Windows Mobile 6.5 review

It's widely acknowledged by users, media, and even Steve Ballmer himself that Windows Mobile is in dire need of a ground-up revamp, and it's happening -- but not quite yet. That's Windows Mobile 7 you're looking for, and realistically, it's not going to be in your pocket for at least another year. That leaves Microsoft in a bit of a pickle: how do you facelift version 6.1 -- which is already a facelift of 6, which in turn was a facelift of 5 -- just enough to eke another year or two of life out of it? Is it even possible?

Let's have a look.

HTC Pure and Windows Mobile 6.5 hands-on

Windows Mobile 6.5 screen captures

First, a word of disclosure: the Windows Mobile experience inevitably varies from phone to phone. With countless models available from a variety of partners like HTC, Samsung, and LG, the variance is completely by design -- but for better or worse, our thoughts on WinMo 6.5 solely as a platform are going to be influenced by that variance. For the purposes of this review, we were provided (by Microsoft, not AT&T) with an HTC Pure, which runs TouchFLO along with a number of HTC-designed tweaks including a custom soft keyboard and communication manager, not to mention a slew of AT&T-specific applications. With smartphones all but standardizing on a small handful of form factors that make models all but indistinguishable from a distance, manufacturers are relying more than ever on WinMo customizations as a competitive advantage -- and the look and feel that you get from, say, an LG GM750 is going to be moderately different in day-to-day use than what you see here with the Pure. As they say, your mileage may vary.

What's new?

Rather than a thorough reworking of the platform, 6.5 is very much a nip-tuck job -- just as every Windows Mobile version in recent memory has been. Here are the biggies:

• New Today screen: Though the "classic" Today screen is still available, 6.5 introduces an all-new version that somewhat closely approximates the Zune's home screen experience (whether that's a harbinger of things to come remains to be seen). Perhaps more than any other single feature, the new Today screen gives 6.5 a freshened look -- but ironically, many users will never see it because it's often replaced by a manufacturer customization (in HTC's case, TouchFLO).
• "Honeycomb" Start screen: The main menu of old -- a white screen with a grid of boring, old icons -- looked like a relic of Windows 3.1. Happily, it's gone here, replaced with a themed alternating list of thoroughly modern images for default apps. The Start menu is gone, too -- pressing the Windows icon in the upper left of the screen now leads straight to the new Start screen.
• Finger-friendly UI elements: Windows Mobile's notorious for being unable to shake the stylus, but 6.5 makes some additional baby steps to help fingertips do all of the work -- inertial scrolling in many screens and a redesigned context menu style both help here.
• New lock screen: Though not revolutionary, Microsoft put a commendable amount of thought into this one -- instead of merely settling to give the user one way to get back into their device, 6.5's lock screen gives you multiple points of entry depending on the current status; if you've got a new text message, for example, you get a separate unlock slider that can take you straight to it.
• Revamped Internet Explorer: Bringing a "desktop" browsing experience to the pocket has been a big focus for mobile platforms over the past couple years, and Microsoft's been lagging desperately in bringing a version of Internet Explorer Mobile that's both easy to use with a few swipes of a finger and also capable of digesting thoroughly modern pages using up-to-date standards and technologies. The company's made it a big focus for 6.5, adding a new, prettier UI, a zoom slider, better support for full HTML, and a new JavaScript engine.
• Windows Marketplace: The biggest news in 6.5 might not be a 6.5 specific feature at all, ironically. Windows Marketplace finally takes WinMo into the all-important world of consolidated, managed mobile app stores, but it's only exclusive to 6.5 for a few weeks before being made available to 6 and 6.1 later this year.
• Exclusive content: It's hardly a platform "feature," really, but Microsoft is making a pretty big deal of the fact that it's signed on a number of internationally-recognized designers like Isaac Mizrahi and Vera Wang to craft themes for 6.5 that ship with the platform free of charge (we're not sure if you'll find them on every 6.5 phone to be produced, but they came loaded -- albeit turned off by default -- on our Pure).

What's not new?

