Submitted by Before the iPhone, we were content with stylus-based interfaces that worked well – mostly – for what you needed to do. Then came the iPhone. From a pure feature perspective, it was (and is) lacking, but it more than makes up for it by being a polished product that’s easy to use. The iPhone shook the entire industry up, and while newcomers have done relatively well (webOS, Android) Windows Mobile is now so far left behind you can barely see it any more. Windows Mobile 6.5 is supposed to be the first step towards modernising Windows Mobile – but it fails miserably.
Windows Mobile 6.0 was released in February of 2007. Between then and now, Apple has released three versions of theiPhone OS, Android has entered the scene, and the webOS has begun doing its thing too. The BlackBerry OS has been updated too, and RIM shipped a touch phone.
What does Microsoft have to show for itself? Windows Mobile 6.1, with a slightly updated homescreen and some performance enhancements. And now we have version 6.5, which will be put out there to compete head-on with the iPhone, Android, and webOS. Seeing the reviews on the web, I actually kind of feel sad for the poor thing. It’s going to be torn to shreds.
Windows Mobile 6.5 improves the mobile operating system in four key areas: a new Start screen, a new Today home screen, a new lock screen, and an updated version of mobile Internet Explorer. The new lock and Today screens receive positive responses, but the other two improvements do not.
The new Start screen organises your applications in a honeycomb layout, but this creates odd icon and caption placing (even on the screenshots it looks weird). Worse yet, the implementation feels like a proof-of-concept, as it lacks any method of organising the icons other than a “Move to Top” command. There’s no alphabetical sorting, no drag and drop, nothing. In addition, there’s no way to delete applications straight from the Start screen.
The new home screen gets a more positive reception, and vaguely resembles that of the Zune user interface. The items in the Today screen are presented as a text menu, but also deliver some basic preview functionality; you can flip through photos from the Pictures item, or play/pause music from the Music item. The scrolling is smooth and has that inertia effect.
Mobile Internet Explorer 6 is the IE7 of the mobile world; it’s improved compared to MIE5, but it’s still generations behind the competition (i.e., WebKit). While it adds smooth panning and zooming as well as better CSS/JS support, it’s also a lot slower than other browsers, rendering is far choppier, and it sometimes formats pages oddly.
The new lock screen is actually kind of nice. Instead of providing just some basic information and an unlock slider, it will also create specific unlock sliders after certain events. For instance, if you received a text message, there will be an unlock slider that will take you directly to that message. A nice feature.
The big, big problem with Windows Mobile 6.5 is that all the improvements are literally just skin deep. The above four areas are really all there is to it; the rest of the operating system is still horribly outdated and stylus-based. Context menus are now more finger-friendly, but everything else still requires you to take out your stylus. It’s the same old mess that we’ve been using for ages now.
There’s also Windows Marketplace and My Phone, but those are not 6.5-specific features; you can get them on 6.1 phones as well. If you put all this information together, and take into account that handset makers have been making better Windows Mobile user interfaces for ages, you’ll realise that there is no reason whatsoever to upgrade to 6.5. It presents nothing that handset makers haven’t already done already – and have done so in a better way.
I think Microsoft should’ve just skipped 6.5 altogether and went straight to 7. It’s better to release something good late, than something crappy. The worse thing of all, though, is that even after the release of Windows Mobile 7, 6.5 will live on. Microsoft plans on shipping both versions side-by-side.
I so badly want a HD2 (http://www.htc.com/www/product/hd2/overview.html) with Android.
Things I dig:
800×600 4.3 inch capacitive touch screen that takes the whole device (the thing is nearly smaller than the iPhone)
1GHz Snapdragon
ROM: 512 MB
RAM: 448 MB
Expansion slot(microSD)
5 megapixel auto focus camera
Dual LED flashlight
With Android: Best phone ever
With WinNo: Great hardware and you have to wait for xda-developers to finish an Android port .. that usually takes more than a year ;(
Edited 2009-10-06 20:34 UTC
I guess they fixed the performance problems of the Hero? I never really was interested in android until this generation of HTC phones.
it’s a ways off still till windows mobile 7 and win ce 7.0. its sad really because its going to be the step in the right direction that should have been taken last year. but 6.5 is “sufficient” for teh mean time. liiking forward to ce 7…
Not only that, but WinMo 7 looks like it is using the Zune for inspiration rather then the iPhone, which imo is a recipe for failure.
