Musings over my continuing journey with WP7

I have been a fan of Microsoft products for a while saying that I have generally been open-minded to what the rest of the platforms have to offer. Last year, I was pondering on the choices of smart phones that were available for offer since my 3 mobile devices were (as if in unison) dying out on me, I heard Microsoft was planning to release Windows Phone 7 - a total reboot from the old Windows Mobile phone OS and naturally this interfered with my plans for an upgrade and as early as 01/01/11 I gave myself a new year gift - a shiny HTC HD7 WP7 device.
I soon downloaded the WP7 SDK, videos, books and started pounding into the framework as i learnt how to harness the power of the device a process that had some revelations:

- I could not run my home brewed apps on my phone since it was not a developer phone.
- I needed to pay $99 to register as a developer and thus register my phone as a dev machine.
- I could not register as a developer even if i wanted to (being based in Kenya and Pakistan)

This was quite frustrating as I had a device i could not use and this was problematic as i would need to stick to the emulator and thus not be able to test GPS, accelerometer, Camera e.t.c. until I discovered ChevronWP7, a jailbreak type application that would unlock my device and thus I got temporary reprieve from my woes. Later I discovered that ChevronWP7 only unlocks the device temporarily as M$ sneaks in and locks it thus rendering all [illegal] apps in the phone useless.

Later in January I got news that apparently the rest of the world was not as enthusiastic as I was on these devices as Microsoft announced that it had sold some 2 million devices in the last quarter of 2010 - a small number compared to the 300k-a-day Android activations over the Holiday season. This led me to my first point of doubt, was I backing the wrong horse? Android on the other hand has a myriad of apps (no one to check for buggy apps, and multiple app installations for the same app - trial and full functional) this was until in Fabulous Febuary: we had all these announcements,
- Nokia announced their collaboration with Microsoft (potential 3X% of the market or more) and the fact that Nokia knows a thing or two about phones seeing as they are the world's leading mobile phone's manufacturing company.
- Microsoft announced the tentative release date of their Window Phone 7 NoDO update i.e. March 8, 2010.
- Microsoft at MWC announced WP7 integration with Kinect, the Mango update, that promises to bring a variety of stuff into the young platform including "multi-tasking", IE9, HTML5 e.t.c. we will however need to wait until April for MIX to shed more light on this.

- There has been a beehive of activity in the WP7 development environment as 66% increase of activity was noted in some fronts when Nokia backed WP7 while the platform had the highest % growth of apps over January 30% compared to other platforms.

Its going to be a make it or break it year for WP7 and this has gotten me excited and I am really looking forward to the future of WP7. Having watched the movie Secretariat sometime ago, I am hoping that WP7 becomes the secretariat in the mobile phone platform as it lunges from behind to beat the fairly old and tested smartphone platforms.

Its a marathon and not a sprint.