Definitely an improvement in moving away from gradients and four colors, especially since Google executes that paradigm much better.
Font’s kinda boring. It’s not the same as the metro font, is it? The modified Frutiger? Maybe it’s just the boring weight/execution…
The color isn’t working for me, but I guess in context it may be applied in cool ways.
I love the move away from the flag window. Could be more dynamic like the 1.0, but it communicates it pretty well.
Not bad MS, between windows phone, the lumia 800/900 and this I’m starting to be convinced that amazingly talented designers have authority in the company…I’m still skeptical about the Office/Outlook divisions though, gmail is still better than outlook.