So, what hasn't changed in 6.5? The short answer is "pretty much everything else," which really drives home why Microsoft only added a meager 0.4 to 6.1 in deciding on a version number this time around. Realistically, we'd say it even feels like a 6.2 -- an almost surgical modification to the Windows Mobile of old, just enough of a change in highly visible, highly strategized areas of the platform to justify the release.

That's not to say existing, essentially unmodified applications aren't benefiting from platform-wide changes. Microsoft wants 6.5 to be all about touch, a point driven home by the fact that the non-touch-enabled Standard Edition soldiers on in 6.5 essentially unmodified from its predecessor while Professional gets all of the freshening. The most in-your-face example of this is the new finger-friendly menu paradigm -- 6.5 replaces the old stylus-oriented menus everywhere, killing off one of the major "I can't believe I have to pull out my stylus" pain points. Inertial on-list scrolling also makes appearances throughout the platform so you can deftly avoid touching that thin scrollbar -- you know, the one that practically screams "just try to work me with your bare finger, I double dare you" -- along the right side. This is a pretty big deal for apps like Messaging where you'll presumably be spending a lot of time between text messages and email.

Getting around

As manufacturers are keen on making sure their phones deliver a uniquely HTC-ish, Samsung-ish, or LG-ish experience out of the box, one of 6.5's key differentiators -- the revamped Today screen -- will likely never be seen by an overwhelming majority of buyers, especially considering that everyone's replacement experiences (S-Class, TouchWiz, and so on) are generally enabled by default. That's a crying shame for two reasons: one, as we mentioned before, the default Today screen gives 6.5 a totally fresh look (whereas TouchFLO is pretty much the same as it's been for a year or more), and two, we actually found it to be quite usable. In a word, this is one of the few places where Microsoft's halfhearted attempt to make Windows Mobile a true touch platform actually paid dividends.

Scrolling through the list of entries is an effortless, inertial process, and the text for each entry in the list actually makes use of the screen real estate that's available -- a far cry from the cold, emotionless Today screen of old. Microsoft has tried here to give one-flick access to the most important functions on your device -- email, text messaging, voicemail, calendar, current time, and the like -- and sweetens the pot by offering glanceable bits of information on each one: the email row will tell you how many new emails you have in each account, for example, and the music row lets you know what's currently playing, all with enough visual pizzaz to keep things interesting. Additionally, some rows can move laterally to indicate more information or options within a category -- multiple email accounts, text versus picture messaging, selecting music tracks, and so on.

That's not to say the rejuvenated, rethought, re-imagined Today is without its flaws. You lose the bulk of a category's spread of glanceable information the second you move the highlight bar away from it (there are some minor exceptions like a superscript number to indicate new email count), and it's possible to move the current time -- that sacred, must-have clock -- completely out of view because it's treated with the same level of respect as any other row in the list. Also, although the lateral motion found on some of the rows adds the depth of the screen's capability, the information you find here -- new picture messages, for instance -- is entirely concealed unless you take the time to highlight the "text" row and swipe to the right. Odds are we'd end up using TouchFLO given the choice, but for those looking for a slightly simpler option that still doesn't look like it's straight out of 1998, Microsoft's come to bat here.

Another major piece of the 6.5 puzzle lies just beyond the Today screen -- and unlike Today, users of all creeds will likely be exposed to this one regardless of the skin they're using. The new Start screen disposes of the drop-down menu users will remember (that's just as well, since it was virtually useless to the average finger), but the new style doesn't necessarily makes as much sense as Microsoft would have us believe. The concept as it's described to us is that arranging the icons in a staggered pattern makes them more accessible by touch -- but in reality, we can't imagine that this is any easier to use or that you're any less likely to press the wrong icon here than you are with a standard grid, and the result looks like a jumbled mess. You've essentially traded readability for dubiously more error-resistant icon selection, but what good does that do if you can't find what you're looking for? On the plus side, the new Start screen is fully themed which gives it a slick, modern look (assuming you pick a reasonable theme, of course) and inertial scrolling works reasonably well here -- it's a tad laggy, but we bet that evaporates on a faster device like an Acer neoTouch F1 or a Toshiba TG01.

