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Cellphones Handhelds Operating Systems Software Windows Hardware

Windows Mobile 7 Phone Release Delayed Again 131

jcoventry writes "Microsoft is delaying Windows Mobile 7, and it is thought new phones with the operating system are unlikely to reach the market before 2010. Microsoft partners who had expected to have a final release in their hands by early 2009 have been told that it won't be ready until the second half of 2009. Partners include companies like Verizon, Motorola and Samsung, all of which plan new phones that include the Mobile Windows 7 OS. Windows Mobile 7 is expected to have features like gesture recognition and speech input."
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Windows Mobile 7 Phone Release Delayed Again

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  • Android (Score:4, Insightful)

    by ohtani ( 154270 ) on Saturday September 27, 2008 @04:38PM (#25179447) Homepage

    Welp, there's always android for now.

    • by ohtani ( 154270 )

      Oops misread an ad, thought it was out NOW. Apparently it's out in October.

      • Word is (Score:1, Interesting)

        by Anonymous Coward

        AAhhhhhahahahahahhhhahhhhhahahahahah (exclamation point, DOCTOR !!)

        It's already 6 months late (CE6 was Summer 2006, and WM based on the new OS has, for the past 10 years, been 18 months behind), so add on another 18 months and it's really two years late. WM6 came a year ago. Wm6 is CE5.02. WM5, which goes back to mid-2005, is CE5.01. So the transition from CE5-based OS (WM5) to CE6-based OS is FIVE years. Thems a lot of wasted days and wasted nights at Fort Redmond (Fort Bangalore to be accurate).

  • er, won't the hardware be looking crappy with that kind of delay? The top end phones seem to change markedly each year.
    Or will the target hardware change fast enough that microsoft have to delay again while they get the OS working 'properly'? Rinse, repeat.

  • Too slow (Score:5, Insightful)

    by viljun ( 1267170 ) on Saturday September 27, 2008 @04:43PM (#25179479) Homepage
    Microsoft is just too slow and clumsy nowadays. Mobile Windows 7 may already be old at the time it hit's the market.
    • Re:Too slow (Score:5, Informative)

      by thetoadwarrior ( 1268702 ) on Saturday September 27, 2008 @05:07PM (#25179657) Homepage
      Imo, version 5 and 6 were both old by their release. Windows mobile has a lot of nice features but the interface is boring and lacking and the OS is buggy.

      I was so glad to get rid of my Windows Mobile phone. I've been just using a cheap phone until I can see if there were be anything decent from Android.

      It's a shame Apple are acting like a bunch of nazis about iphone development or I might consider their over priced phone.
      • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

        by tobiasly ( 524456 )

        Imo, version 5 and 6 were both old by their release. Windows mobile has a lot of nice features but the interface is boring and lacking and the OS is buggy.

        You ain't kidding. Its resemblance to desktop Windows is striking though... you have to reboot your phone every few days or else everything starts running slowly, rendering halfway-drawn dialog boxes on the screen, and eventually crashing. And talk about poor integration... every app that has you enter an email, phone number, or contact name does it differently. Some use auto-complete, and others don't. It's just a mess and I can't wait for Android to come out.

        • My favourite is when it loses its stylus calibration. It's so random. I can through a period of weeks or months where it loses its calibration any time it goes into power saving mode. But then it can go months without it doing that and I've not changed my usage habits. It's almost like they've built that into that system to screw with people.
          • Re:Too slow (Score:4, Informative)

            by Dun Malg ( 230075 ) on Saturday September 27, 2008 @07:05PM (#25180409) Homepage

            My favourite is when it loses its stylus calibration. It's so random. I can through a period of weeks or months where it loses its calibration any time it goes into power saving mode. But then it can go months without it doing that and I've not changed my usage habits. It's almost like they've built that into that system to screw with people.

            That's actually a hardware issue. Really, touch screens are a simple matter of variable resistance across two circuits. All WM knows is the min ohms and max ohms for the X and Y axes. Apply Occam's Razor. Do you really think WM is "forgetting" four simple integers? Or do you think that maybe the resistance of the touch screen hardware on some phones might be flaky? Add in the fact that there are plenty of people whose WM phones don't lose stylus calibration, and the answer seems pretty obvious to me.

            • Re:Too slow (Score:5, Funny)

              by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 27, 2008 @07:16PM (#25180475)
              Do you really think WM is "forgetting" four simple integers?

