that Flash is on the way but until then you wouldn’t have anything to lose should you stick with your iPhone instead. Sure there’s Silverlight but that’s still no Flash.

4) There’s no support for removable storage. Your Apple iPhone will not support hot swappable memory but WP7S handsets won’t either. It looks like Microsoft will ensure that all phones running Windows Phone 7 will have at least 8GB of built-in storage space. Is that enough?

5) There are no apps in the Marketplace yet. The Marketplace has to be completely changed in order to adjust to the needs of the new Windows Phone 7 features. The App Store already has more than 140,000 apps inside so it’s not worth going from a lot of apps to almost no apps since the Windows Mobile 6.x apps will not work on the new OS. Not to mention the whole iTunes environment which will contain apps, music, videos, games and books.

6) The iPhone 4G, hopefully running iPhone OS, will arrive later this summer and, in case it’s ready to pack some sort of improved multitasking support and a front-facing camera coupled with a better battery and faster processor, will be the phone everyone will want. Unfortunately for Microsoft the iPhone 4G will come before the first Windows Phone 7 handsets arrive so there’s no point in ditching your iPhone yet.

7) Microsoft will still not make its own Windows Phone 7 handset. Maybe Google, with their Google Nexus One proved to Redmond that not every mobile OS manufacturer should also make its own handset. But should Microsoft make its very own Zune-based Windows Phone 7 handset I am sure it would gain even more respect from both its customers and competitors. Not to mention that an own Windows Phone 7 handset from Microsoft would practically mean that Microsoft will spend a great deal of time improving the device and the mobile OS.

8 ) Microsoft is at least one year late with its Windows Mobile 7 and while its Windows Phone 7 efforts are remarkable it only puts them on par with the competition. Should Windows Mobile 7 have arrived last year at around this time we might have not bought all those iPhone 3GS. Now the competition is way ahead in sales and popularity and I’m not talking here only about Apple. And the competition already knows what it’s wrong with its mobile products and hopefully it is working on improving them. We will want more than an impressive user interface from WP7S handsets before we buy one and we are especially interested in those unique features that will make us choose Microsoft over everything else. What’s even more curious is that Microsoft already has plenty of mobile experience but is still willing to make some of the same mistakes others did. It should already be aware of what we don’t like about Windows Mobile 6.x or the iPhone. But instead of trying to offer those missing features in its WinMo 7 phones, it has just said that it won’t!

So why does it seems to me that Windows Phone 7 is going through the same evolutionary stages the iPhone did? Will we want to go back in time and get an iPhone or iPhone 3G when we can play with a 3GS or 4G?

Does Microsoft really want to be/become Apple?