Mixed picture for Windows Phone 7 after first day of sales

The trajectory of Windows Phone 7 remained uncertain Tuesday, a day after Microsoft threw a massive coast-to-coast coming-out party celebrating its belated return to the smartphone market.
A slew of Windows Phone 7 handsets from the likes of LG, Samsung, Dell, and HTC went on sale in the U.S. on Monday, and there were scattered reports of sell-outs, including word from the Los Angeles Times that the gorgeous, 4.3-inch HTC HD7 was briefly sold out on T-Mobile's website.
Sounds promising for Microsoft, right? Perhaps, but then comes sobering word from CNET News.com, which sent a couple of reporters to an AT&T branch on San Francisco's Market Street.
The CNET scribes found a line of 200 people snaking out the door early Monday, just like you'd expect for the launch of a new iPhone. Just one problem: Turns out almost everyone in line was only waiting for tickets to the Maroon 5 concert in celebration of Microsoft's Windows Phone 7 launch. Later in the day, the CNET crew learned that the AT&T store had yet to break double digits in Windows Phone sales.
Meanwhile, Scott Moritz at TheStreet.com cites a market research firm that claims Microsoft sold just 40,000 Windows Phone 7 handsets on Monday, a fraction of the 200,000 Android phones that Google says are sold each day. Last month, Apple boss Steve Jobs claimed that consumers are activating about 275,000 iPhones a day.
For its part, Microsoft has yet to release sales figures for Windows Phone 7, which it first announced back in February.
Four different makes and models of WP7 devices went on sale Monday: the 4-inch Samsung Focus, the LG Quantum QWERTY slider, and the HTC Surround (which comes with a slide-out Dolby surround speaker), all on AT&T, and the aforementioned HTC HD7 on T-Mobile.
All four phones are selling for $199 with a new two-year contract, with more handsets due to arrive on Verizon, Sprint, and other worldwide carriers in the coming months.
Because Windows Phone 7 is essentially an all-new mobile platform, Microsoft is facing an uphill battle against the more established iOS and Android platforms.
With its totally revamped interface and relatively small app store — just 2,000 applications for now, a figure that's actually a little ahead of what Microsoft had been hoping for — consumers will probably be taking a wait-and-see approach to Windows Phone 7, especially in these (very) early days.
Not helping matters was the initial word that Windows Phone 7 wouldn't support cut-and-paste, a criticism that almost always comes up when discussion turns to the revamped OS.
Microsoft has since promised that the feature would arrive early next year in the form of a software update, but I've heard plenty of smartphone users — both casual consumers and fanatics alike — dismiss Windows Phone 7 out of hand because of the missing feature. (Oh, and there's no Flash support for the Web browser, either.)
Even if first-day Windows Phone 7 sales were slow, my guess is that Microsoft will dig in for the long haul. Unlike its ill-fated Kin experiment from earlier this year, the new Windows Phone OS makes for a worthy competitor in the increasingly cutthroat smartphone wars, and it's well worth remembering that Google's first Android phone didn't exactly come roaring out of the gate, either.
Then again, the T-Mobile G1 — the very first Android handset — came out almost two years ago, when the BlackBerry ruled and the iPhone was just nipping at its heels. The mobile world has turned upside-down since then, and it remains to be seen if Microsoft can gain a foothold in the increasingly crowded smartphone market — or whether it's already too late.
Anyone out there buy a Windows Phone 7 handset yet? Think Microsoft stands a chance against Apple and Google?