That's what I did when we moved to Berlin/Germany: Sold my car. My wife has the only car in the house.

I have joined two carsharing services in case I need a car - one of them DriveNow as in the article. But that occasion pops up far fewer times than I originally thought.

There is no guarantee to have a car nearby but usually there is one down the street. The iPhone app works great to locate the cars and provides a filter in case I want a specific model (do prefer the Mini).

Unfortunately I had the very same experience. Yesterday I walked down to the local T-Punkt here in Germany. They had many Androids on display. Checked out the Galaxy S2: beautiful! Disclaimer: I use an iPhone.

I noticed only three phones on display running WP7. Probably not Mango yet. The one with the biggest display was a HTC (I think) and I checked it out. But for not too long: Every other application displayed a cryptic error code. Something like 80070057. Is this some nostalgia for COM developers? Did not work for me.

Interestingly the other phones worked well. So I do not think it was a connectivity issue. But even if it was: The year is 2011 and I expect a reasonable error message.

No Win7 phones in the wild: quite true. I'm travelling a lot on German high speed trains where most people spend their time handling some kind of mobile device. Lots of Apple stuff, Blackberries. Less Androids but still noticable.

But I have yet to spot one single WP7 phone. Odd somehow.

I'm actually wondering what the other development team involved thinks about this: the guys who created WM7.

Now Nokia is supposed add input with regard to further development? They might perhaps veto some design decisions, add other goals? Surely Nokia would love to outmaneuver the other hardware manufactures. This cooperation seems to grant Nokia enough leverage to do so.

As a WM7 developer with a vision for my product I'd feel pretty pissed. Strategic thinking of a hardware manufacturer will steer the future of my software baby? Of a manufacturer with distinctly different mindset? Who just realised that his software strategy tanked.

To my knowledge I don't know anybody on the WM7 team. But I feel already sorry for you guys.

Flashback to 1998: A former employer calls and asks if I or anybody I knew could work on a new project. I asked for the required qualifications. The answer was that being able to hold a keyboard was sufficient.

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zoltan