              Well, it is Microsoft we're talking about.
            • I might believe that if it wasn't for the fact I bought it after my Nintendo DS and I've yet to ever have to recalibrate my Nintendo DS. So unless HTC uses some really shitty hardware and charges more than more for it than a old style DS I don't see how that's the case.

              Don't get me wrong I believe that hardware can be a problem sometimes but I've seen better performance from old touch screen catalogues in Sears from the 80s.
            • I had an HTC Tytn which needed recalibration at least once a week (known 'issue'). Replaced it with an HTC Polaris and not had to be calibrated since I got it 6 months ago.
              To be fair to the original, the fact that my IPod touch doesn't even have a recalibration option makes me feel a lot more comfortable.
        • Except it "sorta" forgot to completely copy the Windows paradigm. I am angling to skip laptops and use things like SuperPhones as ultramobile computing centers, with "commodity" hardware externals like keyboards, monitors.

          I still can't believe that a 400-some Mhz machine can't run something like a stripped Windows2000. Lasy I understood you can't even easily use the classical C:\ tree model & install stuff as if it were an OldSchool comp.

          • An ARM processor at 400 Mhz is not even close to a real x86 processor at 400Mhz. First of all, you'd have to port all the kernel junk from x86 to ARM (hint: not fun) but more importantly, the performance just isn't there. ARM is designed for power-thriftiness, not performance.

            I have a 400Mhz ARM in my phone (HTC PPC6800) and the thing has serious trouble rendering complex HTML (Opera Mobile 9.5, part of the slowdown might be scaling images down to 320x240 though) -- something that my old PC doesn't even bli

      • by Mista2 ( 1093071 )

        I hated Windows Moble, I hated the number of taps required to get to stuff that was one or two taps away in palm OS. Media player sucked as if I turned the screen off, MP did not move on to the next track. If listneing to music when taking a call, you had to fish the phone out of your pocket to carry on listening after the call ended. Want to skip a track, pause while someone talks to you, fish out the phone again.
        However I sold it and bought an iPhone. I love the iPhone, but I hate almost everything about

    • Re:Too slow (Score:4, Funny)

      by cp.tar ( 871488 ) <cp.tar.bz2@gmail.com> on Saturday September 27, 2008 @06:14PM (#25180083) Journal

      Microsoft is just too slow and clumsy nowadays. Mobile Windows 7 may already be old at the time it hit's the market.

      Well, at least they'll be keeping up with the desktop version of Windows...

      • Please don't be right.

        I might even send you a cake upon being reminded of this.

        "Unified Windows Rollout! Windows Seven Desktop. Windows Seven Mobile. Windows Seven. It's a Revelation".

        • by cp.tar ( 871488 )

          Now I am horribly reminded of the seven deadly sins.
          Please, keep the cake. It is probably a lie anyway.

  • gestures (Score:3, Insightful)

    by nighty5 ( 615965 ) on Saturday September 27, 2008 @04:43PM (#25179481)

    I'm no iPhone fanboy but it seems ironic that after 6 iterations of Windows Mobile, Microsoft still hasn't released an update to handle gestures.

    iPhone is way ahead of the game in this area, and I'm sure Apple intend to exploit this position agressively.

    Microsoft must be kicking themselves for resting up during the last couple of revisions, whilst Apple takes away significant market share and "wow factor".

    p.s i don't own an iPhone :D

    • RIM is a lot cheaper these days :)

    • Re:gestures (Score:5, Interesting)

      by pchan- ( 118053 ) on Saturday September 27, 2008 @05:12PM (#25179697) Journal

      I'm no iPhone fanboy but it seems ironic that after 6 iterations of Windows Mobile, Microsoft still hasn't released an update to handle gestures.

      Before version 4, WinCE (which is the core of Windows Mobile) was unusable garbage. In version 4 it was upgraded to "terrible" (as an OS), and the source code became available to developers. Version 5 is the first version that didn't entirely blow (although I quit a job using WinCE for one using specifically not WinCE because it is still a shitty OS).

      WinCE is not inherited from any of the other Windows lines, it doesn't share any code with them at the lower levels. The problem is that WinCE bolts the horrid Win32 API on top of this OS. And then MFC. And then dotnet. And it still retains much of the desktop+mouse user model. Every time I see that mouse arrow on a retail WinCE device it makes me cringe. For an embedded device, this makes no sense. Microsoft was more interested in maintaining compatibility with its desktop environment than with creating an interface that is logical for an embedded device.

