Over the past 24 hours, Windows Phone 7 fans have been attending pre-launch parties and store openings in cities including Singapore, Paris, Berlin, Vienna, Sydney, Milan, Madrid, and London. It’s so cool to see phones beginning to hit shelves in some of the retail locations in these cities. Determined fans including Jourdan Templeton in Auckland, New Zealand and Andrew Willett from London, England got early starts to be the first ones in their countries to purchase Windows Phone 7 devices.
While there can be only one “first” customer, others were treated to celebrity appearances in store while they purchased their phones – ranging from actor Isaiah Mustafa at Telstra in Sydney, to radio personalities Jonny Vaughn and Lisa Snowden at Orange in London. Lucky guests in Berlin got to welcome Windows Phone 7 to Germany with a star studded evening in Berlin hosted by Microsoft and Deutsch Telekom with top German celebrities including singer and actor Jimi Blue Ochsenknecht and the TV hostess Barbara Schöneberg. While in Paris, people flocked to Orange’s flagship store to try out the new Windows Phone 7 handsets.
Early reviews continue to come in from around the world, here are just a handful of my personal favorites:
“While the home screen squares and rectangles in solid colours on its phones look like buttons to push to get to essentials – calls, mail, messaging, contacts – there is a level of sophistication hiding just beneath the Windows Phone 7 touchscreen surface.”
– Chris Nuttall, Financial Times.com
“Let’s just get it out of the way: Windows Phone 7 is the most exciting thing to happen to phones in a long time.”
“But the Windows Phone 7 platform is a strikingly nice system with a refreshingly different design that shows the team in Redmond still has enough vision and talent to be a serious contender.
– Brier Dudley, The Seattle Times
