What I would have really liked to see in the video was any new capabilities of Mobile Internet Explorer. Is it going to have the capabilities that we're used to from the iPhone, webOS, and Android? The web browser is probably the most important part of these phones since almost everything has a web interface. The XBOX Live and Facebook apps look nice, but there's no guarantee that Windows Phone 7 Series will take off and get lots of developers on board. However, a good web browser means that I can still get what a lot of what I want without apps.
"Here's a look at the browser. This is a much more advanced browser then we've ever shipped. It's based on the desktop version of IE, so it's highly compatible with lots of webpages."
That browser better has to support the exact same features as webkit for android and Iphone else I don't think this phone can match up against the iphone and android phones due to the lack of developer interest in developing for this browser.
Developers are fed up for years with Microsoft's browsers and here they can safely ignore it because it doesn't have a huge market share.
If it's based on the rendering engine in IE8/7, then pretty much everything on the web already works for it. No mainstream sites are "safely ignoring" Internet Explorer.
Well regular mainstream sites aren't, but mobile web applications/sites are making use of css3 and html5 features not present in IE8/7. In the mobile industry Microsoft has such a large marketshare that it will be safe to ignore the browser of Windows Mobile 7 (for now).
