It’s astounding that until this moment, three years after the iPhone, the biggest software company in the world basically didn’t compete in mobile. Windows Phone 7 Series is more than the Microsoft smartphone we’ve been waiting for. Everything’s different now.

Today, at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Microsoft is publicly previewing Windows Phone 7 for the first time.

I’m loving this interface. But each menu pulls enough info from the cloud, I’m concerned that the menus will turn very slowly. They can spec the phone to the snapdragon’s nuts, but if the menus pull heavily from the cloud, we will be wearing rose-colored hourglasses.