You would be surprised but Maemo and Android have much more in common then WM. I hope you confirm Android benefits, isn't?

Elop: "It has been discussed that Nokia plus Microsoft together have an extraordinarily strong intellectual property portfolio."

Quick, everyone save this, and hope we don't need it soon...

Edit: More quotes here:

Elop: "our first priority is beating Android." WTF????? Nokia, you just gave up on the software side of phone/computer development and now you just started a war with something that could help you recapture some of your market share. Brilliant! You had a chance if you offered WP7, Android and Meego (when ready), but you completely dropped the ball and insulted, not only your own employees, but also your customers....by not offering any choices (specifically, Android). If I was Ollila I would seriously question the motives of the person I just put in charge. Corporate schizophrenia at it's finest! Nokia has lost it's identity for sure. Game over......you can't win.

Understood, but MeeGo is/was positioned as a mobile computing platform, which by any rational analysis should not be niche! Mobile computing is the future... not "smartphones".

Well, it is a word of software company but not handset manufacturer.

Absolutely, no doubt at all.

None of these, either together or separately, are required parts of an operating system.
All an operating system really is required to do is allow a user to run programs of their choice. ANYTHING beyond that qualifies as smart.

Services:
Xbox integration: I have access to all my xbox friends and their avatars and information. I can send and recieve messages from them. In the future there will be chat and game invites and most of the features already present on the xbox itself.
Zune: A huge catalog of drm-free music at competitive prices. Also available is the Zune Pass, of which I've been a subscriber for a few years now. I can download whatever I want, whenever I want, wherever I want, and however much of it I want. No hassles. I get to pick 10 of my favorite songs each month and they're mine forever, no questions asked. I can have only my phone, and stream the vast majority of songs available on the marketplace seamlessly. If I'm at my computer I can use the fantastic software client to manage/buy/play my music. If I'm at the library, I can log into the zune website and stream music through the web browser. I mean the abilities are astounding! Plus every night I go to bed, plug in my phone right beside me nowhere near my computer, but when I wake up the next morning all my new music and podcasts from the computer are magically on my phone. New pictures and music I have on my phone are on my computer.
Windows Live: Anything from any of my windows devices can be synced to each other seamlessly through WL Skydrive. I take a photo on my phone, I can set them to automatically upload to Skydrive and from there they can go anywhere: flickr, my computer, etc. I don't have to go through a "share" menu, it just happens.
Then there's the social integration. I don't have to load up the facebook website or even the app. Its integrated into each person's contact.

Community:
Granted there isn't anything in the windows world, that I'm aware of, like the "communities" that gather around open source projects.
That said, consider that there are TONS of blogs and podcasts by Microsoft employees about all of their projects. For Windows Phone, there is the Windows Phone Radio podcast that is run by two developers from the team that develops Windows Phone. Furthermore, its not just them broadcasting, they answer emails, ASK QUESTIONS OF THE USERS LISTENING, and generally CARE and care PUBLICLY. Then there's the Zune Insider podcast if you care about the Zune side of things, which I do. Its incredibly informative and since Window Phone users use the Zune software client on PC, its informative since one of the hosts is a developer who works/worked directly on that. They consistently talk about feedback they've received and what they're doing to act on it. Just the fact that they let their users know that they HEAR what users are saying and take it back to the team is amazing. NOTHING like that exists in the Nokia world.

Applications/Development:
I'm not going to espouse an app market as the best feature about a phone. Android and iOS have larger markets. I just want to say if you care about that sort of thing, WP7 has an excellent market that has a lot of apps in it and its consistently growing by leaps and bounds.
As far as development goes, ITS MICROSOFT. They make some of the best development tools and environments that exist.
Lets face it, developing for the n900 when it first launched was a joke. Thats partly why it never gained the sort of traction that could have inspired Nokia to put more support behind it. It got better when you could use Qt to develop for it, but that was always more of a work in progress than a fully integrated experience.
With WP7, you're using proven tools with EXCELLENT documentation. Development is a breeze. Thats all that needs to be said.

WP7 isn't a smartphone, its the future of phones.

I can go on, and I probably will to correct some of the blatant idiocy I'm reading in this forum, but for now I'm going to get some pizza.

Just a quick aside as someone who used to work in Nokia. The reason Nokia failed to produce compelling products: arrogance, laziness by the symbian developer teams, piss poor control of user testing (in the end as a test user of pre release phones I eventually gave up as I got sick of what I saw as real errors being marked as 'as specified' or the more brutal 'ignored'.

Nokia has become full of dead wood engineers who are waiting around for their 15 year renewal option when they can take voluntary resignation and coin in 15 months of pay. Nokia became like a socialist model of a country where 'good enough' became an accepted pass criteria for product launch. Nokia finland is strangled by union control - Elops life is going to be real hard getting rid of the cruft.
Symbian OS was known for being the thing that would eventually kill Nokia - and lo its come to pass. QT was killed by it as symbian is the OS that was holding up its release to the outside world. Maemo and linux already had QT grounding - all the qt r+d time was sucked up by the pile of fail that is that POS OS.
I'm off to android now..

We'll see fanboy! Troll else where stooge....

To all those "Elop was ony very short at M$ and isn't necessarily thinking M$ centric anymore. He's number eight of the list of single people holding M$ shares:

http://www.dailyfinance.com/company/...ional-ownershi

Now you know who's benefiting from this deal ....

Don't have an Xbox, don't want an Xbox. Not everyone is a gamer. And not all gamers use Xbox.

Don't have a Zune, don't want a Zune. Better DRM-free services are available elsewhere.

Don't get me started on M$ reliability or security.

Ya suppose there might be good reasons for that?

Also known as propaganda.

There's reasons for that, too.

Heaven help us.

If you get open source pizza you can eat it or whatever you want, but if it's M$ pizza you only get a limited user's license.

Look, I don't have time or inclination to go into more detail refuting your points and would obviously be beating my keyboard against a wall anyway. Clearly, you're Elop's kinda guy.