I am surprised that Microsoft has not shown WinMo more love. It it because Windows really isn’t very portable? Or they get by on inertia from the handset makers, who as a bonus will do MS’s job for them and reskin it anyway?
I’ve been running some 6.5 betas (thought to be a possible 6.5.1) and so far am not really impressed. Yeah, they made some buttons and menus bigger (and of course moved the main softkeys to bottom screen which borks apps like Resco), but have actually _reduced_ the intuitiveness and ease of use of some of the apps (didn’t think that was possible, did ya?). I wanted to like these releases, but outside of the truly Herculean efforts of some of the ROM “chefs”, I am left empty.
C’mon, Microsoft. Didn’t you learn anything from almost missing out on the Internet? Doesn’t Steve Jobs wiping the floor with you in the smartphone space piss you off? Doesn’t the prospect of a <cough> *Linux* <cough> based OS outstripping you in the market make you cringe? Then do something about it. Throw us a bone here. Meanwhile, I’m waiting for the Android port to my phone (they got CDMA, w00t!)
Translucent menu bar with a Windows logo as drop-down menu top left, and the name of the active application in bold next to it… It looks so familiar!
Hmmm, where have I seen this before?
*thinks*
*ponders*
*looks back at his Mac*
Oh wait! Now I know! Mac OS X also has a translucent menu bar with an Apple logo in the top left corner, and currently reading “Firefox” in bold next to it.
Like those blue DVI ports, eh? Do you know that this has been WinMO since day 1! Ofc such a Macfanboi don’t know this. Oh and blue port in back of laptop is fricking VGA! Dvi is white.
That made no sense at all.
I think he was trying to reply also to this article (http://www.osnews.com/story/22296/Review_MacBook_Pro_13_) but got so tangled up in his anger that he forgot all about how to write understandable comments.
Since we’re doing this: good review article on the MacBook Pro 13” there.
We have some WinCE handhelds used to acquire telemetry data from trains and they do their job. It’s a vertical application and that’s about the only thing they’re good at, doing ONE thing. No multitasking. No high speed data transmission. No movies, no music. It’s MS’s classic mistake, they have a good product with WinCE, but they started crufting it up so it has become the bloated beast that Mobile is today.
Edited 2009-10-06 21:34 UTC
I don’t think CE/Windows Mobile has ever really been that good. I think I am a pretty objective observer on this. I have had 4 CE/Mobile devices – a Phillips Nino, a Uniden 100, a Compaq Aero, and now an HTC Touch phone. I have also had a Palm III, 3 Clie’s and a Palm Centro.
Basically, the CE devices have always been slow and buggy. I’ve always had to reset them once or twice a day due to lockups or low memory. The Palms were always faster, but just as prone to lockups. I think both platforms are essentially dead (despite the 6.5 press), and really iPhone, WebOS and Android are the only realy competitors. Certainly MS could rally, but it really seems too slow on this one.
Mobile 7.0 should already be out, and even then, I don’t know if it would be enough. They are losing the next generation of phone users.
Why does it seem like we’re always having to trade features for ease of use? It’s like a product has to be gimped in order to have polish and be user-friendly.
I guess it’s merely a power user’s wet dream to have the best of both worlds.
Well, it depends. A new product sometimes needs to decide one or the other, and as it matures it fills in the gaps.
Microsoft and Apple had two very different paths, and I think we all know which won in the marketplace.
Microsoft went for functional. I had a WinMo-based TMobile HTC phone in 2006-2007. It had a lot of functionality, some of which the iPhone didn’t have when it came out. But it was painful to use. Web browsing as awful (in terms of speed and UI), setting up email on my personal account would always lock up the device to the point of requiring not just a reboot, but wiping the entire phone’s configuration (too many imap folders, although every other mail app never had a problem with it).
When the iPhone came out, they went for usability straight away. There was no stylus. This dramatically made it less combersome to even interact with. Email worked beautifully, and it handled my IMAP just fine (with encryption even!). Web browsing was slow (EDGE network), but at least the browser wasn’t painful. I’ve had it crash maybe once or twice a year, where WinMo would crash every week.
