A lot of it comes down to what you want from Apps - I've had a Windows 7 phone and could do everything I wanted with it.

Are there particular apps you want that you can't get?

Bit early to pass judgment on WP8 as it's not launched to the public yet. Comment is fair for 7.5

Its bad enough when you cant find an app on Android that has been launched on iTunes! Imagine what it is like on WP7?!

If MS had got ahead with products such as Hotmail and the like, before I got settled on Gmail, maybe they would have more takers for their phone.

Wasn't hotmail out for years before gmail?

It certainly was...many, many years

I think the point was more that despite the huge head start, when G-Mail was launched it was far better than Hotmail because MS had just left it to stagnate.

Does anyone still use Hotmail? I come across hotmail addresses very rarely these days.

The replacement email service Outlook.com is very nice indeed and is getting rave reviews.

That's what happens when there is no competition. Since then, Hotmail began improving the service many years ago. But no-one paid attention to the improvements but hopefully with the outlook.com service they will take another look as those same feature e.g. for dealing with greymail like newsletters is still there and much better than google. I think the new UI for outlook.com alongside GMail's clutter with things I don't use like GTalk and trying to push me to use Google+ are making me push my email usage back to the MS side.

In any case, why is GMail a reason not to go with a Windows phone? You can access Gmail on a windows phone.

I loved my WM 6.5 (HTC Raphael) phone when i first had it but Microsoft were notoriously bad at maintaining the software. Looks like they have made some serious improvements with W7 (i was very tempted last upgrade to a Nokia W7 phone).

This next batch could be make or break. Hopefully they wont stifle the OS too much with various versions of the W8 software (I can understand the hardware issue with W7.8). If you look at Windows (desktop) OS there are to omany versions with basic netbooks even losing the fundamentals like changing background picture ! Using a similar approach to stifle 'budget' handsets would be a bad move IMHO. It looks like they may be falling into this trap already with their tablet range .....

Keep it open (functionality wise - not open source), keep it maintained, keep sweet with Apple and they could be onto a winner .....