Windows Mobile 6 First Impressions - Gizmodo Comments

Windows Mobile 6 First Impressions

rimplestultskin — Thu, 08 Feb 2007 16:44:48 EST

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.)

rimplestultskin

Windows Mobile 6 First Impressions

werk — Thu, 08 Feb 2007 12:29:50 EST

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.

werk

Windows Mobile 6 First Impressions

Klippoth — Thu, 08 Feb 2007 11:29:39 EST

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"...

Klippoth

Windows Mobile 6 First Impressions

Lamont — Thu, 08 Feb 2007 09:12:29 EST

uh, Brad, you can can do direct push email now with mobile 5 and the MSFP....

Lamont

Windows Mobile 6 First Impressions

werk — Thu, 08 Feb 2007 09:01:48 EST

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.

werk

Windows Mobile 6 First Impressions

njb42 — Thu, 08 Feb 2007 08:59:50 EST

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.

njb42

Windows Mobile 6 First Impressions

mister2d — Thu, 08 Feb 2007 02:33:43 EST

Would this mean I would have to get a new phone or will my Motorola Q accept a WM6 upgrade?

mister2d

Windows Mobile 6 First Impressions

hubfam — Thu, 08 Feb 2007 01:57:48 EST

Yawn!

You can't wait to get a big piece of crap?

I guess it takes all kinds!

hubfam

Windows Mobile 6 First Impressions

Klippoth — Wed, 07 Feb 2007 23:53:24 EST

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...

Klippoth

Windows Mobile 6 First Impressions

cmonaussiecmon — Wed, 07 Feb 2007 23:02:07 EST

I'm sure every Wookie with a corssbow fetish will race out and buy one of these.

cmonaussiecmon

Windows Mobile 6 First Impressions

Brad — Wed, 07 Feb 2007 22:41:47 EST

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?

Brad