      Device manufacturers have given MS a kick in a pants. They told them that what is currently being produced is inadequate. After the iPhone came out, MS released WinCE 6, which is the same old stuff (ooh, now a process can use 64 megs of RAM instead of 32) with more dotnet. They came out with yesterday's product. HTC and Samsung had to revamp the UI totally to ship a competitive phone. Can you imagine the level of hackery that went into this? Will MS catch up? Up until now there was no competition to WinCE (Linux required too much work, Symbian was, well, Symbian, and iPhone OS is not available to anyone). But with Android, handset developers have a real alternative OS (yes, I know it's Linux, but it's a complete OS). If Google hadn't screwed up Android by tying it in so much to Google services, I would say MS is too late. As it is, we'll see.

    • Re:gestures (Score:4, Informative)

      by TheNetAvenger ( 624455 ) on Saturday September 27, 2008 @08:04PM (#25180785)

      Windows Mobile, Microsoft still hasn't released an update to handle gestures.

      Windows Mobile has supported gestures for a long time. The Summary is misleading, as it is 'Gesture Navigation' that was to be expanded in Windows Mobile 7.

      Gestures on Windows Mobile are almost as old as Pen Gestures introduced back in the Tablet PC in 2002.

      Sad that people in the mainstream don't have any idea where all this comes from and how Apple did better at marketing than innovating anything. Most of us have been suckered by Apple, not helped by them.

      Go look up multi-touch gesturing which comes from both MS Tablet (yes there were multi-touch tablets back in 2002 even), MS Research and demostrations from the TED conference about 5 years ago. Apple copied the TED expansion of the demostrated concepts idea for idea, even using the 'made up' gestures for the conference that were only to be 'examples'. -Google the TED Video.)

      Another misleading item from the summarty is voice input, as Windows Mobile has had voice recognition dialing for a long time, something the iPhone still seriously lacks except from 3rd party add-ons. And sadly, something even free phones from Walmart can do that make the iPhone look sad. (Bluetooth headset users know this all too well.)

      • Newton (Score:2, Informative)

        by LKM ( 227954 )

        Gestures on Windows Mobile are almost as old as Pen Gestures introduced back in the Tablet PC in 2002.
        Sad that people in the mainstream don't have any idea where all this comes from and how Apple did better at marketing than innovating anything.

        Yes on the "sad that people don't know where it comes from," no on the "Apple didn't innovate." Remember the Newton? Yes, that was 1993. A decade before your Tablet PC.

        • Yes on the "sad that people don't know where it comes from," no on the "Apple didn't innovate." Remember the Newton? Yes, that was 1993. A decade before your Tablet PC.

          Go look up Pen Windows 3.1... Geesh.

          Is a pissing match really where you want to take this?

          There are a lot of companies that did touch input even 20 years before Pen Windows.

          Heck even take the Casio Calculator watch from the mid 80's you could write numbers on the touch screen with your finger. AND THIS WAS A FREAKING WATCH back when the 6800

          • Actually yes Apple did invent it.

            You see, inventing something and having it go nowhere is pointless. Unless you can get people to buy it en masse its like you didn't invent it at all.

            Only a geek would care about the pedantic details of who was really 'first'.

            Oh wait this is Slashdot....

            • inventing something and having it go nowhere is pointless

              There have been millions of these devices sold. More than freaking iPhones and all the iPods ever sold combined...

              Just because YOU didn't know it existed means you are stupid, not that Apple invented it.

    • I agree. I installed SBP Mobile Shell and it added a bunch of finger gestures to the WM interface, along with eyecandy flips, slides, and other animations obviously a la mode now because of Apple's influence. I understand that HTC also added finger gestures with its Touchflo interface, along with apparently lots of rotating cubes. It's just not that difficult to add this stuff to a small, simple UI and the fact that MS is taking so long to do something that small ISVs have already accomplished shows that it

  • Recognition (Score:5, Funny)

    by freeasinrealale ( 928218 ) on Saturday September 27, 2008 @04:48PM (#25179513)
    I wonder if Microsoft or the mobile 7 software recognizes the gestures currently being submitted by the developers.
  • by 2010 (Score:2, Interesting)

    by davebarnes ( 158106 )

    Apple, Google and RIM will be that much farther down the road.

    Windows Mobile is dead.

  • by Anonymous Coward

    Screw gesture recognition, I just want MS to fix the crappiness that is the current-gen Windows Mobile OS and turn it into something that is usable.

