Microsoft: iOS 5 is copying Windows phone 7 Mango

What do you do when you feel threatened? Do you lie down and take it or do you start swinging insults? Microsoft’s Joe Belfiore, head of Windows Phone at Microsoft, clearly chooses the latter road when life’s gone against him, as the below tweets reveal:

The messages are were fired off into the Twittersphere as a response to some of the features unveiled for iOS 5, which Belfiore clearly thinks Microsoft has announced first for its own phone platform.

While the first tweet pertains to WP7 features that have been on the platform since day one – having a physical camera button, discrete, hide-able notifications and photos that auto upload to the cloud, the second is full of features still not available to Windows Phone users.

Features like WiFi sync, baked in Twitter integration and online chat services are all set to land in Microsoft’s next software update, which will land in the Autumn. Couple that with the fact that Microsoft only had the jump on Apple with these features by about a month (MS properly unveiled Windows Phone 7.5, or ‘Mango’, in May), and it seems odd to begin calling attention to iOS 5’s ‘borrowed’ ideas.

What do you think? Has Belfiore got a point, or is Apple merely working at the same speed as Microsoft? Let us know on the Gadget Helpline Twitter feed.