Windows Marketplace

Windows Mobile's perceived competitive disadvantage hasn't just stemmed from its wonky, archaic interface -- it's also suffered from a lack of proper app management. The platform came into this pickle in a particularly unique way: it'd already amassed a fairly huge, vibrant library of apps from thousands of developers over the years, but as Apple's App Store started to demonstrate the power of a centralized, well-supported, well-marketed mobile software clearinghouse in getting an unprecedented amount of third-party code onto phones, Microsoft, Nokia, and others had little option but to follow suit to keep their platforms competitive for users and developers alike.

That's where Windows Marketplace comes into play. Though it's launching initially on 6.5, it'll ultimately be made available on earlier versions of Windows Mobile, which exposes what may be both the platform's greatest strength and greatest weakness alike: at its core, it simply hasn't changed. By and large, code that runs on 6.0 is going to run like a champ on 6.5, giving 6.5 buyers access to a wealth of apps out of the gate -- but the seedy underside of that same coin is that those apps look even more ancient by 2009 standards than they did by, say, 2006 standards.

At our latest count, the Marketplace gave us access to 196 applications spread across 14 top-level categories; each of these in turn leads to a number of subcatgories (though some, like Tools, annoyingly lead to just a single subcategory, necessitating a second tap for no particular reason before you start to see apps). That's not nearly as many as we would've hoped, and we're willing to bet (or cross our fingers, at least) that we see a groundswell of additional content over the coming weeks and months as legacy publishers bring their goods into the store. The good news is that what's there already will be considered meaty, important stuff to many users: Facebook, MySpace, WeatherBug, and the like.

The interface is what we'd describe as "basic but functional" -- it gets the job done, but isn't going to look pretty in the process. Fortunately, Marketplace is one of the most finger-friendly apps across the entire device, likely owing to the fact that it was designed and built concurrently with 6.5, but it's still hamstrung by a couple ridiculous UI niggles: first, you've still got that infernal soft key bar along the bottom that requires a skilled touch or a fingernail to actuate accurately, and secondly, the left soft key is marked "Back" throughout most of the app. That's not a problem in itself -- it makes perfect sense, actually -- but the problem is that the Back soft key has nothing to do with the physical Back button that lies below it. They're easy to confuse, and pressing the physical button will whisk a user straight out of the Marketplace into the last app they visited. It makes no sense, and for novices, it'd be downright bewildering.

Learning about, purchasing, and installing applications is really what an app like Marketplace is all about, and fortunately, we can't take much issue here -- in fact, the individual app product pages are probably Marketplace's strongest suit with room for full descriptions, average ratings, a screen shot gallery, and a dead-obvious "Install" button that impatient users won't have trouble finding. Purchases are tied to a user's Windows Live account, which is reasonable enough to set up and manage (and most folks probably already have an account lying around anyhow); we were kind of bummed that you need to be logged in even to download free apps, but to be fair, it makes sense -- everything you pull from the Marketplace can and should be tied to you. Once you kick off a download, it quietly pulls over the aether with a drama-free progress bar at the bottom of the screen; you can continue using the Marketplace to find other apps in the meantime, and when the download is complete, the new app installs in the background. One complaint we had here was that apps seemed to have free reign to auto-launch after installation if they so chose; we'd prefer to have control over this, because otherwise, you can be jolted out of the Marketplace without warning.

The post-install experience is pretty painless, too: there's a "My applications" item in the main menu where you can see what you've purchased and what you can remove. You can also come here to rate apps after you've had a chance to use them (you get a five-star scale along with a text field for a review) and check for updates that might be available for stuff you've got installed. As far as we can tell, you've got to come here to check this -- there's no notification service like you've got on Android to give you a heads-up when updates are available. Removing installed apps was quick and didn't present us with a single warning box through the process -- it was dead silent, actually -- though we imagine this could get a little more complicated as you install larger, more complex apps that are maintaining significant swaths of data on your device.

Internet Explorer

It might be a different landscape on the desktop, but on Windows Mobile, Opera's been eating Internet Explorer's lunch for a long time -- and for good reason. Until recently, IE Mobile (or Pocket IE as it was known in a former life) was, for lack of a better description, a joke -- a bad excuse for a browser that was incapable of properly rendering any but the most basic sites, despite the fact that the devices on which it ran often had ample screen real estate, data speed, and processor power to do more. 6.5 gets a thoroughly overhauled version of IE Mobile that features a finger-friendly UI, an on-screen zoom slider (6.5 doesn't have multitouch gestures, after all), and a new rendering engine that should theoretically let it handle desktop-class tasks.