    On my HTC Apache (aka XV6700) which I personally upgraded to W.M.6 from the W.M.5 that came with it, and I still am sometimes not even able to answer a call; no matter how many times I try it will just register as missed. Sometimes this doesn't happen, but the call goes directly to speakerphone. That is lovely for the times when Mom calls and promptly does the

    • I don't need fancy stuff like gesture recognition, I just want my phone to work the way it's supposed to. Hopefully Android can prove itself early on and I can switch to an HTC Dream.

      As someone else once said, there is another [apple.com].

      I wouldn't mention the iPhone since obviously you don't own one at this point for a reason, but I thought I'd point out that coming from Windows Mobile you're going to have a much better Windows integration experience with the iPhone than with Android as it ships today, and possibly f

    • Upgrading the OS is not recommended unless you are using an image supplied by the phone manufacturer. I don't think HTC supply upgrades.

      Try downgrading back to the WM5 that shipped with your phone and you might find it works more reliably.

  • Not the full story (Score:5, Informative)

    by Stan Vassilev ( 939229 ) on Saturday September 27, 2008 @05:17PM (#25179719)

    The article uses very unclear wording in that part, so I thought I'd clarify.

    Microsoft will release updated browser in their 6.2 update. The good news is it can render Flash and AJAX and so on because it's based on the rendering engine of the desktop Internet Explorer browser. The bad news: it's based on the desktop version of *IE6*.

    • The article uses very unclear wording in that part, so I thought I'd clarify.

      Microsoft will release updated browser in their 6.2 update. The good news is it can render Flash and AJAX and so on because it's based on the rendering engine of the desktop Internet Explorer browser. The bad news: it's based on the desktop version of *IE6*.

      I was very dismayed to read that also. I currently have a Windows Mobile 6 phone (AT&T 8525) and its current web browser is just terrible (based on IE 4 from what I understand). I had heard that the next version of Pocket IE would finally enter this century and naturally figured it would have the IE7 rendering engine at least.

      I'll never again buy a Windows Mobile phone. Microsoft is just too big and clumsy to continue innovating their products. It's ridiculous that I have to look for third-party softwar

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Tweenk ( 1274968 )

      The bad news: it's based on the desktop version of *IE6*.

      For God's sake, Microsoft! Stop defiling the world with this unholy abomination! Would somebody think of the children who grow up to become web designers and whose souls are going to be destroyed and their life energy drained away by sinister forces while they unfruitfully struggle to fix their layouts deformed beyond recognition by the filthy bowels of IE6? Now we have ultimate proof that Microsoft is Satan incarnate.

    • That sounds like such a half assed thing to do and it shows no respect for web developers. Everyone is patiently waiting for IE6 to die off and then they add it to another product.

      Oh well, I suppose on the plus side there will probably only be about 3 people using Windows Mobile 6.2
    • Microsoft will release updated browser in their 6.2 update

      Yes, but which one? I have had an HTC Touch Diamond during a few days, it came with both Internet Explorer (part of Windows Mobile), and Opera (part of the "TouchFlo 3D" layer added by HTC).

      In fact, none of the two browsers really worked...
  • Wow, Microsoft is really falling behind here.

    Google has just released a prototype Android phone for review and Apple is still going strong with the iPhone.

    I hope Google is able to push their OS hard enough to knock MS right out of the phone market. The last thing I want is a phone running a proprietary OS that is impossible to program for...

    I think the best thing about the Android compared to other phone OS's is the open development. It can be programmed easily using well known and widely used languages, un

    • Re:Falling behind... (Score:5, Informative)

      by Tweenk ( 1274968 ) on Saturday September 27, 2008 @06:15PM (#25180091)

      It can be programmed easily using well known and widely used language

      Fixed - I don't think any JVM based languages other than Java are anywhere near widely used, and Android has no provisions to execute "bare metal" code. I may be a good thing after all, because it ensures compatibility of all Android apps with all Android phones despite different hardware.

      • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

        by mmurphy000 ( 556983 )

        I don't think any JVM based languages other than Java are anywhere near widely used

        That depends on how you define matters. Ruby is fairly widely used and has a JVM-based implementation that is less widely used. Ditto Python/Jython. At the moment, though, I suspect neither will run on Dalvik — any interpreted language that generates bytecode on the fly for JIT would need to generate Dalvik bytecode.

        and Android has no provisions to execute "bare metal" code

        That's probably not strictly true — again

    • I think the best thing about the Android compared to other phone OS's is the open development. It can be programmed easily using well known and widely used languages, unlike the iPhone that requires Objective-C!

