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At the Windows Phone 7 event in New York Monday, Microsoft and AT&T had demo units of the three WP7 phones that will be available in the United States next month. I had a few minutes to play with each of them. Here are my first impressions.

LG Quantum

This is the slide-out phone with the QWERTY keyboard. It’s similar to a Blackberry phone’s layout, with two buttons on the left for Shift and Function (which for the most part you use to type in numbers). The hardware keyboard works very well, but I found using it in that mode a little confusing.

Some apps move from portrait to landscape without a hitch. But the WP7 home screen, Marketplace and a few others don’t. In time, you could get over this guessing game. Maybe users with more experience with slide-out landscapes know how to do this without a snap. The keyboard also made the phone quite thick, particularly compared to the touchscreen-only models on display.

Samsung Focus

This was by far my favorite of the three phones. It has a 4-inch touchscreen with beautiful color fidelity. The three hardware buttons don’t depress, but each provides a little buzz of tactile feedback. I even found using the software keyboard and switching from portrait to landscape much easier on the Focus than on the other two phones. That extra half-inch really does make a difference — and the image quality shows off just how graceful the WP7 OS is.

HTC Surround

This was the most difficult phone to put through a full trial, simply because there weren’t games or movies available to play readily. I wasn’t able to listen to its much-touted Dolby Digital Surround speakers either. But otherwise, its interface was very similar to Samsung’s, although again with a much smaller and dimmer screen. Its three hardware buttons also had a similar tacticle feedback buzz, which the LG Quantum didn’t have.

Overall

It’s a very beautiful OS, and I think some people will find its working clean and intuitive right away. It may seem like an odd thing to get fixated on, but the landscape/portrait thing really stands out.

There were plenty of times when text information trailed off the screen without wrapping in portrait mode, but you couldn’t turn it into landscape in order to see it, You had to swipe over to the next screen. Some of the applications, like QWERTY typing and gaming, seem built for landscape, but the primary navigation mode of WP7 is definitely portrait.

It’s probably somewhere in between the iPhone and Android in terms of customization possibility. There are more options than iPhone (including plenty of easy accessibility and mulitlingual options), and they’re a little easier to find. But I thought, for instance, I might be able to change the font, which is everywhere. No dice — at least on these floor models.

I loved the Focus: iPhone and iPad users will probably find it the closest to their experience and preferences.

I thought the keyboard on the Quantum was very well-made (and existing slide-out users again might find it even more appealing).

I was and remain intrigued by the microsize media experience the Surround offers. It’s an extremely solid lineup of phones; at $200 each, users dead-set on WP7 will just have to decide which hardware and use experience they like best.

Photos: Tim Carmody/Wired.com