
just crippled enough to annoy
Just capable enough to suck people into buying, crippled enough to make them regret it soon after.
WTF were they thinking with 4Gb storage, the cloud is not a good enough substitute even over WiFi, totally useless with typical 3G reception in most of the UK.
How many people will associate the cut down feature set here with WP7 in general. When you buy a low end Android phone it multitasks poorly - but still does it. It's easy to imagine the performance improvement an upgrade would bring to a feature you've directly experienced.
With this 'beginners edition' of WP7 it's less obvious to casual users what an upgrade brings - unless it's actually so crippled you're compelled to upgrade just to get a useful device - a well used Microsoft strategy on the desktop. Arguably the missing multitasking isn't exactly great in the full version anyway!
I can see a future where this sort of device is the 1st AND last WP phone large numbers of people buy.