      Having done a lot of Java, and now a lot of Objective-C (for the iPhone) I can say that's not really true.

      Objective-C the language does not take long to pick up if you've used another modern language - Java is an especially good starting point.

      From there, both platforms require a lot of work to under

      • I'm pondering idea of switching my augmented reality app to iPhone from Symbian. What kind of investment should I do ?
        Is MacBook + iPhone enough ? Are there a good free IDE for Objective-C ? Or IDE is part of SDK ? SDK (development programm) itself is only 99$, correct ?
        • One thing to be aware of is that currently, the location services give you positional data but not direction, unless you move - I think that's true of the new GPS phones as well as the old, but it may take more experimenting. I don't know how that would factor into how you are using devices today.

          A Macbook should be plenty for development. I have an older Macbook Pro (first Intel model) that I think is slower than the latest Macbooks so speed wise things should be fine. The screen is a little on the smal

    • by ceoyoyo ( 59147 ) on Saturday September 27, 2008 @08:10PM (#25180827)

      If you know C and it takes you longer than twenty-four hours to become familiar enough with Objective-C to program an iPhone then you don't know C.

      Objective-C is an extension to C, not some completely new language.

      • Don't you think the Smalltalk parts might confuse some pure C coders? I mean, heck, some of them are using C++ as if it is C because they don't want to or don't care to learn object-oriented programming.
        • by ceoyoyo ( 59147 )

          Probably. But they'll just use it the same way they use C++: they'll miss the power, but they should be able to limp along.

          Really, you can write an entire Mac or iPhone app in C and use the Objective-C extensions strictly for system calls. For those you just have to treat the objective-C message as a weird looking method call.

      • Objective-C is easy enough...Cocoa and XCode are less so. (posted from an iPhone, for what it's worth)
        • by ceoyoyo ( 59147 )

          Strange, I found the opposite. To me Cocoa is much easier to follow than the other GUI systems I've used, from the transfer record mess of Windows 3.1 through Swing to Wx and Qt (which are both much better).

          XCode is just like every other large IDE I've used: bloated, overly complicated and almost impossible to find that obscure option you actually need.

    • by EvanED ( 569694 )

      The last thing I want is a phone running a proprietary OS that is impossible to program for...

      My impression was that since you can program to the .net compact framework, VM would be one of the better systems to develop for. Depending on your program, it seems like it should even be possible to create a program with basically one code base that will run on either a WM device or a Windows PC, and maybe even other systems under mono. Compare that to either the iPhone or Android, both of which by my understandi

    • by LKM ( 227954 )

      unlike the iPhone that requires Objective-C!

      If you can't figure out Objective-C, you're doing something wrong :-)

  • ..if you are surprised by this.

    It seems today to be almost common practice to announce release dates you never intend to keep. That way your product appears better than the competition, except that it won't be available until technological development has allowed to competition to equal it.

    • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

      by Fumus ( 1258966 )
      It seems you are trying to use a hand gesture, but your current version of Windows Mobile doesn't support them. Would you like to preorder Windows Mobile 7?
  • by david.emery ( 127135 ) on Saturday September 27, 2008 @05:50PM (#25179915)

    The fight will be between Google and the Open Source community in one corner, Apple and its traditional strength in human factors in the second corner, and the Koreans with their history of innovative phone products in the third corner. (I was in Seoul a year ago and I never saw so many different kinds of weird cell phone gadgets :-)

    Although I'm pretty much an Apple fanboy (based on how much better their products work -for me- versus the competition), I'm very excited to see competition based on real innovation, rather than on the Microsoft Monopoly's ability to seize and lock up the competition.

    I have not bought a smartphone (although I was a pretty early dedicated Palm user), and I'm waiting to see how the iPhone and Android mature before jumping in. The Crackberry -never- had any appeal for me (I had to fight one off back in 2002, the project I was working on was an early adopter.) As someone who types pretty well, the thumb keyboard has no appeal to me whatsoever. Pen-based inputs (e.g. Palm Graffiti, but not Graffiti 2 which was worse...) work for me on a handheld.

