When I reviewed Windows Phone 7, I'd been using it for a little over a week. At the time, I concluded:

Microsoft doesn't often get version one releases right, but this time, it has got the release very right indeed. Windows Phone 7 looks great, works well, and is a treat to use. Market success isn't assured, but judged on its merits alone, this is a platform that absolutely deserves to succeed, and I really, really hope it does.

As of today, the smartphone platform has been on sale for exactly three months—long enough for things that felt like minor flaws at the time to develop into fatal, infuriating, carbuncles. I've been using it since launch on a range of handsets: how does it stack up now that the new gadget glow has worn off? Is it still a platform with promise, able to hold its own against the competition? Or are its widely publicized flaws and omissions crippling in longer-term use?

I stand by my original assessment. This is a great platform that fundamentally works well. The Metro user interface is fast and elegant, the applications that are most important to me—e-mail, Bing, and the browser—work well, and the hardware is generally pretty decent. It remains a release that Microsoft should be proud of.

However, not every early impression was accurate. Some things that seemed like problems at the time turned out to be not such a big deal. Other things that I thought I would use often have for one reason or another fallen by the wayside.

Happy surprises and annoyances

Day to day, the smooth animations, transitions, and clean graphics continue to delight. There is often a danger with animations to make them excessive. HTC is a repeat offender in this regard; its applications (for both Android and Windows Phone 7) contain all sorts of cutesy animations (such as windscreen wipers wiping the screen when the weather app says it's raining) that look fun and amusing the first time you see them—they make great demo apps—but are just downright annoying the 900th time, when all you want to do is look at what the weather is.

Even three months in, I'm finding the Windows Phone 7 animations to fall firmly on the side of "good." There's no point at which I'm waiting for the animation to complete just so I can do something useful. The transitions and animations just serve to make the different parts of the software feel integrated and joined up. Microsoft has struck a good balance here.

A few things have surprised me. I use the Bing application a lot more than I thought I would. I didn't really think I'd need instant access to a search engine all that often. But because the Bing application is smart and "knows" that if, for example, I'm searching for a restaurant, it should find places that are nearby and show them on a map—and not just do a dumb Web search—it is invaluable when out and about. It provides quick access to relevant information—Microsoft's essential mantra for the platform. It makes the iPhone's built-in Spotlight and Web search seem extremely primitive and unhelpful in comparison.

I've also found that I don't really care that the Bing application doesn't search the phone itself. This was flagged by many as an omission at launch time—after all, the iPhone does search the phone—but while I do search my mail and contacts on a regular basis, these things are conceptually different enough that I don't really want them in the Bing application. So while I suspect that some kind of unified search will materialize in the future, it might not be as desirable as I once thought.

Indeed, the one place where local and remote content is searched in parallel, the Zune application, annoys me most of the time. When I'm searching for a song, I don't actually give a damn about stuff in Marketplace. Sure, I could buy it. But I ain't gonna. I just want to listen to what I already have. The Zune application hides local search hits behind an arrow, encouraging me to buy new songs instead, making it optimized for the wrong thing. I suppose I might think differently if I had a Zune subscription, but I don't, and so searching for music to buy is for me logically distinct from searching for local music. The two shouldn't be conflated.

What's worse is that if the phone has no network connection—and hence can't search Marketplace at all—it also loses the ability to search local music. This is clearly asinine.

In fact, if one weak spot has emerged in using the phone for a prolonged period, it's Marketplace. It suffers the same conflation problem as searching Zune—if I drill down into "applications" and then search for "Twitter," it'll still show me songs and music that contain the word "Twitter." Who wants that? Nobody, that's who.

Apps are surprisingly good

Which is a pity, because I've been generally pleased with the third-party development on the phone. OK, it's still got a long way to go to rival iOS or Android, but growth has been steady, with around 6,500 applications currently available. Some are idiotic fart applications, unfortunately, but I have, for example, a good Facebook application, a good Twitter application, Yelp, and a useful travel application (Wipolo). I've been consistently impressed that developers have really made an effort to create applications that leverage Windows Phone 7 user interface concepts like panoramas and pivots, and they do so to good effect. This is heartening to see: it makes the applications feel like they're really part of the platform, that they belong there.

