Sound familiar? These are precisely the features that were missing from iPhone 1.0, too. Furthermore, there’s a search button, but it can’t search your whole phone at once (for apps, contacts and e-mail simultaneously, for example). There’s no visual voice mail. And there’s no tethering option (where you pay an extra $20 a month to use the phone as a glorified Internet antenna for your laptop).

Like the iPhone, the Web browser doesn’t play Flash videos on the Web  but it also won’t play the HTML5 videos that the iPhone plays, or even videos in Microsoft’s own Silverlight format. So, no YouTube, no Hulu, no online news videos.

The e-mail program can’t unify your e-mail accounts into a single in-box. In fact, each e-mail account winds up as a separate icon on your home screen. There’s no message threading.

The calendar can sync with online calendars like Yahoo’s or Google’s. But, incredibly, it can show only one category at a time, like home or work. If you’ve color-coded your life’s appointments, then this feature is all but useless.

The address book has the opposite problem: it displays everyone from all of your accounts, including Facebook, in one long list. If you have hundreds of Facebook friends, they clutter up the list of people you call often. (There’s no Twitter integration at all, only a separate app.) That sounds like quite a lengthy to-do list for Microsoft, and it is. But heaven knows, if any company is famous for its slow, dogged, multiyear, multimillion-dollar approach to software improvement, it’s Microsoft. The company swears that it’s going to make Windows Phone 7 a contender. At the least, it’s safe to assume that it won’t kill the project completely after only two months, as it did with its Microsoft Kin cellphones this summer.

Here’s the thing: WP7 is a 1.0 release in a good way, too. It’s a complete rethinking of app phone software design. Somehow, Microsoft has pulled off the inconceivably difficult task of coming up with a fresh, joyous, beautiful new software design that doesn’t look anything like iPhone or Android.