    But a note to Verizon: If you want to continue to be my carrier, then you'll have to look way beyond your current handset offerings and their developers, and your approach to business/marketing. The other carriers are catching up in network quality, and the traditional "grab the customer and screw him for all he's worth" approach of the big carriers is failing in the face of the Brave New World the iPhone has helped create and that Android has legitimized.

    dave

    • The fight will be between Google and the Open Source community in one corner, Apple and its traditional strength in human factors in the second corner, and the Koreans with their history of innovative phone products in the third corner. (I was in Seoul a year ago and I never saw so many different kinds of weird cell phone gadgets :-)

      Although I'm pretty much an Apple fanboy (based on how much better their products work -for me- versus the competition), I'm very excited to see competition based on real innovation, rather than on the Microsoft Monopoly's ability to seize and lock up the competition.

      I have not bought a smartphone (although I was a pretty early dedicated Palm user), and I'm waiting to see how the iPhone and Android mature before jumping in. The Crackberry -never- had any appeal for me (I had to fight one off back in 2002, the project I was working on was an early adopter.) As someone who types pretty well, the thumb keyboard has no appeal to me whatsoever. Pen-based inputs (e.g. Palm Graffiti, but not Graffiti 2 which was worse...) work for me on a handheld.

      But a note to Verizon: If you want to continue to be my carrier, then you'll have to look way beyond your current handset offerings and their developers, and your approach to business/marketing. The other carriers are catching up in network quality, and the traditional "grab the customer and screw him for all he's worth" approach of the big carriers is failing in the face of the Brave New World the iPhone has helped create and that Android has legitimized.

      dave

      While you may be right in terms of the market, if you just want the best phone with the most flexibility and software, it's definitely going to be on WM6.x for the forseeable future, as long as you're willing to mod your phone and you get a good one, like an HTC Touch Diamond, Pro, or HD.

      • I'm very much willing to wait for something with substantially more appeal than either a Windows-for-handhelds device or the current RIM offerings. I feel no compelling reason to compromise just to get a new smartphone today...

        dave

      • While you may be right in terms of the market, if you just want the best phone with the most flexibility and software, it's definitely going to be on WM6.x for the forseeable future, as long as you're willing to mod your phone

        I'd have to say you're far better off getting an iPhone and Jailbreaking it if you are allowing mods into the picture. There's already a lot of useful software from the App Store and from the jailbroken apps today.

    • The fight will be between Google and the Open Source community in one corner, Apple and its traditional strength in human factors in the second corner, and the Koreans with their history of innovative phone products in the third corner

      And where does Symbian, an OS written by a British company and maintained by a Finnish one, which owns over 70% of the market share, fit in to this list?

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by DECS ( 891519 )

        It fits into the 2006 list. Symbian market share is now down to 55%, just as Microsoft's WiMo fell from 23% back in 2004 to today's 12%.

        Nokia is taking over Symbian and making it into an open source foundation because royalties are dropping rapidly. Nobody wants to pay for OS software. Without revenues (down 14%), Symbian can't afford to invest in modernizing.

        The era of Windows-like software platform licensing is over. From here on out, it will be integrated proprietary platforms (RIM and Apple) or free pla

    • Although I'm pretty much an Apple fanboy (based on how much better their products work -for me- versus the competition), I'm very excited to see competition based on real innovation, rather than on the Microsoft Monopoly's ability to seize and lock up the competition.

      I totally agree.

      I'm doing a lot of iPhone development right now, but can easily see adding some Android work at some point - but I'm happy to see a fight based on technical merits rather than other factors. I hope we can see at least a few go

    • Wait, what? Shouldn't Team Nokia/Ericsson/Scandinavia/Symbian be in there somewhere? I'd consider Nokia to be the traditional leader in usability, making snappy, easy to use and feature rich smart phones of high build quality. You consider them out of the game because they haven't released their touch phone yet?

      I guess we could consider both Nokia's and Apple's treatment of developers a ringing endorsement of their competitors, though...
      I'm hoping this whole Android business will force Nokia to be less relu

      • Nokia/Ericsson/Scandanavia/Symbian have -not- produced the breakthrough devices that are represented by
            a. Treo
            b. Blackberry
            c. iPhone
        So I'd characterize them as "legacy" with the negatives that term can imply.

