Windows Mobile 6.5 walkthrough with Engadget (now with video!)
By Chris Ziegler 
posted February 16th 2009 11:53AM
posted February 16th 2009 11:53AM
- The new locking screen is very cool. Not the jazziest looking we've ever seen, but the added functionality of being able to go straight to specific screens of the phone -- screens you're particularly interested in when coming out of standby -- is great. Someone should've thought of this long ago.
- The home screen is a love-it-or-hate-it affair -- the gesture used to navigate it might be a bit difficult to get used to. There's a focused bar for each piece of information on the screen; it needs to be dragged from item to item to highlight, which is where we could see ourselves getting a little hung up. The left / right gestures to move through pieces of information in a single category (tasks or calendar items throughout the day, for example) makes a boatload of information accessible from the home screen, but it might be too much -- if you're busy, seeing your whole calendar this way could take a few minutes and leave you with a sore thumb. Also, the left / right thing makes less sense for some of the items -- bookmarks, for example. Who's going to thumb through their bookmarks one at a time?
- Windows Media Player is a total unchanged carry-over from 6.1 -- a major disappointment for anyone hoping that the Zune influence on the 6.5's home screen would be pervasive throughout the platform. Actually, a major disappointment, period.
- 6.5 is resistive only. It doesn't support capacitive touchscreens.
- The on-screen keyboard looks cool, but you'll see some struggles typing engadget.com in the video -- possibly related to the resistive nature of the screen. Bottom line, 6.5 isn't 100 percent finger-friendly. (Besides, it turns out that the keyboard is HTC's, not Microsoft's; as far as we know, the stock board is unchanged from 6.1).
- Scrolling is generally choppy, especially in the honeycomb menus. We're hoping this resolves itself prior to launch -- the software's still in alpha, after all -- but we're not holding our breath. The "springboard" action when scrolling is new to WinMo and works well, but what's the point when you're struggling with speed?
- IE Mobile seems to render beautifully in the sites we've seen, but the zoom slider seems difficult to actuate with a finger -- possibly just because it's slow to respond. We think part of the perception that the zooming functionality is low-performance stems from the fact that it's stepped, not smooth. Hard to say if 6.5 has the raw horsepower to do smooth scrolling, though (and to be fair, Android and the iPhone "cheat" by filling in areas with a checkerboard pattern to speed things up, so no one's really nailed this).
- The finger-friendly menus seem unintuitive even to our demonstrator, mainly because they don't support swipe-based scrolling. Instead, the user taps arrows at the top and bottom of the context menu to navigate.
I actually like it very much!!
Ya there are some kinks to it, but man they did a better job than I expected. I was hoping that they would start to integrate the whole Microsoft platform like Bill Gates said they would years ago.
Maybe this was a hit and miss?
They do have a lot work to do, but I like the direction in which Microsoft is going, they are actually listening to the users!
Yay to Marketing- Define consumers needs- and then satisfy them. Now just work on the satisfaction part a little more.
Wow. Miserably unimpressed....
so scary! I'm glad that I'm not using a WM device. Look at the homepage scroll...it looks like an iphone scroll with 5fps :)
hmm, strange, WHY IS IT THAT ANY COMMENT AGAINST OR CRITISIZING MICROSOFT IS LOW RANKED AND DIMMED? hmm
HTC Touch Pro user chiming in here. In it's current state, 6.5 leaves much to be desired. Outside of the honeycomb and locking screen, I'm not seeing anything worth leaving my current device for. I thought the Engadget editorial was harsh the first time I read it through. After watching this video, however, I can completely understand their disappointment --especially with this presentation. Let's hope for more goodies before the official 6.5 OS is released. From the sounds of it, Engadget would like to see more pimping of the interface and core functionality out of the box instead of spending 3 days loaded customized software on.
What is it with HTC and Microsoft always having pressure touch screens and not capacitive touch screens. Notice how the person doing the demonstration in the video had to repeat some commands and be precise about how he was touching the screen to get the desired result. If that were a capacitive touch screen the errors would have been very few or none. I have read somewhere that pressure touch screens are better for use with the Korean language but what about the rest of the world? Look at how successful the iPhone has been with its capacitive touch screen, Android, and the soon to be released Palm Pre. HTC and Microsoft need to get with the times and offer up a capacitive touch screen device or Windows Mobile will continue to fade away!!! I am a Windows Mobile 6.1 user and I must say this looks very disappointing compared to what the iPhone, Android, and Palm Pre have to offer. I am going to move off of Windows Mobile if this is what they are calling an improvement because it looks like something that would have been a premium operating system in 2005...2 years before the first iPhone launch.