I've also found myself gaming on the phone much more than I thought. It's clear that Microsoft has spent quite a bit of money in this area, to encourage third parties (notably EA) to develop for the platform. The result is a range of games (Tetris, Rocket Riot, Need For Speed: Undercover, Crackdown 2: Project Sunburst, Bejweled, The Harvest and others) that are pleasingly diverting or even downright entertaining. I'm not going to give up PC gaming anytime soon, but equally, I know I'm not going to be bored on the bus; there are plenty of high-quality games to choose from. The development may not be entirely "organic"—without financial incentives from Microsoft I'm sure game availability would be worse—but that doesn't detract from the enjoyability of what's on offer.

The trial option (optional in all third-party software, but mandatory for games that want to achieve the more stringent Xbox Live designation) is excellent. Not everything has a trial, but I've been glad to see that many developers have gone for the option. I only hope their conversion rates are good, and that they continue to do so. Trials make purchasing essentially risk-free, and the contrast with Apple's App Store is stark.

Perhaps it's because I don't own an Xbox, but I haven't found the Xbox Live integration to offer much value. OK, I collect gamer scores and achievements from the games I play, but I honestly couldn't care less about that.

I still want multitasking

One area that third-party software seems to have done less well is tombstoning. Windows Phone 7 doesn't offer any true multitasking of third-party applications, but it does have a suspend/resume model that allows applications to save their state to ensure that switching back to an application after, say, replying to a text message is speedy. I'm not sure what the difficulty is, but it seems to be awfully haphazard. When it works, it seems to work pretty well, with an experience that's almost as good as multitasking. But I find that is the exception rather than the rule. Most of the time, resuming applications seems to make you essentially wait for them to restart.

I'm not sure where the fault lies here, but I do know that it detracts from the phone experience, and it appears to be a pretty consistent issue in third-party applications. It's better than pre-multitasking versions of iOS—especially when it works well—but it's still not what it should be.

The problem is compounded by some extraordinarily long load-times in third-party applications. Restarting programs each time would be tolerable if only it were quick; often, it isn't.

When I first reviewed it, I found the back button behavior annoying, particularly in conjunction with the browser. Sometimes I want to go back to the previous application, but the browser just wants to take me back to the previous webpage. I felt at the time that if anything about the phone would drive me to abandon it, it would be this.

It still annoys me, but much less than it did—but that's only because I found a way to kind of work around the behavior. The main problem situation: I click a link from an e-mail (or other program, but typically e-mail), and then navigate beyond the linked page. I then want to go back to the e-mail, but without backing out of the navigation I performed. The workaround is simple and inelegant, but it works: create a new, empty tab in the browser, and then hit back from there. This backs out to the e-mail application directly. It's still not perfect, because it means that I can no longer visit history items for the e-mail originated browsing, but that's normally a trade-off I'm happy to make. Well—not happy, but it makes the phone more livable. My worry is that nothing better will ever materialize, because this dual usage of the back button is so baked into the OS.

Some great ideas are undermined by sloppy execution. The camera button, which instantly opens the camera application when you press it, is a great concept. I find myself not using it as much as I would like, however, because of what's really a very basic oversight: the camera application doesn't remember its settings, so my preferences for the flash (off), and anti-shake (on), get reset to their defaults (automatic and off, respectively) every single time I press the button to take a photo. I've grown tired of flash reflections ruining the pictures after the automatic flash decided to fire, so now I just don't bother. The entire point of the (well-intentioned) feature is to allow instant no-hassle photography, and if it can't do that, well, what's the use of it?

It's worth using

Three months on, there's no doubt that Windows Phone 7 works well on a day-to-day basis. The interface and design aren't just eye-catching razzamatazz. They're well-thought-out, functional, sensible pieces of design, marrying form with function. The platform's beauty is more than skin deep.

It's not all plain sailing, and there are problems. The biggest problem could essentially be phrased as, "the software today is identical to the software three months ago." In other words, Microsoft has yet to ship a single update, a single new feature, a single bug fix. And we still don't know when an update will ship: we know that copy-and-paste and faster application launching are coming, but the company hasn't seen fit to tell us when they will materialize.

If I wanted that kind of update situation, I would have bought an Android phone. With Windows Phone 7, part of the promise of the platform was that it would get better over time. So far, it hasn't. The early adopters, the people most likely to champion the phone and show it off to their friends, family, and colleagues, the ones who will build grassroots support for the platform, have been left wanting. Apple managed to get its first bug fix release out within a month, and its first feature release out within two months. That's the standard Microsoft should be aspiring to—but hasn't.