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There's a new challenger in the battle for smartphone supremacy.

The device itself is a bit heavy.. but that’s more an LG thing than a WP7 thing, not bad though similar to the Milestone from Motorola and has good build quality. Apart from the weight it feels good in the hand and the slide out keyboard is quite easy to use with decent sized keys for my man hands.

The UI is very slick and runs quickly when switching between screens or apps, there is no lag or freezing, never had to force close an app (those who have used android will know what I mean). You can also make a phone call without having to hold it in a special way or apply a protective rubber sleeve.

There are lots of well thought out little things in the OS mostly around how things interact with other things rather than lots of good but isolated application capability... like toasters when you get new messages even when you’re in another app so you can get a preview of incoming events.

The Office experience is SECOND TO NONE and I really mean that. It’s so well thought out in a mobile context definitely not just trying to map out the desktop experience on a mobile. Simple things like a button to advise people you are running late for a meeting or showing your next appointment on the home screen, or the built in quick views for unread or urgent emails through to being able to view the details of an appointment and adjust them as you would in Outlook.

Add to that opening and editing documents in their native form, deep contact integration with active directory, SharePoint integration for document viewing and editing with no additional VPN overlay (think simple workflow/approvals process and forms apps with no development) and contact integration with “mysite” put it yards ahead of anything else. Not to mention that soon it will integrate natively with the new version of OCS and with all the BPOS services.

On the personal side of things the Facebook integration is good and the aggregation with the windows live login it pulls details into your contacts list and has a nicely separated view of your homepage and the friends feeds easy to update and reply. It has really good integration across media you can directly share links or content or webpages from the browser or media player or camera easily and even get the option to automatically back up all your photos and media to the cloud in real time.

There are some pretty cool features when you have Windows7 at home as the integration with your desktop is great especially if you’re running a media server on it. The phone becomes a remote as well as the ability to stream content from your device to your home theatre via media centre...works with other media centres as well.

I don’t have an xbox (PS3 FTW) but it looks like there could be some pretty cool games and integration with console games might even switch to XBOX to get the integration... one thing Android lacks is a decent tier one games catalogue and WP7 looks set to own this space from a mobile perspective due to the catalogue and console integration.

And lastly with ZUNE the WP7 has the third killer app for consumer ...music...something the iPhone has and Android ecosystem lacks.

Don’t want to sound too much like a fan boy but I honestly think this is the best Mobile OS for business use right now. As a personal device it has a much better ecosystem than Android does and depending on how well Microsoft markets the advantages it has over Android we could see some consumer drive. Its consumer appeal will come down to how much MS want to spend marketing it and how quickly they can get the chassis two option out for a lower entry price.