Windows Mobile 7 has been in work since the end of 2005. Being under hard pressure from the main competitors, Apple and Google, the company tried to create anything that will beat its rivals at the first shot. According to Steve Ballmer, their latest product stands out in an overcrowded smartphone market and delivers a different kind of mobile experience to its users.

Windows Phone 7 is a complete overhaul of Microsoft’s previous concepts of the mobile phone. Thus it has almost nothing to do with earlier versions like Windows Mobile 6 and Windows Mobile 6.5. A piece of bad news here – all the apps created for the previous versions won’t work here.

Instead of trying to make a small PC out of the phone, Windows Mobile developers decided to focus on the features which are considered appealing to the audience – an easy access to social networking, music, video and mobile phone applications. The phone content is organized around a set of hubs: People, Pictures, Games, Music + Video, Marketplace, and Office, each having a series of individual apps. The People hub might already be called the best social networking implementation yet on a phone.

Xbox Live, also supported by the Windows Phone, makes gamers tremble in anticipation. Internet Exlorer and Outlook email app continue the Microsoft company tradition.

In general, the new phone brings together a bunch of different Microsoft services — Zune, Xbox, Bing and makes them work seamlessly and flawlessly. The only disappointment is that handsets with Windows Phone 7 are unlikely to appear anytime before last quarter of 2010.