Gizmodo
The lid was supposed to be kept on this until 3GSM next week, but Microsoft just couldn't wait to show off their Windows Mobile 6: Crossbow. How does it match up to our old Windows Mobile 5? Here are some impressions.
Besides the renaming scheme we talked about already, crossbow is supposed to be faster and more stable. Also, there's going to be Windows Live integration (Search, Mail, Messenger) to bring the entire suite to the mobile space. More good news: Office Mobile will be on the Smartphone (Classic) editions now as well.
Then, there's direct push calendar syncing, better formatting for Mobile Office, a 30% increase in speed for mobile IE, better Vista syncing, a better Calendar view called "Calendar ribbon", cal history, and tightened security.
You can now download updates and applications via Windows Mobile Update and Windows Mobile Marketplace OTA (over the air), which makes it quite convenient to upgrade or install new apps. Plus, better contacts integration gives business users with hundreds of contacts a better way to view the Call History screen.
All these features add up to one pretty enticing reason for everyone to upgrade to Windows Mobile 6.
First Impressions: Windows Mobile 6 [Geek.com]
Comments
I can't wait to get my first Crossbow phone. I've been on WM 2003, WM5, and now this, with direct push calendar sync, will be great.
Since you can already sync your Google Calendar with Outlook, imagine someone requesting a meeting and getting notified directly on your phone. Confirm the meeting, but propose a change that gets sent to everyone else coming. Everyone else agrees to the time change, and it's added to everyone's phones, desktops, and laptops. That's just damned cool.
I wonder if email will be direct push too, or if you'll still have to sync ever 10 minutes. Anyone know?
I'm sure every Wookie with a corssbow fetish will race out and buy one of these.
One of the best things I noticed about Crossbow on my phone, is the improvement in memory management. In WM5, you couldn't truly "close" a program without installing a third-party task manager and killing the app or doing a reset of the device. In WM6, closing the app actually closes the app, releasing the memory for other tasks. The only version of Activesync that works with WM6, though, is 4.5 Beta (4.2 and below doesn't work), or of course, the Mobile Device Center in Vista (which so far seems like a better-dressed version of Activesync)...So far the Camera application in the Crossbow Beta is either broken, stripped down, or just plain sucks, but there are third party apps out there that can replace it. It also seems that the old Voice Dial program has been replaced with Voice Commander, which takes getting used to, but is a wonderful and powerful program. All in all, Crossbow is definitely an improvement over WM5...
Yawn!
You can't wait to get a big piece of crap?
I guess it takes all kinds!
Would this mean I would have to get a new phone or will my Motorola Q accept a WM6 upgrade?
Also, the spiffy new HTML Email feature appears not to work with Exchange Server 2003. It works with POP/IMAP accounts, but apparently you need Exchange Server 2007 to have your Exchange mailbox show up in HTML.
Damn...I can't wait to upgrade my Wizard, but I *just* put a cooked AKU 3.2 ROM on it. I guess I'll just wait it out til an official upgrade comes out for some Wizard device and the hackers have had a field day with it and cook up another nice ROM.
uh, Brad, you can can do direct push email now with mobile 5 and the MSFP....
Actually, Crossbow for the Wizard has already been cooked to a golden brown and declared done as of a couple of weeks ago. That's what I'm using...I'm not about to link it, but I can tell you to look around for a file called "orwells1984"...
That's cool, klippoth, all I had read about previously was the pdaviet release which is discussed in intentionally vague terms...but I caught the drift that it was kinda flaky.
Guess I'll have to poke around xda developers and other places to see what's up.
bravo for finslly putting office on the smartphone edition. now, pocket PC phones runing crossbow will be the same as crossbow smartphones with the exception of touchscreen. so the idea that photon might merge all versions of WM onto one platform becomes that much closer to reality now that crossbow is official.
now, all that's really left in making WM a good platform is making it more stable, cleaning up the UI in both the menus and the programs (samsung's ultra smart phone and the apple iPhone both look like their strong points are gonna include ultra-sleek UI's, and after releasing vista, microsoft knows they CAN make cleaner UIs if they really WANT to.) and making it more consumer-friendly (because business customers arent the only ones who want keyboard phones, go take a look at the average sidekick or low-end-version-of-the-treo owner, things like AIM and more myspace-friendly browsers never hurt anyone) and MS might actually have an on-par OS with the other guys, and clearly a bigger developer base (the OS itself may be closed, but there are a lot more people coding WinMo and Palm apps than any other handheld OS), so they would actually be able to excel in this market.
..so, one step closer to merging the entire WM platform into one OS, and one step closer to ending my hatred of microsoft (but my pirated copy of XP will never die until my hard drive motor burns away.)
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