Windows Phone 7 – great platform, sad user experience

If you have been a Windows developer and at the same time Apple iPhone/iPad or Google Android user then you probably know what I am talking about here.

Windows Phone 7 is running on top of Silverlight and XNA, and then you can use Visual Studio and/or XNA Game Studio for WP7 development. So in terms of development WP7 is a dream platform.

That being said, I am looking at the WP7 phone that I got for research, and the user interface is just plain ugly. I am talking about the square boxes, or info tiles (or however you want to call them) on the home screen; the black and white lists and dialog boxes; the square black and white buttons and the half-hidden page titles.

I keep wondering why, given the capabilities of Silverlight and XNA, why has Microsoft created such an unexciting user interface?

The phone I have is SAMSUNG SGH-i917 with AT&T