A new smartphone with --will soon be here. The people have spoken...and I relayed the message to Microsoft, and Microsoft is hooking it all up. So, fear not! The series will be Mango after all.

It will still be a few days until the Mango smartphone arrives, but this is good. It gives me an opportunity to experience NoDo firsthand for a while before Mango comes along to rock its world. It will give me better perspective on the improvements in Mango relative to what Windows Phone 7 is now.

During the next few days, though, I don't plan on focusing on NoDo per se. As many comments and emails pointed out, NoDo will soon be extinct like the Dodo so it won't do me much good to get too personally invested in it. What I will do to keep things moving along while I wait for the Mango smartphone is to check out various aspects of the Windows Phone 7 OS that are consistent between NoDo and Mango.

For today, though, I want to examine the double-edged sword of diversity. I have been using an iPhone for a few years now. I have switched during that time from the iPhone 3GS to the iPhone 4, and I have been . But--with Apple--iOS and the iPhone are essentially one and the same and the only options in terms of smartphone hardware are whether I want it in black or white.

Not so with other mobile platforms like BlackBerry, or Android, or Windows Phone 7. No, with these platforms there is a diverse plethora of handset options distributed by a range of manufacturers (except BlackBerry which has a variety of smartphones, but all from RIM). As if that isn't enough, which smartphone I can get also varies by wireless carrier.