Add to that the great iPod interface for music, and the iPhone blew the WinMo out of the water. WinMo could do a few things the iPhone couldn’t, but it didn’t matter. I switched to iPhone and never looked back. If I left iPhone, it would be for WebOS or Android. Certainly not WinMo.
“Microsoft and Apple had two very different paths, and I think we all know which won in the marketplace. ”
Indeed we do – Nokia.
(But the difference between Microsoft and Apple is much less than, I suspect, you would be thinking, and WM beat out iPhone as recently as Q4 2008).
http://www.roughlydrafted.com/2009/08/21/canalys-iphone-outsold-all…
World-wide, Nokia reigns supreme, especially in Europe. But in the US, I can’t remember the last time I saw someone with a Nokia-based smartphone. The lead that the iPhone has over MS (world-wide and US) seems to be increasing. Microsoft is clearly on the defensive, with vendors scrambling to paste interfaces onto Windows Mobile to make it look more iPhone-like, and scramble to get a marketplace like Apple’s app store.
It’s true that Nokia smartphones still have the largest marketshare worldwide.
But, it’s down to 38% last count. It WAS, at one time, 60%.
Anyone wanna bet that same time next year, Nokia’s marketshare will be even lower, and both Rim’s and Apple’s will be a good bit higher?
Meanwhile Win Mobile is down to 9%, WebOs doesn’t register, and the Pre is selling very poorly.
Android looks to be the possible up and comer here.
I think that three years from now, Apple, Google, Nokia and RIM will have most of the marketshare, and Win Mobile and WebOs will be small players, if Palm is still around. Though it will possibly get bought.
the problem is that app developers really don’t know what they should be developing for
Well, just use J2ME. For over a decade, nearly all mobile applications have been developed for J2ME and the trend continues. All phones support it (except the iPhone, of course). The ARM processors even implement jazelle so as to execute J2ME application in the hardware. It’s the easy choice.
For the iPhone, use alcheMo, which translates J2ME apps for the iPhone, but clearly, Apple sucks for not implementing J2ME. The iPhone will never be a major player worldwide because of this. Many developers will just ignore it.
Have you been living under a rock for the past year or so?? Apple treats its iPhone developers very poorly and yet the App Store is full and continues to fill with thousands of applications (a few are even good).
Well, not under a rock, but I live outside the US. Here we have had mobile phones applications for over a decade. We have adverts on TV to download the last stupid application that make your phone blink and I receive SMS spams prompting me to install new apps several times a week. Over a billion of phones support J2ME and there are hundreds of thousands of J2ME apps. What you see here with the iPhone is Apple marketing machine building reports, sending news and trying to make you think the iPhone is big and that everybody is talking about it. Actually, this is only in the English speaking media. Where I live (continental Europe), there are many specialized phone news papers and they talk about the trends and all the new phones. They’ve talked about the iPhone when it was new, but they don’t constantly bring it back to the news when there is nothing new. There are a lot of other phones and very few iPhone around here. In Asia, there are even more phones and the iPhone is not even sold in Korea and in Africa.
Edited 2009-10-08 05:38 UTC
I was going to say “You’ve obviously never written a J2ME app” but apparently we’ve already had that conversation:
http://www.osnews.com/thread?354739
It really is a very limited platform. Hell it doesn’t even support qwerty input.
WTF?
there:
http://java.sun.com/javame/reference/apis/jsr118/
keyPressed method of the Canvas class. Look at the Key Events section.
Why are you spreading FUD about J2ME? It does support more hardware than any other language for mobiles. Why don’t you read the doc? Yes, it does support qwerty keyboards.
Which language can replace J2ME exactly? Which other language is supported by over a billion phones? Which alternative do you have? No other language support the range of hardware J2ME supports.
Edit:
After thinking about it a little more, I think maybe you talked about software keyboard? Like this one?
http://wiki.forum.nokia.com/index.php/A_Canvas_Qwerty_Keyboard_For_…
Or what? What are you talking about? J2ME does obviously support any type of qwerty keyboard I can think about.
