Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) is pinning its hopes for making headway in the smartphone business on its upcoming mobile operating system, Windows Phone 7. But some early reviewers think the software makers should rethink this plan.

Galen Gruman at InfoWorld minces no words in predicting that the upcoming platform will fail: "Windows Phone 7 is a waste of time and money. It's a platform that no carrier, device maker, developer, or user should bother with," Gruman writes. "Microsoft should kill it before it ships and admit that it's out of the mobile game for good."

Okay, Galen Gruman, tell us how you really feel about it.

Having seen a demonstration at the Mobile Beat conference last week, Gruman says that the platform's highly touted user interface is awkward and unsophisticated. It takes a lot of scrolling to get to what you want because each tile on the screen contains a small amount of information. If a tile contains more than a few apps, most options are hidden and you have to navigate through layers to get what you want, he writes. 

Gruman also takes issue with the apps that have been demonstrated, and with what he calls a "backward set of technologies" underpinning the system: "Microsoft is stuck in 2007, with a smartphone OS whose feature checklist might match that era's iPhone but whose fit and finish would look like a Pinto next to a Maserati," he writes.

Gruman's colleague Jared Newman at PCWorld didn't have much better things to say about the upcoming operating system. Newman writes that while he wants to retain some optimism about Windows Phone 7, he senses that it "could be Microsoft's Vista--again." The similarities with Vista go beyond a clunky user interface, he writes. The platform doesn't include standard functions such as copy and paste, multitasking and support in the browser for HTML5.

For more:
- see Galen Gruman's post at InfoWorld
- see Jared Newman's post at Computerworld

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