“John Dvorak from MarketWatch recently uploaded his review of the current Windows 8 Release Preview, calling the upcoming OS an "unmitigated disaster."”

“The brightly colored, interactive tiles of Windows 8's Metro interface are fun and innovative. But they can also be frustrating and completely unintuitive to use.”

“It’s Microsoft’s insistence on inserting Metro between us and what we want to do – and at times Metro is spectacularly inappropriate.”

“Fewer than half of the 2900 readers who answered our survey about the Consumer Preview said they were satisfied with the new interface.”

“'You can converge a toaster and a refrigerator,' Cook replied, 'but those aren't going to be pleasing to the user.'”

“There is mounting evidence since the release of the Final Release Preview that  Windows 8 is shaping up to be a repeat of  the Vista Disaster.”

I just said I liked it. But then again, I passed my Windows Phone on to someone else.

If it is so good, why all the fuss about it?  MS is putting it on everything and the consumer has been saying no, no, no to it.

I like quite a bit about the Metro UI.

There's room for improvement, obviously, but there are good bits to it.

WP is underwhelming, Microsoft has never listened to the customer and as such will always be in last place.  They will never be the “third” ecosystem when they are just holding on to 7^th place and not far ahead of the “others” category.  The laggy UI of Android is a bug that Google has never fixed.  Google can certainly fix it, but there are other OS’s on the same hardware that don’t have the laggy feel to them.  Some on similar hardware as WP and they can actually do more with the hardware.

Nokia was going around offering a challenge to show how fast the “Metro” UI was.  Well, they lost that challenge as my phone was faster than theirs.

I have a quad core Samsung Galaxy S3 (Android) and the UI is very "laggy". Specsmanship of that kind can be misleading.

That said, I think I agree. The announcements were a little under-whelming. << that's about the gist of your post?

"Plus it was a painful presentation to watch" -- agreed. For some reason Nokia presentations are like that. Windows and Elop haven't changed the firm's presenting style.

Caveat: I only watched for a few minutes.

What is there to like?  Dual-core phone?  The competition was three a few years ago and are now introducing quad core phones.  Is Microsoft always going to be late to the party?  WP is still limited to certain hardware, just like it has in the past.  Why will this release of WP be any better than WP7 or WP7.5.  Microsoft released WP7 and it went nowhere.  When WP7.5 was nearing being released, you had the product manager saying that it was the release to wait for.  It too went nowhere.  Now you have Ballmer saying that 2012 is the year for Windows?  The year is about up and will be nearly up by the time they do release it.  At the end of the day, WM and Symbian are still outselling WP.  No what else is, Bada.  How many handsets did Nokia move by giving the handset away for free or other items?  At one point it was buy a Lumia and get an Xbox 360 for free.  How many of those handsets do you think made it to eBay still new in the box?  How will the current users fare when apps are written for WP8 and they are left out?  The closest they will get to WP8 is a WP7.8 update but will do nothing for the app portion.  Microsoft is also going to port all WP7 apps to WP8.  Oh, where is the SDK for WP8?  Microsoft still hasn’t released it.  It is expected soon, but a little hard to get developers writing apps without it.  Is Microsoft really committed to WP when they are slow to release the SDK?  Microsoft can afford to lose money on WP, can Nokia?  The answer is no and their “partner” is not really a partner.  Is Nokia any better off now than they were before?  Nope.  They are selling less than 10% of where they were before in smartphones.  All the money spent on the Lumia 900 should little ROI.  If AT&T does pick the Lumiz 920 up, I wouldn’t expect a big fanfare about it.  The $150 million spent on the Lumia 900 to move around 300,000 units probably has AT&T reluctant to spend any money on future WP handsets.  That leaves it up to Microsoft and Nokia.  While Nokia has $12 billion in cash, they also have $6.5 billion in debt.  That is as of June 30, 2012 and with July and August behind us, I’m sure that cash is even less.  Sales have been slow and the pickup of WP slow.  Microsoft sure likes to boast about the number of apps and how fast they got there, but at the end of the day, does that really matter?  If you don’t have the volume of the handsets, the developers can’t make money.  With iOS it is 50 apps per device sold.  Where would a developer rather be, somewhere where there are over 200 million devices sold or where there are around 25 million?  With WP8, there are 0 customers today and current customers do not carry over.  Microsoft broke compatibility with the move to WP7 and then again with WP8.  What happens in 18 to 24 months when Windows 9/WP9 is released?  Current customers have to be asking themselves this as well as the developers.

Nokia would have been far better off sticking with MeeGo and Symbian and then testing the waters with WP8.  You have Nokia throwing each and every customer they had under the bus with the move to WP7 and then they did it again with WP8.  Sorry Nokia, you had two feet and you shot them both now.

Don’t forget, the board has a backup plan if WP doesn’t work out.  What it is, they won’t say and what the deem is a WP failure is not known either.

The stock almost doubled in the two months leading up to the announcement.  Remember the phrase "Buy the rumor, Sell the news."

Plus it was a painful presentation to watch.  Is there anything here I can't do on another brand of smart phone I actually might want to buy? 

I doubt it too. No launch date, no operator partners and no price details ... the phones look pretty, though.