While providing moral support to my father in-law at Best Buy this weekend* I got to fondle a Windows Phone 7 phone (redundant?). Specifically, the HTC Surround.

Wow.

In a good way.

Wow.

I love HTC’s hardware to begin with, but it was the OS itself that was most impressive. Smooth, intuitive, original, fresh… so un-Microsoft it caught me off-guard.

It makes iOS look antiquated and Android seem like a bad joke.

It was a visual pleasure, never stuttered or got laggy, the keyboard was great. After only a few minutes of playing with it I walked away thinking, “Apple had better bring it with iOS 5.0 – grids of static icons aren’t cutting it.”

I really liked it.

If Microsoft can get developers on board and can figure out how to market this thing (HA!) it may not be too late for them after all.

*Free tip: Don’t plan on relying on a Best Buy employee to be able to help you figure out what you need – do your research ahead of time. We got the same wrong information from three separate employees which turned what should have been a 20 minute trip into a two hour debacle. Thank you for killing my evening.