        (you asked...)

        dave

      • by S3D ( 745318 )
        <blockquote>
        I'd consider Nokia to be the traditional leader in usability, making snappy, easy to use and feature rich smart phones of high build quality.
        </blockquote>
        <br>
        What ??? Nokia is leader in usability for smartphones ? Nokia can make highly usable feature-rich dumb-phones, or sometimes (not always) good hardware design for smartphones, but usability of Nokia smartphones is terrible. To do any action you have to press several options from drop-down menus. Most useful function, like
        • Well, somewhat. The N82 I'm using at the moment go straight to the log by pressing the dial key, for instance. The default menu layout admittedly looks like someone swallowed all the icons and puked them up again, but it's all customizable, so it didn't take long to rearrange it so I can get to anywhere I ever need to go with three button presses, and to the stuff I use 90% of the time with just one.
          Anyway, I said they were traditionally the leader, I didn't say they were good. Oh, wait, I did say 'easy to

          • by S3D ( 745318 )

            As an aside, that's a very cool link in your sig. I had the idea of doing something like that just five hours ago. I never told anyone about it, and I never wrote it down. Your spies clearly work with great efficiency and speed. :)

            Porting to N95(Symbian 9.2) right now :) Probably will take couple of weeks more. After that - either to markeless outdoor tracking, or iPhone port, havn't decided yet.

        • by mvdwege ( 243851 )

          I call bullshit.

          I give you one thing: the Symbian UI only makes sense if you're a longtime Nokia user, as the whole workflow is obviously based on the older non-smartphones. But that's also where it shines. To take your log example: if you're going to treat the phone like a computer, you're going to have to go through the main menu and then three levels deep to find the log. Or you can press the 'Call' button, and immediately be thrown into the call log (and logically, starting at the 'Placed calls' sublog)

  • Basically an iPhone with a slide-out keyboard. I just cannot manage the on-screen keyboard for love or money. I'd even settle for a Blackberry-type format of half screen half keyboard.

    Unfortunately I know that with Jobs we'll never see an iPhone with a keyboard of any kind, so it looks like I'm stuck with WM for a while. My Moto Q mostly sucks (calls you can't end, crashing, slow), but ActiveStink works pretty well and the phone part generally works.

  • As a windows mobile user for professional reasons I do have to say that for work purposes and general Outlook integration the phone got good capacities. Now for the rest...I mean yes the word "terrible" to describe that OS is not making him enough honours...

    The whole problems with Windows Mobile is not only with the OS himself, I had several Palms who where working perfectly even under "heavy" usage. A Windows Mobile smart-phone-pda-assistant (whatever) has to be reseted quite often just to make it work as

  • MS has let Windows Mobile stagnate for a very long time. It has seen glacial changes since Palm entered irrelevance. Now suddenly after seeing its marketshare crash and burn MS seems to care again. Its like Firefox all over again. Yet if we look at that case study it is apparent that even with a new push, MS just doesn't have what it takes to fight the open source Android, or even Apple who is better than MS at their own game. Heck even RIM is doing just fine. Balmer should be drawn and quartered by the sha
    • WTF Mate?

      Xbox? You know the console which is selling more games, movies, controllers and expansion packs than practically all of its competitors combined? Sure it's not selling like the Wii which is pretty much a WiiSports Box but it's selling very very well. Yeah. Let's fire Balmer for releasing the most popular gaming machine amongst gamers and giving microsoft a reputation for releasing cutting edge home entertainment gear?

      Zune? Have you used a Zune? Argueably better than the iPod although less popu

      • Let's fire Balmer for releasing the most popular gaming machine amongst gamers

        Where by "gamers", you really mean "a subset of all gamers which I define based on some arbitrary ideas on who is allowed to call himself a gamer."

        The Xbox 360 will end up in third place, doing worse than the original Xbox which at least managed to (barely) outsell the Cube.

      • by Anonymous Coward

        Xbox? You know the console which is selling more {...} than practically all of its competitors combined? Sure it's not selling like the Wii {...}

        Yeah, that's a coherent and logical argument, Xbox sells more than all competition combined, except that one of the competition is selling even more. Somewhere, you failed at your "additions" skills.

        which is pretty much a WiiSports Box {...} Let's fire Balmer for releasing the most popular gaming machine amongst gamers and giving microsoft a reputation for releasing cutting edge home entertainment gear?

