Microsoft Immediately Stumbles in Quest for Well-Designed Phone Apps

The newly released app-design guide reveals a lot more about Microsoft than they probably intended.

With the recent release of Windows Phone 7, Microsoft appears to be getting serious about design. They've overhauled the mobile OS completely, in favor of a minimalist aesthetic and an efficient no-nonsense UI. And they're hoping to improve the most glaring failure of their previous phone OS's: Hideous 3rd-party apps. But how?

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The first step in that change has been...