One of the big complaints I had about the original release of Windows Phone was that many of the platform's best features are only available in certain locales, and some are literally available only in the United States. If you were to make a table of sorts, I said on the Windows Weekly podcast earlier this year, with features down one side and countries listed across the other, it would be a patchwork quilt of missing functionality.
Well, Andrew Birch took me up on that challenge, and the resulting Windows Phone feature tables he created have been a truly useful resource for the Windows Phone community as well as a central point of evidence about the platform's weakest spot.
With the release of Windows Phone 7.5, Mr. Birch is back, this time with his Windows Phone 7.5 feature tables. The first covers Windows Phone app and Zune Marketplace availability across the various locales in which Windows Phone is sold, and the second handles Bing Local, Xbox LIVE and other features.
As with the original tables, these new versions show that only the US gets a complete Windows Phone experience. Some countries--Australia, Canada, France, and so on--come close. And some are just listing in the wind, with bizarre combinations of available services and missing features. For example, in Italy and Mexico, you can rent movies from Zune Marketplace, but not buy them. Wah?
Thanks as always to Andrew for putting this together.