Habitual smartphone experimenter Steve Wozniak in a podcast (embedded below) gave strong compliments to Windows Phone. Having picked up a Lumia 900 weeks earlier, the Apple co-founder still picked the iPhone as his favorite but argued to aNewDomain that Windows Phone was better than any Android phone. It had the "most beautiful" visual experience of any platform, Wozniak said, and its presentation made him feel like he was "with a friend, not a tool."
It was also fast and reliable, he added, although he echoed complaints about the camera.
Following up in the comments, Wozniak suggested half-jokingly that Microsoft had picked up on the spirit of Apple. While he was careful not to imply that Microsoft had copied anything, he wondered if Microsoft hadn't hired an Apple employee to influence the design given its overall emphasis on intuitiveness and design.
"I also surmised that Steve Jobs might have been reincarnated at Microsoft, due to a lot of what I see and feel with this phone making me think of a lot of great Apple things," he added.
In practice, much of the Metro interface in Windows Phone has commonly been attributed to Joe Belfiore, a more than 20-year veteran of Microsoft. The interface was inspired both by its namesake approach to modern urban signs as well as by magazine layouts.
Wozniak is known for wanting to try most mobile platforms and even got a pre-release Galaxy Nexus directly from Google's headquarters in Mountain View. While some have accused him of being 'disloyal' to the company he helped create, he has regularly kept the iPhone as his favorite and expressed appreciation for some features or design tricks that other platforms might do better.