In reality, we found that the latest generation of IE Mobile only gets it within shouting distance of Opera Mobile -- ultimately, the Norwegian browser still takes the cake. We found Opera to load pages consistently faster (and we're talking noticeable to the naked eye, not a few tenths of a second on a stopwatch), and once the page was loaded, it was far quicker to flick around the page with the same pleasant inertial scroll that Internet Explorer now features. On large pages, IE tended to choke, freeze, and struggle with weird rendering issues in places where Opera kept humming -- Engadget, for example -- and when you consider that a significant percentage of WinMo 6.5 devices will feature WVGA displays, an enjoyable, reliable browsing experience is not negotiable. We were surprised at first to see that the Pure included Opera Mobile in ROM -- after the introduction of IE Mobile 6.5, we'd assumed HTC would be able to stop bundling third-party browsers to make up for Microsoft's shortcomings -- but after using both at length, we stand corrected. We totally get it, HTC; carry on.

Wrap-up

Microsoft's not promising the world with Windows Mobile 6.5, nor are they delivering it -- it's very much a stopgap, complete with duct tape, bubble gum, and Bondo. The platform is hopefully one of the last in a long, dreary line of revisions that may have looked fresh years ago -- but at this point, no amount of pancake makeup can hide the fact that you end up looking at screens like this from time to time:

When you're being asked to "use dialing rules" in 2009, that's a problem -- especially on a grayscale screen that looks flatter than the Toshiba TG01 on which it'll run -- and good luck pressing that "OK" in the upper right with a finger.

Put simply, 6.5 won't win a single user to the platform, even though the snazzy hardware that's running it just might. What it does do is make the full touchscreen use case just bearable enough to keep users already in the WinMo ecosystem hanging around -- and a stop-loss plan is exactly what Microsoft needs while it gets version 7 locked and loaded over the next few months. Let's make it happen, guys.

[Silverfox2000 Posted Oct 6th 2009 3:11AM]

so basically this is more lipstick on top of more stale lipstick on top of rotten pig flesh.

[scottkrk Posted Oct 6th 2009 3:36AM]

The M$ bots will be posting about how great 6.5 is and how mind blowing 7 will be when it ships in about a year.

Talk about snatching defeat from the jaws of victory, M$ owns the desktop, productivity apps, business computing and they tried to own the internet with IE6.

Bill Gates saw the writing on the wall and got out on top and left it to buffoons like Balmer to preside over the inevitable demise of M$

[Tiptup300 Posted Oct 6th 2009 3:47AM]

Please help me out. I'm getting a winmo phone here shortly. The LG Incite. (was free)

I've never used winMo ever, so I have no idea how everything works, the main thing I want to ask is if there are any specific things I should do. Can you like reformat it with a clean version of winmo? Or get a new UI or something, I'm not much of a cellphone kinda guy. Please help!

BTW, it's winmo 6.1

[Edobe Posted Oct 6th 2009 4:02AM]

I'm not sure this is the demise of MS. The zune was far behind until the zune HD. Vista was a disappointment then came windows 7. This is Ms being MS. You pretty much have to force them to realize that there product sucks, that they will wake up and deliver an amazing version of the same thing, and you will wonder what took so long.

[trealtp Posted Oct 6th 2009 4:06AM]

ya theres some real good interfaces from xda devs available that make wm great unfortunately this looks shitty so far as I am using android and other versions of 6.5. It can be good but im not impressed by this stock version.

[(Unverified) Posted Oct 6th 2009 4:28AM]

To be fair, the stuff they copied directly from the iPhone should be impressive to people who have never seen an iPhone before.

[(Unverified) Posted Oct 6th 2009 4:42AM]

The truth is WinMo is dead, at least from OEM business point of view although
Ballmer isn't going admit it publicly for now. Otherwise, MS won't be pouring money
into Project Pink. There are no other explanations for Project Pink, period.
And yes, Win 7 is for Project Pink. You heard it here, okay.

