Windows Mobile is a relic of the past. Especially compared to Apple’s iPhone operating system, it becomes painfully obvious just how outdated, clunky, and unfriendly Windows Mobile has become. Today, Mictosoft has taken its first step in modernising the platform by releasing a sort of alpha release of Windows Mobile 6.5, with a completely revamped interface.
The new alpha release comes packed with a whole bunch of interface improvements, but underneath it all, it’s still Windows Mobile 6.x. In other words, this is widely regarded as a stop-gap release between Windows Mobile 6.1 and Windows Mobile 7, which will arrive later. Still, there are some interesting interface additions in there, so without further ado, here’s a video of Windows Mobile 6.5. Credit to Engadget.
As you can see, some of the animations are a bit choppy, but it’s stil alpha after all. IE mobile seems to be improved as well, but let’s face it, it’s not as if it could get any worse. Menus are apparently problematic since they don’t support swipe; you need to tap arrows to navigate them. In any case, Microsoft still has some work to do here for 6.5; release is scheduled for the second half of 2009, so they have some time left to work on it.
By the way, what’s up with the word “mobile”? I missed the memo which stated it’s pronounced like “mogul” now. Weird.
I will wait for Android to be ported to my Diamond.
(xda-developers are on it. Calling already works.)
WinMo is so outdated. The hardware of windows phones nowadays is much better than the iPhone but the software just stinks.
The touch-screen variant of WM may be seriously outclassed by Android, iPhone, et al, but the non touch-screen variant is far better than any other non-touch platform I’ve used except maybe the Blackberry.
I switched from a Nokia S60 phone to a technically inferior WM5 smartphone because I found S60 to be slow, unstable and downright painful to use. Not to mention the nightmare that is Symbian programming.
I am a HTC Touch Diamond user and what I think after watching the video is that the TouchFlo guys were working on WM 6.5. And not to mention that it has been shown in a HTC Touch Diamond 2. Anyway, I am also waiting for Android. There are a lot of Win32/managed code things that make it impossible to develop nice TouchFlo-like interface without making them all in unmanaged code. That’s why I am awaiting for Android ROMs and I hope Microsoft to stop wasting money on WinMo. As they say: change the world or go home.
Lets hope the new features in the iPhone, Android, and Pre push Microsoft to increase the competition. Competition is always good for us.
They are still going with the ‘X’ in the corner to close apps. It is tiny too, that just doesn’t make sense to me when you finger is huge in comparison to it.
Also Thom, “mobile” has been pronounced like “mogul” for some time now where I live. I hear both variations.
“mobile” pronounced like that is American. The same goes for some other -ile words: docile is pronounced like dossull.
You evil bastards
(((
That vid makes my Firefox (3.1 Beta 2) crash down. Works fine until I press play… X86-64 flashplugin (alpha?) in use.
Edited 2009-02-17 06:21 UTC
My work phone is a Treo 680. I have been using that for in excess of a year and I could easily rattle of a list of most irritating problems. I had the choice at one point to get a HTC 8525 flashed with WM6.1 handed down from a layoff, no questions asked. I would have jumped at anything, ANYTHING to get off buggy, buggy, dead, unsupported Palm OS.
My time with WM proved that there are things indeed worse. From the start menu, to the bottom buttons, excessive use of menus, horrid phone app and a task manager lol(WTF? process ids lol on a phone god… makes me giggle in a mad way), and of all things close buttons and the start menu! ok sorry this is turning into a rant. With WM I didn’t find a single thing to love. And let me tell you, these fancy “gestures” are not what I want in a phone. i Don’t want a badly tacked on bling layer which is what 6.5 looks like. WM just seems like an aimless OS and a follower.
Say what you want about the old PalmOS but it was a trend setter that became a victim of it’s own success. It was let languish by an indecisive Palm that didn’t know what to do next. I love a number of Palm apps(Phone, messaging, PIM,email) and even the basis of the os and despise what the OS has become. Because Palm didn’t have the balls to disappoint anyone, they alienated nearly everyone. It seems like Apple has given them a clue and they seem to be running with it with the Pre, while maintaining what I still love about 680.
I want simple, intuitive and good quality hardware with a physical KB.
Edited 2009-02-17 07:36 UTC
People got brainwashed into thinking they needed something more “sophisticated” and “modern”. And Palm stood by and let it happen. Ever notice how often the top dog in a market is not so much there because of their own cunning and product quality, but because their competitors all fell on their swords?
