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I will start off by saying that the Microsoft store that I sought out was just as welcoming as any Apple store that I have walked into.

Bright lights, brilliant displays and a bunch of people having with with the Xbox 360 Kinect.

Beyond that there was nothing positive to report after my first and possibly last visit to the Microsoft store based in Atlanta, Georgia.

I walked over to the Windows Phone 7 devices to try to browse the web to see what type of user experience Microsoft had to offer on mobile computing.

There was one issue, the devices weren’t activated!

I went sought out assistance from the young lady that greeted me at the door and asked her if there was something wrong with the device I was attempting to use.

She told me that none of the devices were activated because they required sim cards.

This, makes no sense to me at all.

How are you going to demo a smartphone in this day & age without having the device activated?

I’d say 70% of the features on the device are web related, so why not have the device at least connected to the web?

The device not being activated wasn’t that big of a deal because I had my Nexus S with me so I could turn the device into a mobile hotspot.

I explained to the lady that I needed her to show me how to turn on the wifi feature on the device, she prompted a “why?”

I explained to her what I wanted to do and she told me that would not be possible.

Strike Two.

After haggling this woman for about 45 seconds she finally came over and showed me how to enable the wifi access on the mobile device.

It soon picked up my portable hotspot and I was off to the races.

I enjoyed my brief time with the device however the laughable support and the fact that these devices weren’t connected to the wireless network inside the store were a joke.

I see why Apple is running laps around Microsoft.

Last night I loaded a few movies on my Palm Pre.

One of the limitations of the hardware is the lack of removable memory on the Pre.

With my songs, pictures and now movies I have less than 600 megs of storage space.

It isn’t that big of a deal because transferring files isn’t bad but it would be a nice option on future WebOS devices.

The video is below:

I hope that this device becomes a huge success.

From what I’ve read and viewed through videos it looks as though Palm has done everything right except for not being backwards compatible out of the box with existing applications.

This new (long over due) os sounds like it might be a real threat to WinMo, Rim, OS X and Android.

As a consumer this gives me a reason to jump for joy but being some what familiar with Palms most recent history I have to reserve all smiles until this device is released.