Microsoft announced its long-awaited Windows Phone 7 will ship soon and early reviews are favorable. Their official announcement came last week, but some have been testing out pre-release prototypes and can’t stop talking about it. Apple blogger John Gruber of the website Daring Fireball called the unit a “real, credible competitor”
Gizmodo: Windows Phone 7 is the most exciting thing to happen to phones in a long 
time… Windows Phone 7 is really great. A solid foundation, it’s elegant and joyful.
Engadget: for a first generation, brand new OS, the folks in Redmond have done a pretty impressive job… It’s one of the best and most accurate virtual keyboards we’ve used on any platform — and that’s saying a lot.
Mobile Crunch: For the most part, Microsoft really has done an incredible job with the visual interface here. From the lock screen on down, they manage to simplify things down in a way that seems almost artistic… Perhaps the best feature of all: if an app developer wants to give their users a taste before they buy, the marketplace supports it.
This is great news for developers. A successful WP7 means more opportunities. With more than a million .NET licensed developers worldwide, no one has to learn a new language to write apps for the OS. Also, WP7 supports Visual Basic and XNA Framework so developers can easily port what they’ve written for Windows or the Xbox to the phone. Making it easy write or port apps for the WP7s means these new phones will have a lot of cool new options for users.
Part of Microsoft’s push with WP7 also appears to be a renewed emphasis on Zune, integrating its music application with the phone OS. We’re hearing they will make a Zune app available to run on OS X. Perhaps Apple is feeling the heat a bit as we’re also hearing that they’re considering a subscription model for iTunes.
These additions to the mobile marketplace mean more jobs and opportunities for applications developers to grow their business. This is the next area of huge growth within the industry. As consumers grow more comfortable with cloud based applications, more of our everyday activities will happen in the cloud and on mobile devices.
Everything should be roses, except for one thing. No one is really sure how the government plans to regulate. Privacy laws which apply to the internet were written when answering machines were the most advanced communications device. Mosaic had yet to be invented and CompuServe hadn’t even begun offering email when this bill became law.
Some small companies are reluctant to invest in the cloud because they have no idea which regulations apply. We need to know that the federal government has a firm decision about how it will treat this new industry. To help jumpstart the process, industry and consumer groups joined together to form the Digital Due Process Coalition. They combined their efforts to help lawmakers identify the key principles to update these outdated laws.
The country urgently needs our political leaders to not stand in the way of opportunities for economic growth. Hopefully, when Congress returns after the elections, it can fix these laws so that small businesses can write new apps without worrying about unforeseen government intervention.