[Girish Posted Oct 6th 2009 5:23AM]

As of now, Windows Mobile is being used as a platform and not a phone.
HTC (Touch Flow 3D) and Samsung(Touch Wiz in Omnia II) are doing an amazing job of providing rich UI on Windows Mobile.

But it is painfully clear that compared to the likes of Apple and Palm, work done by HTC and Samsung are still just skinning.

Forget the honey-comb start screen and the jazzed up context menus. What MS needs to provide is a rich set of Graphics APIs and a modern UI framework, it is time to say goodbye to old Win32.
Something which recognizes the need for Animation, OpenGL, etc.

HTC and Samsung are spending huge amount of resources trying to come up with their own UI framework, but will never get to the point where Cocoa is. Apple seamlessly integrates libraries such as CoreAnimation, CoreGraphics, etc with their environment. Win32 provides no such thing.

Windows App developers struggle with horrible frameworks like ATL and MFC, trying to bind the plethora of technologies needed to create a good looking app for windows.

It takes a huge amount of effort and system overhead to provide the rich experience given by TouchFlow 3d, or Samsung's latest Touch wiz iteration.

It is Microsoft's duty to now come up with a competitive framework and allow app developers and OEMs to indulge in creativity rather than trying to hide the horrible under belly of Windows Mobile.

[Ioncloud9 Posted Oct 6th 2009 8:28AM]

Long time WM user here and this half assed 'update' makes me want to cry.

[Groovy100 Posted Oct 6th 2009 10:38AM]

Is that it?

Was that the famed Simultaneous Global Windows Mobile 6.5 launch??!

Two official handset announcements of devices that were announced ages ago anyway? (HTC Imagio and Pure)

Is that all that's readily available to buy on the grand WinMo launch day with other devices not coming to market until November, the holidays or even January?

Seriously??

What happened to all those grand announcements from SonyEricsson (what ever happened to X2?) and Samsung (when is this rumoured Omnia Pro B7610 with 6.5 finally going to come out?)

Not to mention Microsoft's own WinMo website which mentions exactly TWO handsets with 6.5 on it.

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsmobile/en-us/meet/windows-to-go.mspx

I have an Xperia X1 and I have absolutely ZERO incentive to upgrade at this point; no incentive from a hardware point of view and no incentive from an OS aspect either.

Where's that grand choice we were promised??

By the time they release other handsets, WinMo will be totally irrelevant because both the Pre and Android as well as Maemo will only have strengthened their market presence and enriched their app stores.

FAIL!

[joshbw Posted Oct 6th 2009 11:15AM]

"What MS needs to provide is a rich set of Graphics APIs and a modern UI framework, it is time to say goodbye to old Win32"

You know, you provide a whole lot of fancy terminology to give the appearance that you know what you are talking about, mentioning ATL, MFC, Cocoa, etc, but in the end you honestly don't, achieving nothing more than name dropping. The one thing WMo actually has going for it is the .Net Compact framework which is probably the most developer friendly embedded API set and development environment. Someone who spends a good deal of time with the full framework will certainly appreciate what is missing from the Compact Framework, and there is quite a bit of noticable gaps there, but it is miles away from the likes of ATL, and has been since 2003. So congratulations, you are only about 6 years out of date in your criticism, which in the world of development technologies is the equivelent of living in the cambrian.

Incidentally, all of the spiffy visual effects, utterly trivial with managed DirectX in the .Net CF. That most developers don't use them has almost nothing to do with the availability or ease of use. If you want to bag on Windows Mobile there are a wealth of very legitimate criticism (the fact that everything but the development environment is stuck in the Pocket PC days for example) but development frameworks is not one of them.

