Windows Phone Thoughts: Web Browsing On WP7S

"One of the most appealing parts of the iPhone is its Web browser. Mobile Safari is powered by the WebKit engine, and this same engine also powers the desktop browser. The result is a Web experience that, while not identical to the desktop experience, is not far off. Windows Mobile, on the other hand, has a browser that's roughly derived from Internet Explorer 6. The result? A decidedly second-rate Web experience. Windows Phone 7 Series will improve things somewhat-to approximate parity with Internet Explorer 7-but it remains behind its desktop counterpart."

I'm finding it hard to put any kind of posiive spin on this - fact is, it's hard to be positive about a lot of the WP7S news that's come out over the past few weeks. I can (probably) learn to live with most of them, but this is one area that I'm going to find hard to gloss over. If we had access to alternative browsers like Opera that's one thing, but it looks like that's still going to be a ways off with the restrictions Microsoft is placing on developers. Getting on par with IE7 may be good enough, but...who knows? WP7S is coming late to the party as it is, and a dated web experience is just one more strike against it.