AT&T to be “initial exclusive” US carrier for Windows Phone 7

In what will be rather unwelcome news for most  Windows Phone 7 fans, the Wall Street Journal is claiming AT&T will be the “initial exclusive U.S. carrier” for phones running the new OS.

Apparently this exclusivity is tied up with “marketing support” from AT&T, something that has been very successful for Motorola and Android on Verizon with the Droid campaign.

On the other hand the Droid campaign only amplified the message with consumers that Verizon is awesome, with the carrier enjoying the highest satisfaction rates of all US carriers.  Any campaign by AT&T will in fact have to work against the perception that the carrier is awful first before it can even come to advertising Windows phone 7, with the carrier sharing last place with T-Mobile.

With the carrier saturated with iPhone users one can also only speculate about the size of the potential market there.

This also casts some doubts over Microsoft’s claims regarding the reason for delayed CDMA availability, as it may have just been a convenient excuse for what would have been an exclusively GSM launch in any case.

Of course the statement could be wholly wrong – we do after all expect the HTC HD7 to show up on T-Mobile USA some time in November, so lets hope as usual it is some analyst jumping to conclusions.

What do our readers think of this news? Is AT&T exclusivity worth AT&T’s marketing muscle? Let us know below.

Via Infosyncworld and WMExperts.com