[thefourthheat Posted Oct 27th 2009 1:00AM]

I think the real issue is just that Internet Explorer (in ALL it's current incarnations mobile or not) is a giant pile of stinking doodoo at this point. It won't even run modern websites even close to acceptably on machines with 3Ghz Pentium 4's let alone a portable phone processor. I don't even think Snapdragon could make it work even vaguely as well as Opera Mobile or Webkit.
Anyways this is probably why Opera ships standard on all the HTC chipsets as the default browser, and will probably continue to do so. It's a pity that the makers of Iris got purchased by Blackberry but at least there's still one other Webkit browser in development for Windows Mobile that seems promising (Dorothy), so the fact that Internet Explorer still blows doesn't neccessarily define the internet experience on Windows Mobile.
But that said I would just like to say: MICROSOFT!!! Maybe it's time you guys just like...give up on the Internet Explorer engine. It stinks, and if you guys really want to do it right then you need to dump tons of resources into doing a serious from scratch rewrite of everything because this just doesn't cut it on modern websites anymore-ESPECIALLY not on limited hardware. And if you're not willing to invest those kinds of resources would you just please repackage Webkit like everyone else? I won't hold it against you, because I don't use Internet Explorer unless I absolutely have to for some horrible compatibility reason and mostly it's because it runs like horse dung. Seriously, either give up or give it the most ridiculous budget ever to make IE fast again (yes, there was a time when IE was the fast browser, standards be damned).
And if it's really that shameful just have some subsidiary of a subsidiary buy up the guys that are making Dorothy a la Blackberry. Then deny that you ever knew but secretly help them perfect webkit for Windows Mobile. Don't worry, it'll be our little secret.

[chansthename Posted Oct 6th 2009 3:11AM]

WinMo Forever

[LAY Posted Oct 6th 2009 7:17AM]

It's not like anyone is shocked of the WM6.5 review from a site that runs 4-5 iPhone app stories a day. The funny thing is how they dumped it at 3am EST. Like what were they trying to avoid?

They didnt like any part of it, duh. Hell, they give the same treatment to WebOS and barely give kudos to Android and Blackberry. So when they say it's awful, then I know it's way better. And yes, i use 6.5. have been for months, and it works perfectly fine, and as advertised.

[MarkAnderson Posted Oct 6th 2009 7:26AM]

Sorry, don't buy that. Matthew Miller - who is Mister Even Handed as far as these things go - has also expressed his disappointment. It's very clear this is a stop gap to take the rough edges of WinMo whilst MS perfect WinMo 7.

And, you'll notice, Chris is pretty clear on that point - the OS isn't going to attract many people but that's not to say the hardware it's on won't since the last thing most phone buyers care about is the operating system it uses.

It's a needed release but it ain't a panacea.

[UnixSystemsEngineer Posted Oct 6th 2009 10:24AM]

Look_Around_You,
So your first argument is that this site is Apple-biased, then your second argument is that the story was put out at 3am to fly under the radar? Which is it? If the site hates MS so much, shouldn't it put this article out at 10am, prime Starbucks-sipping hour, so that we can all laugh at MS as we enjoy our soy lattes?

The fact of the matter is Windows Mobile is a very dated platform that needs a complete redesign, not just a skin. Hell, the most excitement you can muster is to say "it works perfectly fine." For all your rants about fanboyism, maybe you should just look in the mirror and be honest with yourself.

Slashdot links to PC Pro (?)'s article: "If this is the best [Microsoft] can muster in the year-and-a-half's worth of development time since Windows Mobile 6.1 appeared, we'll be dramatically lowering our hopes for Windows Mobile 7.'"

I personally think WM has been dead since before the iPhone came out. I ditched it after 2 weeks to go back to a featurephone, it was that bad. The iPhone has changed what users expect from a smartphone, and Android and Palm are bringing alternatives to the masses. They're making WinMo look like the lousy standout in a field of good competition.

If you want to wait until WinMo7 before making a final judgement, great, that's a valid way to go. But don't pretend like WM6.5 criticism is just a bunch of uppity tech snobs keeping poor Microsoft down.

[coolius Posted Oct 6th 2009 3:13AM]

I've been running 6.5 on my Xperia X1 for a while now and actually prefer using the home screen to TouchFlo, it's just much simpler.

Plus I think the lock screen as actually very good and requires a bit more detail in the review!

[ridley182 Posted Oct 6th 2009 3:13AM]

Yawn.

[newreformation Posted Oct 6th 2009 3:25AM]

I agree, it is pretty late at night. I need some sleep...

[jhoff80 Posted Oct 6th 2009 3:16AM]

With regards to WM Standard, it had some drastic changes in 6.1, giving the sliding panels today screen before the Pro variant got something similar in 6.5.