Have you ever had a problem with handling keyboard input in J2ME?
Edited 2009-10-08 14:06 UTC
Possibly. Nokia is in state of radical technology transition right now, but when it’s done (2011?), it has the best technology stack of all the other offerings (based on C++ and Qt, whereas the competition has Dalvik, ObjC, C# and Javascript – almost all of which are “managed” vm’s).
There is nothing “magical” of iPhone, just some polish that takes time and money. It’s easy to surpass, really, now that Nokia is not exclusively married to the Symbian albatross.
This is a very good point. Ultimately, it matters very little if Nokia is still a marketshare leader if its share is in freefall. After all, it takes a while for people to give up devices they already own. The big question is, what will be the device they buy next?
Anyone else get the feeling Windows Mobile 6.5 is supposed to suck so bad that when Windows Mobile Seven appears it will be a success despite itself? Just like Vista was so lousy that Windows Seven can’t help but be better by comparison…
–bornagainpenguin
Hey, I thought I was the only one who thought that about 7 vs Vista. Good to know I’m not totally crazy… either that or you’re just as nuts as I am
.
I get this feeling on a lot of Microsoft’s products, especially when they’re obsessed with deadlines. They seem to put out something that is complete shite and then “fix” it a year or two later to make the new product look good and ring yet more money from the gullible. I honestly think they intentionally leave bugs in Windows in order to make the next version look good for having those glaring issues fixed, all the while introducing yet more issues in the new version that they will “fix” later.
The impression i get from Microsoft with some of their products is their are so eager to get the technology out there. Sometimes they have some really good ideas but rush it out without any polish.
I love DPM (Data Protection Manager) it is a great idea for an automatic disk based backup server for Windows networks. They had some create ideas for archive and compression, however the UI and the implementation for a final version felt very beta and in some cases Alpha release.
I found this with Windows Mobile, some great ideas and technology but implemented very badly. Of course ive droned on about this before, but Microsoft really comes into their own when they are challenged, im pleased that apple cam along with the iPhone or we would still be using phones with a stylus and no hope of anything else. Im sure with the beating Microsoft is getting it will pull out something interesting with v7.
If they get to interesting things, I think we will be seeing it in v8, not v7. What we will see in v7 is something that looks and behaves like the Zune, with WPF/Silverlight-esque application environment. That will make WinMo not quite so embarassing compared to everyone else, but it is hardly going to be revolutionary.
Although MS have many years of experiences in desktop OS and server OS. Embedded OS is a totally different ball game.
Making the interface similiar to the desktop OS on such a small screen is not going make it more user friendly. That is why Apple don’t try to make iPhone interface like Mac OS.
Apple have more experiences in embedded OS because of their experiences with Newton OS. So they are actually ahead of the ball game.
I don’t buy “lack of experience” as an excuse.
MS have had enough releases of PocketPC / Windows Mobile / Windows Phone over the years to know what they’re doing. And they have MORE than enough money to throw at research and development.
MS’s problem is their complacency to build anything significantly new or improved from their previous products while they know people are still buying their products.
In fact, this is all too visible in the releases of their mobile OS – sometimes the most significant change is the name of the product rather than any GUI rewrite.
MS were happy to keep pushing the same flawed design knowing that all their competition were either financially on the rocks or just releasing even worse products.
So I have no sympathy for MS what-so-ever. They had the smart phone market handed to them on a silver platter but failed to put any work into their platform – so now they’re paying for they’re inactions.
MS has been in the mobile space since 96 http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/cb/Windows_CE_Timel…
I think 13 years of shipping devices gives them more experience then apple had with its 9 years of newton development.
I don’t know if I speak for the masses for not, but I was never happy with stylus based interfaces on mobile phones.
PDAs I didn’t mind (mainly because they had bigger screens and were used for different, more PC-centric, functions.
But for smart/mobile phones, I wanted something that I could punch quickly and inaccurately on the move – which meant I ended up opting for Sony Erricson’s K-series (K800i et al) as they had a fair wack of functions but were still very easy to make quick calls and texts on the move.
Thankfully these days there’s a slew of stylus-free touch screen options available so now I have the best of both worlds: PDA functionality and easy interfaces.