During my time here at the CTIA Wireless conference in Las Vegas, I've had the chance to manhandle a prototype Windows Phone 7 Series device, whose interface seemed pretty stable. The actual length of time spent with it (5 minutes) and an inability to conduct my usual routine of rigorous evaluations (including the Will It Survive Being Drop-Kicked? test) mean that I can't offer any sort of intensive review, but on first impressions alone it seems that Microsoft has something on its hands that could conceivably compete with Google Android and the Apple iPhone.

While I've been out here, writing about the state of the wireless industry and wondering how the casino operators managed to squeeze slot machines into the restrooms, my colleague Clint Boulton interviewed Stefan Weitz, director of Bing, who told him that Microsoft is totally cool with not catching up to Google in the arena of traditional keyword search.

Instead, Weitz seems to suggest that Microsoft is interested in claiming market share in nontraditional areas such as event-driven tasks and commercial queries. "It's not a zero-sum game," Weitz said. "I think what we're doing with search and, as we look at how people are using the Web itself and how the Web is changing, we think we can expand that which people do with these engines. We can grow the overall pie, the overall number of searches that are happening across the Web."

Microsoft has actually insisted a number of times over the past few months that it intends to gain market share through features like Bing Travel, which allows search to be compartmentalized into areas such as flights, hotels and so on. One of its other goals has been to layer additional functionality onto Bing Maps and other areas.

"We're going to have a radically different experience that in many cases rethinks [what] search should look like," Weitz reportedly said. "I hope we take a portion of share in those areas. We'll continue to compete in keyword-based search. But the more exciting place, and the place we're looking at more often, is how we expand the art of the possible in search and in those areas where we can create that expansion, we'll have an experience people will come to."

It could be working. Analytics company ComScore released a report on March 10 indicating that Bing owned 11.5 percent of the U.S. search market in February, although it lags far behind Google at 65.5 percent. Yahoo, meanwhile, had dipped to a 16.8 percent market share during that period.

Microsoft has been engaged in a substantial proxy battle against Google, with Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer mentioning during a March 2 talk at the Search Marketing Expo in California that the company had been "expressing" its frustrations with the search engine giant to the Justice Department.

And of course, as I'm seeing at CTIA, Microsoft is preparing to take on Google Android with its Windows Phone 7 Series.

So when a Microsoft executive comes out and says the company's sanguine about not catching up to Google in traditional keyword search, I sort of believe that just about as much as James Cameron telling the press he was totally okay with losing the Academy Award to his ex-wife, Kathryn Bigelow.