The Treo’s are/were bricks. They were good for doorstops and paperweights. I was supporting about 50 users at one time with them, and they all had the same comment “Treo’s suck, where’s our Blackberry’s?” Unfortunately the decision to use Palm was made way before I joined the group.
We’ve since gone Blackberry and BES and couldn’t be happier.
“Broken gets fixed. Shoddy lasts forever.â€
Please don’t make me use a touch phone! With my Blackberry I go to contacts and press the “T” key to bring up “Tammy”. Keyboard shortcuts are faster than finger, work better in a bumpy car ride to.
yeah, really. I hate touch interfaces. Palms Pre looks interesting, but I’ve not liked the ones I’ve messed with at all.
I love how having to slide my finger around and use gestures is /sooo/ much more efficient than smacking a letter key once and hitting the call button. I can do everything from my keypad in 2-5 clicks.
i have never been one for touch phones, but I do like the tech under the hood of WinCE (the basis of windows mobile) and while the interface has always been lacking, the underlying tech was (and is) way ahead of android, RIM, and Apple (yes teh iPhone is cool and is based on OSX, but WinCE is a true embeded os and apples iPhone os is a mod).
Though I am halting my development on some of my embeded work until WinCE 7 is out. 6.5 is just some pretty patch work and a “better” GUI. 7 compaired to 6 will be like 6 compaired to 5 on steriods. oh i cant wait.
I use windows mobile 6.1 on my phone… And I like it for the most part, but it can be annoyingly laggy. I hoped that 6.5 would be a faster 6.1 with the same interface, but this is going to suck ass. Lets bolt on a touch interface to an OS and apps never mean’t for it. Yeah, THAT will work. it is like the horrid touch FLO interface on some of the HTCs. ew.
there are some speed improvements under the hood, and its still up to the vendors on what UI to use (there are 4 still avlible including the 2003, 2005, current, and one that looks and acts like win 98).
ooo… I did not know that
If they release a ROM upgrade to 6.5 without that horrid interface for my treo 800w, I’ll be set for a long while.
First of all there is no OS called Mac OS X. It’s just a brand/distripution name for Darwin BSD which is fork of Next Step which in turn was 386-BSD fork.
“iPhone OS” uses Darwin BSD with UI built on top of set of APIs which can be found from the full distribution of “Mac OS X”.
BSD’s are easy to get embed in small devices and are widely used in consumer electronics. So I’d say it’s bit unfair to say that Windows CE is “true” embed os and Darwin BSD isn’t. Besides how do you define “true embed os”???
No, I’m pretty sure it is an “OS”. Its kernel might be Darwin, but the rest of the userland is its own beast.
That is like claiming Windows XP isn’t an OS, it is just a distribution of Windows NT.
Semantics are fun.
I’ve noticed that the definition of “Operating System” has changed over the years. Back when I was in college, in the 1980s, the definition of OS that we used was what we would now call a kernel. Core libraries were considered kind of “in the middle”. Nowadays, it seems like the web browser and standard text editor count.
Edited 2009-02-18 18:11 UTC
really? NEXTSTEP was considered an “OS”, it was released in the 80s and it had a Mach kernel with BSD4.3 userland
It’s never been exactly cut and dried, I suppose. Sometimes I can’t help but think of Emacs as one of the early Guest OSes. 😉
Since when and why Windows CE has been called Windows Mobile? (sarcasm)
Does Microsoft really think they can compete with Nokia and Apple by just improving looks of the Windows CE and giving it a new branding? I touched and played with older HTC phone while ago. I think it had this Windows Mobile 6.0 in it. And it was just horrible.
Even GPE Palmtop Environment is better, not to talk about not so horrible but still bad Google’s Android platform. Do they really expect people to use these things? QTopia wasn’t that bad but I wouldn’t use it. OpenMoko still ain’t done yet. At least you can now make calls with it and use it for something.
Which leaves us Symbian. While Symbian is not bad, it’s not very good either. It is not necessarily more advanced technically than Darwin BSD variant used in iPhone but it still ain’t as user friendly. I’d select Symbian in to my phone because it makes very good compromises with it’s design.
Besides why to use HTC shown in video when you have E70 or E75 from Nokia? What? I heard you want touch interface? But why? It’s just candy nothing more. And even then you still would have N97 or yet-to-announced-to-be-announced E100 with capabilities of E90 combined with touch features.
I hope nobody will get me started on iPhone. To make it short about it. It just sucks. It’s only good thing is UI but that’s all. Besides there’s a guy whom already started most of the things I hate about iPhone.
http://www.thebestpageintheuniverse.net/c.cgi?u=iphone
And no that’s not a joke.