It missed custom apps but all the default phone apps were really great. The “people” app already had everything the android’s “contacts” app implemented in subsequent years (everything it has today) and also integrated with social networks so if you accessed a contact you could see all their posts from every social media in a custom timeline.

The “me” app also integrated all your social media notifications into one app, allowing you to post to all of them from the same place, see replies and that sort of stuff.

I don’t remember what it was, but the “mail” app had a feature that was my favorite thing in the whole WP7, but by the time WP8 came out Google had already managed to make it not wok with Gmail.

Calendar, Camera, even the keyboard. All those default apps were filled with amazing little things. Many of which we STILL don’t have in android today.

In third world countries the difference was even bigger. The keyboard suggested local words and names of local places (no system does that these days), the Nokia maps were far more reliable than Google’s (my town had been split in half by a new train line and Google maps messed up their data with that, as some streets that used to cross the whole town now had multiple unconnected segments - if you tried to follow Google directions to a McDonald’s in one of those segments, it would send you into a slum in another segment).

Plus, the whole UI was cool and the flipping tiles were quite useful.