New York, What on earth is Microsoft doing, bringing out its iPhone competitor now, in 2010? Doesn’t it realise that Apple has a three-year, 70-million-phone, 300,000-app head start? And that Google’s Android phone software has a two-year, estimated 30-million-phone, 100,000-app head start?

And does Microsoft really think that the world needs yet another black rectangular multi-touch app phone design?

Well, clearly, the answer to the last question is yes. Windows Phone 7 is new software that Microsoft hopes will run on new phones from various manufacturers and cellular networks. I tried it out on the nearly identical Samsung Focus HTC Surround and HTC HD7. Each will go on sale in the coming weeks in the US.

So while Windows Phone 7 shows some real genius, it is missing an embarrassingly long list of features that are standard on iPhone and Android. Ready?

There’s no copy and paste. No folders for organising your apps. No way to add new ringtones. No way to send videos to other phones. No video chat. No front-facing cameras.

Sound familiar? These are precisely the features that were missing from iPhone 1.0, too. Furthermore, there’s a search button, but it can’t search your whole phone at once (for apps, contacts and e-mail simultaneously, for example). There’s no visual voice mail. Like the iPhone, the web browser doesn’t play Flash videos on the web — but it also won’t play the HTML5 videos that the iPhone plays. So, no YouTube, no Hulu, no online news videos.

The e-mail programme can’t unify your e-mail accounts into a single in-box. In fact, each e-mail account winds up as a separate icon on your home screen. There’s no message threading. That sounds like quite a lengthy to-do list for Microsoft, and it is. But heaven knows, if any company is famous for its slow, dogged, multi-year, multimillion-dollar approa-ch to software improveme-nt, it’s Microsoft. It swears that it’s going to make Windows Phone 7 a contender.

Here’s the thing: WP7 is a 1.0 release in a good way, too. It’s a complete rethinking of app phone software design. Microsoft has pulled off the inconceivably difficult task of coming up with a fresh and beautiful software design that doesn’t look anything like iPhone.

The WP7 home screen doesn’t have evenly spaced app icons on multiple side-by-side home screens, like Android or iPhone. Instead, you see two columns of scrolling, multicoloured rectangular tiles. Each represents an app, a speed-dial person, a favourite web page, a music playlist — whatever you want to put there. A number on a tile tells you how many messages or app updates are waiting.

Other fresh, clever ideas abound. On any WP7 phone, there’s a dedicated camera button — and you can take pictures even when the phone itself is turned off, a fantastic feature. You can set up the phone so that it automatically uploads your photos to Facebook as you take them. You can speak to dial, search Bing.com or open apps. Even the lock screen has been visited by the Good Idea Fairy. Without even fully waking the phone, you can see the date and time, your next appointment, and how many new messages await. But Microsoft still has a lot of work to do. It intends to deliver free software upd-ates as it fills in holes. For now, this may not be the phone you’ll want to buy.

Windows Phone 7: Hits and put-offs
* Beautiful software design
* Easy to arrange rectangular tiles for icons.
* Dedicated camera button
* Ability to take pictures even when the phone is turned off.
* Automatic uploads of photograph to Facebook.
* Speak to dial feature.
* Check date, appointments, message alerts without even fully waking the phone.
* Word, Excel and PowerPoint.
* Xbox statistics.
* No copy and paste.
* No folders for orga-nising your apps.
* No way to add new ringtones.
* No way to send videos as MMS.
* No video chat.
* No front-facing camera.
* No multi-tasking.
* No visual voice mail.
* In ability to watch flash based videos on the
Web.