“Pocket-lint has learnt from sources close to the matter that Microsoft will announce the much-rumoured refresh to its mobile phone operating system, Windows Mobile, on 1 April 2008. An improvement over Windows Mobile 6 released in February 2007 the new version, unsurprisingly named 6.1, will be a stop-gap measure to keep both consumers and industry happy until the launch of Windows Mobile 7.”
I’m confused. My mobile device already has 6.1 on it, admittedly I put it on there myself. However, my brother’s new mobile (shipped from Orange UK about a month ago) came with 6.1.
I’m running Windows Mobile 6.1 right now on my HTC 6800. Its a pretty good upgrade, I like that they finally added threaded text messaging. I would still like to see them fix the stupidly weak alarm feature though. Its really one of the weakest parts of the phone, some of my old dumb phones had better alarms.
The iPhone is no different.
For a phone with a superb interface and OS, the alarm feature just plain *sucks*. One-third of the time alarms don’t go off due to there being some kind of pop-up on the screen (an SMS notification or some such thing). They’ll finally ring when you get rid of the notification — which can be hours after you were supposed to get up for school/work. 😐
Another third of the time, they simply don’t go off — period. No explanation.
I was late one too many times for work and school, so now I once again use my fool-proof $10 alarm clock rather than the $400 phone.
I’ll second you there — my last phone was a cheap LG with a great ringer and vibrate, and I’d always use it as an alarm clock when traveling. But my 6800 is totally useless for this purpose, and the UI for setting a simple alarm is awful.
In some ways Windows Mobile is great — Outlook is a great IMAP client, IE is “good enough” that I didn’t buy Opera when my trial expired, being able to run a few apps like SSH on my phone is important, the camera/video functions work well. I use Missing Sync for OS X which syncs calendar, contacts, texts and other things perfectly. EV-DO on Sprint is cheap and great.
But as a phone OS, WinMo is just terrible. Roam-only battery life of < 18 hours is atrocious. Ringer/vibrate are bad (hardware issue) and poorly configurable (WinMo issue). Worst of all, stability of the OS is poor, and often I get hangs caused by the incoming-call interrupt that cause me to miss calls. For instance, if phone is locked, the incoming call will take focus (correctly) but then lock me out of hitting the answer button to actually talk.
Some simple tweaks to make the touchscreen more finger-usable (i.e. one-handed, sans stylus) would be extremely welcome also. Even just a Control Panel section to be able to make a few small OS widgets (like the right scroll bar) 2x bigger would be great.
You’re kidding right?
So are we expecting it to be delivered by a herd of flying pigs!?
The press might be forgiven for thinking the same thing… how I would hoot if nobody turned up to the release launch, for fear of being caught in a wacky jape!*
I can’t believe anyone in their right mind would schedule a real product launch for this date.
(* of course, MS are not widely renowned for their wacky japery…)