Cool Gadget | PDA Phone

The OS is half a phone’s worth and there’s little wonder everyone is trying to make it the better half. In the case of Windows Mobile the emphasis really is on everyone. Version 6.5 is up and running but is it the upgrade everyone was waiting for?

You don’t get to see OS reviews on our homepage too often, but this is such an eagerly awaited release that we just have to see if it lives up to the hype. Windows Mobile did need a design and usability overhaul – and you don’t have to trust us on that. Go check out what HTC, Samsung and SPB have been doing about it. Alright, Microsoft must’ve thought it’s about time they did something too.

Rumors of a new WinMo release started to fly just about this time last year, but it was not until a few months later that the official confirmation was finally out. Meanwhile, the inevitable leaks were rather quick to tone down the premature enthusiasm of PocketPC buffs.

It seemed at that point that the changes introduced by the WinMo 6.5 were almost nonexistent. Well, early leaks have never been real trustworthy stuff, so as soon as there was official word from Microsoft part of the excitement started to return.

Promises of increased user-friendliness, better browsing and an app store were made and it once again seemed the 6.5 could be the thing everyone was waiting for. And those leaked screenshots were pretty neat too.

Truth be told, we were still pretty skeptical at that point but seeing manufacturers all eager to hop on the bandwagon made us hopeful again. At the time of the official release of Windows Mobile 6.5, four major manufacturers had already announced handsets that were either shipping with the new OS or eligible for a free upgrade.

We even took a couple of them for a spin already and if you have been keeping track you’d probably know what to expect from this article. The Samsung I8000 Omnia II was indeed an inspiring performer but there’s no escaping the fact that a large part of its charm was in hardware (mostly the magnificent 3.7″ AMOLED display and the fast CPU). From a software point of view we’re more impressed with TouchWiz rather than WinMo 6.5. Sony Ericsson XPERIA X2 didn’t manage to win our hearts completely but still had a trick or two up its sleeve.

So now, we’re bringing the Windows Mobile out of its third-party guises and focusing on the upgrades 6.5 claims to carry. What we’ve seen so far tells us the massive overhaul has been postponed. But let’s see if the changes are enough to buy Microsoft time to bring WinMo 7 as close to perfection as possible.

Windows Mobile 6.5 startup screen

It is a hard enough task now that the competition is keener than ever to bite off massive chunks of the WinMo market. So, even if Windows Mobile 6.5 doesn’t convert new believers it should at least be able to stand its ground against overly-ambitious newbies. Android, Symbian S60 touch, WebOS and Mac OS X are all much younger than the WinMo platform but their rapid rise must’ve got Redmond by surprise.

Enter new homescreen

We start with one of the biggest changes WinMo 6.5 is bringing – the new homescreen. Quite ironic really, it will be the one you’ll see the least – as most manufacturers supply their handsets with their own home-brewed UI. It will rarely cover the OS from tip to toe, but most certainly will keep the homescreen well under wraps.

The default Windows homescreen is not really impressive to look at but may be quite usable in the end. It’s a simple list of items, which you scroll up and down. What you may have missed though is that some of the items are side-scrollable too.

Some of the tabs available on the default Windows Mobile 6.5 homescreen

By scrolling sideways you gain access to different features associated to that item. For example a sideways sweep on the Getting started item lets you set the clock, email account, device password, Bluetooth, custom wallpaper, custom ringtone, upload music or even remove the Getting started item from the list once you’re done setting up the device.

The getting started tab allows you to set up some of the basic feautures of the phone

Another example is Pictures, where you get to browse the thumbnails of the photos in your gallery. Touching a photo opens it fullscreen in the photo album.

Tapping on the music tab will start the media player. We certainly hoped that the long outdated Windows media player will have its own set of updates but to no avail. Essentially, that makes whatever extra app the manufacturer has preloaded or you managed to download the better option.

The Clock item provides information about the current time and date, and displays the operator logo. Tapping on Clock launches the default Windows alarms screen.

The Text and Email tabs display alerts about received messages and email, as well as give you one-click access to the message composer and the inbox respectively. You can scroll previous messages or other mailboxes by the usual side sweeping routine.

The Calendar tab monitors your appointments for the day and allows you to quickly set a new one. The today screen is the default calendar view, which gets displayed upon a press.

The final tab is reserved for the Internet Explorer Mobile favorites. Just as one might expect, a tap on any of the bookmarks will load it in the web browser. That web browser is one of the highlights of the new version of the OS but we’ll be back to it soon.

The Honeycomb main menu

Pressing the Start menu icon in the top right corner no longer opens a drop down menu full of shortcuts. Instead it opens what we like to call the new Windows Mobile “Main menu”. It’s pretty much the same as the Programs menu in the previous version of the OS with few tweaks. It’s got icons ordered in the oh-so-popular honeycomb pattern that many people must remember from numerous official and leaked screenshots.

The main menu and its submenus use the honeycomb layout

Microsoft claim that layout is easier on the thumb as there’s more space around the item you’d be going for. So this main menu redesign is the next step towards dropping the stylus for good. And our experience showed that the final result is pretty nicely thumbable so no regrets there.

In the new main menu you’ve got icons for all the installed programs plus shortcuts to the settings menu (previously accessed separately from the now gone Start menu). That Settings menu has also received a facelift and displays icons in the same honeycomb structure.

The perfectly flat structure of the Main menu can surely get a bit clumsy in time due to the huge number of icons piling up (iPhone users with loads of apps installed will know what we mean). But we’d still prefer that over the confusing experience that so many new Windows Mobile adopters have had in the past. Besides, it seems to be the way things are moving with all other OS’s so you’d better get used to it. Well it’s either that, or Symbian which still sticks to its one-screen-fits-all layout.