In other words, in 6.1, WM Pro had minor changes, WM Standard had big changes.
6.5, WM Pro has bigger changes, WM Standard has minor changes.

So, it's not too big of a deal that 6.5 doesn't help Standard much. (That sliding panels homescreen for example improved usability a ton).

[(Unverified) Posted Oct 6th 2009 3:16AM]

WM6.5 is horrible. the entire honeycomb interface with new homescreen is worse than using an iphone.

i'm a complete WM fanboy, and this is just horrible. if i had my choice i'd still be using wm2003's style of running complete in RAM rather than rom. it was somuch faster.

mix that with wm5s functionality? couldnt get any better.

[High Posted Oct 6th 2009 3:17AM]

yada yada yada buy an iPhone already, its just that simple. Really, just look at some of those screen shots, what is that 2003?? Sorry MS you can't put lipstick on that pig you call Windows Mobile. I can't believe I wasted my time reading and watching those videos thinking MS would release something news worthy.

[MiketheVee Posted Oct 6th 2009 3:35AM]

Moron. Get over the bullsh!t hype that everyone needs an iphone. Winmo 6.5 is not meant to be a completely new experience. It is by definition of its version number an upgrade but not a full new experience.
Also, if you ever went on XDA developers, you would realize that so much more can be done with 6.5 as seen in the various forums in XDA.
'nuff said.

[CJ Posted Oct 6th 2009 8:35AM]

Are you HIGH?

[ScienceProUSAcom Posted Oct 6th 2009 3:24AM]

All of the newer builds on XDA are waaay better than the outdated RTM build.

No one in the know actually runs stock ROMs on WinMo devices, so that's not a problem.

The newer builds with the touch friendly buttons and pull down top bar with easy access to settings are really nice even on my 3 year old Tilt!

WinMo is not bad, and it is customizable more than anything else. However, 7 better be good or MS may as well leave the mobile space.

[andreab Posted Oct 6th 2009 3:40AM]

Totally agree. The newer builds are much more finger-friendly and look a lot nicer. I really hope HTC goes the extra mile by offering later builds for all current phones for their official ROM releases.

[(Unverified) Posted Oct 6th 2009 4:08AM]

I've been on XDA just as long as you, but seriously, you would be crying foul all over the place if engadget was to review a buggy leak of an incomplete product. And that is just what the later builds more touch friendly builds of WM6.5 are. There is no way I would ever reccomend them to someone that didn't have time to work out kinks, and/or just didn't care about problems.

They should be reviewing the 6.5 that's been released, and they should call it like it is, and get MS to get off their butts, and stop delaying 7.

[Tres Posted Oct 6th 2009 5:05AM]

Yeah because to make my mobile device usable I should have to go searching around on the net for a rom that someone's cooked up. Having it work well out of the box isn't an expectation I have of a mission critical device like a mobile phone.

[Brad Hubbard Posted Oct 6th 2009 2:21PM]

@Tres

There are two approaches to personal electronics: lower your expectations until they're met by the device you buy, or improve the device until it does what you want it to do.

There are LEGIONS of developers, hackers, and tinkerers out there all working to make their devices better. If you're happy with all the sacrifices and compromises a company has to make in order to meet cost and schedule deadlines, awesome. It must be nice to live in a world with such low expectations that consumer electronics designed to meet the minimum common requirements of 10 million people are good enough for you.

[SSteven Posted Oct 6th 2009 3:44PM]

Hate to say it Brad, but that WAS the problem until Apple came along. Now we *expect* this in our devices.

[Ehg Posted Oct 13th 2009 10:54AM]

@ Tres

Than why would anyone ever need to "jailbreak" the "1 phone to rule them all"?

[(Unverified) Posted Oct 6th 2009 3:31AM]

Diching Opera was such a bad move from HTC. New IE sux big time :(

[James Posted Oct 6th 2009 4:07AM]

So download Opera...

[jakem Posted Oct 6th 2009 4:17AM]

If you'd read the review you'd know that they're not ditching Opera.

[tonyprince Posted Oct 6th 2009 5:05PM]

lol opera sux. everyone should get skyfire.

