Joe Belifore, Microsoft's VP for Window Phone, sat down with The Verge at CES to talk about the platform, and some of the marketing strategies they'll be using to make Windows Phone stand out against a sea of Android devices and the overpowering stature of iOS. Not surprisingly, the message was repeated that it's quality and experience, not specs and big numbers, that are being focused on.

He did share his thoughts on how Windows Phone differs from iOS and Android, positioning it as the happy balance between the two leaders in mobile software. You get the greater variety of Android with the reassurance of tighter quality control that Apple offers. Quality, in fact, was the overriding theme of what Joe had to say. According to him, having a better user experience is what will differentiate Windows Phone from the competition, not extreme specs or barrel-scraping prices.

There's a certain irony in this approach, as it echoes the approach that Palm Computing took against Microsoft - asking journalists to look beyond the memory size and processor speeds of the Windows Palm-Sized PC units to see that a Palm could do a regular operation in a faster time, such as look up a phone number (which, come to think of it, also sounds a bit familiar).

But it was the right approach then, and is the right approach now. I certainly believe in choosing the right tool for a job, and Windows Phone covers more of the things that I want to do than other smartphones I have tried.

Now to see if that message can be carried out to the rest of the world.