Further on, all menus have a larger font that allows more finger-friendly operation. The close window key however still remains in the top right corner on quite a lot of occasions and even though it has been slightly enlarged is still not the easiest to press with a bare finger.

Another nice change brought by the new version of the OS is the option to alternate tabs screens (wherever WM offers tabbed screens) by simple finger side sweeps. You no longer need to aim for the tiny tab titles at the bottom of the screen as on the WinMo 6.1 handsets – you just sweep your finger across the screen and the next tab loads instantly.

Wrapping it up on this page, here is a quick demo of Windows Mobile 6.5 that we snatched from our Samsung I8000 Omnia II review for you to enjoy.

Internet Explorer Mobile: Like the OS, like the browser

Now, this is the really interesting part – the new version of the Internet Explorer Mobile web browser has received a nicer touch-optimized interface and way cooler skin. It now sports kinetic scrolling and Flash support, and should give you the browsing experience that its predecessor failed to.

There are five available settings for text size and there is a mobile view mode. Still, on a high-res screen we are far more comfortable using the desktop mode, as web pages look much more natural.

Zooming though is best done with double tapping on the IE. It worked like a charm on our retail unit of Samsung I8000 Omnia II. Double taps are certainly more comfortable than the alternative zoom bar. To get to it you either use the dedicated button at the bottom of the screen or hold your finger on the screen to launch a context menu with a zooming option. And to add to the discomfort, when you zoom you loose the Fit-to-screen capability, so prepare for a lot of side scrolling to read those texts.

Another obvious flaw of the IE browser is it doesn’t automatically rotate the pages with the built-in accelerometer. One would think this isn’t the hardest thing to do but the developers obviously saved themselves the effort here. There isn’t a setting for manually switching to landscape mode either so like it or not – portrait is all you get.

We guess that and the handicapped zooming is exactly what dooms the Internet Explorer yet again. Microsoft have actually tried to fix it, admitting there was plenty to fix, but the effort was half-hearted.

We would still take the free to download and often preinstalled Opera Mobile over the IE mobile any day. So they either need to bring a totally redone browser on the Windows Mobile 7 or they better not bother supplying one of their own at all.

Marketplace: a breath of fresh air

By now you’ve probably heard all there is to hear about the Windows Marketplace but to us it certainly is the most important change introduced by WinMo 6.5. It is in fact an application distribution solution that should help third-party applications find their way from the developers to the users handsets by basically cutting off the middle man.

Apple did change the rules of the game with their App store. All manufacturers realized the importance of providing consumers with a quick and easy way to get the applications they need straight from the mobile phone. That’s especially true for Windows Mobile given the massive amount of third-party software that has been already developed for their platform. Downloading software off the internet is fine, but getting it straight on your phone in a few easy steps is way better.

The marketplace isn’t exactly brimming with content just yet

The interface of the new Marketplace application is pretty straightforward – it gives you shortcuts to the most popular applications, the most recent ones and category view. There is of course a search box too to make things easier as the number of applications grows.

As of now, there are only 53 apps available with not more than 7 of them free of charge. The prices of the others range from a few pennies to over 50 US dollars. We guess no one is particularly happy at this point with the proportion of free to paid apps on the Windows Marketplace. But we should probably give it time for more applications to get in (and they will, sooner rather than later).

The Marketplace is nicely setup as well, offering user reviews, screenshots and, as usual, individual ratings.

Final words

You may’ve noticed that this review only focused on very few parts of the WinMo OS. This is simply because all the rest is a perfect copy of what we’re used to seeing in Windows Mobile 6.1, which in turn wasn’t that much different from Windows Mobile 6.0. And we are not even going to mention that 5.0 wasn’t that much worse either.

So, the next iteration of the MS mobile OS took some good four years to cook and what you get is basically the same OS. Even if it was perfect right from the very start, it still would have been dated by now. And you have our word – it wasn’t that perfect at all.

It may not be Microsoft’s fault but the buildup was bigger than the actual thing they delivered. The 6.5 is honestly a petty excuse of a new OS but maybe we were not supposed to expect a new OS in the first place. Microsoft may have a point in the end in their claims that 6.5 was not really part of their plan – just making up for Windows Mobile 7 taking to long. In a way, the WinMo 6.5 ending up a flop could be a good thing for users. That way Microsoft have no other options but get WinMo 7 right.

So, WinMo 6.5 does almost nothing more than what phone manufacturers have been doing for quite some time now with their customized plug-ins. But there are still some things to probably save the day for Microsoft. The first one is actually in no small part credited to the company itself and its longstanding traditions. It is the vast amount of software available for the WinMo OS, which is still unmatched by any other platform (and mind you, we are speaking quality – not mere quantity – here).

The other important circumstance in favor of Windows Mobile 6.5 is the hardware improvements that we’ve witnessed recently. The platform has long been criticized for its poor laggy performance but the 800MHz and 1GHz CPUs that makers are keen to use lately are handling it pretty nicely.

Responsiveness and fluidity used to be a huge bonus for competing platforms but now that WinMo performs so well, this argument is getting thinner and thinner and it’s all about user-friendliness and usability.

Finally, the amount of the devices running WinMo available on the market is increasing as we speak and they are getting nicer and sharper. It is no longer unthinkable for such handsets to have a nice camera or cool design or even come with multimedia on their minds.

Now that others seem to be doing their job and buying them some time, let’s hope Microsoft developers will try their best to be on par and produce an OS that’s as good as some of those recent handsets. Windows Mobile 7 won’t be around for at least another year and we don’t think users will be able to swallow another failure. And with the competition certainly not standing still, it will be without a doubt a make-or-break release.

[GSM Arena]