[Barrysouroldpartneryaknow Posted Oct 6th 2009 3:32AM]

Why is the accelerameter so slow on the pure? And does it turn the keyboard over to landscape?

I plan on getting the Tilt, but having a good accelerameter would be nice.

[(Unverified) Posted Oct 6th 2009 1:01PM]

NO! No AT&T Tilt! I've had mine since November 2007 and have been counting the days ever since that I could finally leave the hell that is WinMo and move on to a real mobile experience. Verizon/Moto/Google Sholes/Tao/A855/Droid, here I come!!

[Jorge510 Posted Oct 6th 2009 11:49AM]

Got to give props for showing of the good old sprint moto q in the back. I love that phone well the verizon motoq on sprint I waited and waited for mms but it never came. I ended up with 3 motoqs 2 verizon and one sprint. I feel so lame now.

[richieb Posted Oct 7th 2009 12:38AM]

not sure about the Q but the Q9C has mms now.

[CaramelZappa Posted Oct 6th 2009 3:36AM]

Winmo reminds me a lot of PalmOS before the Pre launched. It was once really good and really useful but now it just seems outdated and the market has better alternatives.

[GnuGeek Posted Oct 6th 2009 3:41AM]

I am thoroughly disappointed by what I have just read. Even though I knew what was coming, but still this is bad.

In fact I believe 6.5 which is supposed to be stop-gap (whatever) may make potential buyers drift further from WinMo. I wish they could have just taken 6-7 months more and released WinMo 7 with zune-ish interface instead of spending time on this already dead before release platform.
Props for engadget for showing both the sides of the operating system and a fair review

:(

[(Unverified) Posted Oct 6th 2009 4:56AM]

You'd think they would have at least tried to synchronise a Windows Mobile 7 with Windows 7. Looks like WinMo was just too hard to get to a version 7.0.

[RichyS Posted Oct 6th 2009 7:38AM]

Well, on the basis that Win 7 is really Win 6.1, I guess Win Mobile 6.5 is actually ahead of the curve!

[bhtooefr Posted Oct 6th 2009 9:12AM]

Richy: But WinMo 6.5 and 6.1 are both WinCE 5.2.

(Which isn't even the latest version of CE.)

[Beastage Posted Oct 6th 2009 3:52AM]

You know what is funny? Opera, they made buckets of money with contracts for opera mobile browser on WinMo... and they using that money to cry to the EU because their desktop browser sucks.

[Edobe Posted Oct 6th 2009 3:54AM]

So Chris, if you had to rank winmo with all of the mobile os'es out now, where would you rank it. How does it compare to Android, Maemo 5, WebOs, Moblin, rimos, iphoineos, symbian, etc. Where does Winmo fit among the current mobile Os'es?

[kevintex Posted Oct 6th 2009 3:55AM]

Wow this is pretty sad. Did MS just throw in the towel on this one? Did they assume 'bidness users' will swallow this crappy UI and not complain?

Like chambo said no one runs stock ROMs so who really cares? The only problem with that is that there's additional code running which just slows down that outdated processor on top of that crappy UI. It would be much better if the UI was done right the first time. I guess if it wasn't for the crappy UIs we wouldn't have TouchFlo or Xperia's panels.

Yeah, why is the accelerometer so slow on that phone? The Tilt/Tytn II could transition so much faster. And did I see an exit button on the IE menu? That's slightly surprising.

[mikkybukky Posted Oct 6th 2009 4:52AM]

Engadget is rubbish.Give wm 6.5 a chance.

[Canucker Posted Oct 6th 2009 9:57AM]

WinMo 6.5 is rubbish, give Engadget a chance (given one costs money and the other doesn't).

[sonicyoof Posted Oct 6th 2009 4:03AM]

Ugh... same stupid criticisms of WinMo. What's so wrong with that last screenshot? It's got square corners? It's grey? It doesn't swoosh around and drop pixie dust when you pinch or swipe or whatever?

How many times, if ever, do you think you'll see that screen? All of those buttons can be pressed without a stylus, by the way.

And the OK button? No need for a stylus either. I know it looks small, but the touch-sensitive area seems to be bigger usually (or at least feels that way).