        Well, you can argue that the Wii is targeting a different market than the hardcore gamer oriented PS3 and Xbox360, thus they are not comparable.
        Except that, currently, Wii is selling more units nonetheless, and making more profit. For a "make profit at all cost" company like Microsoft, it's still defined as a fa

  • I own a Samsung Sch-i760 that comes preloaded with Windows mobile 6, the interface is a little too business like for me, but after some help from http://www.pdaphonehome.com/ [pdaphonehome.com] i quickly modified the interface. Windows also released the 6.1 update which added a task manager , and threaded text messages. I must say that Windows Mobile is very stable and very enjoyable.
    • The task manager existed in 6, too. It was just less obvious, and slightly less informative (they added per-application CPU utilization to it now) I've always been able to bring up task manager on my phone, via holding down the home key, even prior to 6.1
  • Typical Slashdot (Score:4, Insightful)

    by DavidD_CA ( 750156 ) on Saturday September 27, 2008 @06:49PM (#25180301) Homepage

    Let's not mention this:

    Microsoft will push for a minor update its 6.1 version as early as this year still, calling it 6.2 -- which will have some bells and whistles like an improved browser that can display Flash and Ajax applications.

    Let's also not forget that for a significant number of business users, WM 6 is quite sufficient and still beats the iPhone, Android, and Blackberry hands-down in a corporate environment.

    For proof, take a look at the latest WM6 phones from HTC and Samsung, such as the Touch Pro about to come out in a few weeks.

    All of these competing phone OSes are making improvements (such as the iPhone 2's ability to activesync), but by the time they catch up with WM6 in the business world it will be 2010, when Microsoft has released WM7.

    • by Anonymous Coward

      According to Yankee Group analyst Carl Howe, Microsoft is delaying Windows Mobile 7 to include features found in Android and the iPhone!
      More here on the analyst views:
      http://techpulse360.com/2008/09/23/microsoft-delays-windows-mobile-7-to-add-iphoneandroid-like-features-yankee-group-analyst-suggests-sees-palm-struggling-with-upcoming-platform/

      • by Ilgaz ( 86384 )

        What a big mistake... iPhone is a unique concept and while it made me stick to Symbian next 5 years, it is not about pretty graphics or animations, not even the multi touch... It is squeezing UNIX mentality and NeXT tradition to a tiny device.
        It can't be cloned especially by MS. The iPhone and Apple is exact opposite of MS. I am not saying one side is good or bad.
        It is a waste of time. Both MS and Symbian should stick to own model of doing things and enhance them.

    • Re: (Score:1, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Let's also not forget that for a significant number of business users, WM 6 is quite sufficient and still beats the iPhone, Android, and Blackberry hands-down in a corporate environment.

      roflnoob?

      u have to be joking..i have an HTC artemis (wm6 pro) and the only reason i havent dumped it for something else is because it comes with tom tom navigator and a built in gps which works amazing. everything else is pure crap. let me enumerate the ways:

      • i have to go to task manager to end processes (lest they just endle
      • by Tarwn ( 458323 )

        Is it me or did you just complain about a bunch of things that windows CE does poorly but that the competition doesn't do at all (mixed with a few things that the competition does better)?

        Ive worked with Windows CE for a while, as well as a number of other mobile OSs. I agree with most of your list and Windows CE likely annoys me to a much greater level than you as a user. Some of the problems you listed are definitely CE issues, but some are not.
        When a vendor decides to put CE on a device they compile a sp

    • Let's also not forget that for a significant number of business users, WM 6 is quite sufficient and still beats the iPhone, Android, and Blackberry hands-down in a corporate environment.

      roflnoob? u have to be joking..i have an HTC artemis (wm6 pro) and the only reason i havent dumped it for something else is because it comes with tom tom navigator and a built in gps which works amazing. everything else is pure crap. let me enumerate the ways:

      • i have to go to task manager to end processes (lest they just
      • by sr180 ( 700526 )

        I have a HTC3600. And originally I would have agreed with every single point you have made. However, a bit of time perusing xda.developers.com and I've installed a 'cooked' rom onto my phone, and after trialing a few different versions Ive found one which solves almost all of the problems youve mentioned and a few more.

        The 'cooked' roms are simiple repackaged firmware with programs and utilities from various places and even the later model phones. I was originally going to upgrade, but with the Firmware I h

      • I'm glad you re-replied using your real account so that you can get my reply. I don't think I would have bothered with the AC login. Here's a few things that you might find helpful or informative:

        i have to go to task manager to end processes (lest they just endless take up memory and never auto close)

        That depends on the app. Apps can have an Exit/Quit button, and they can make the X close the app. Blame the programmer. For what its worth, some OEMs ship with a free Task Manager link on the very top-cor

  • by Anonymous Coward

    I have used several versions of Windows for PDAs and phones. Every single implementation was bloated, slow and unreliable. Reboots were needed daily and battery life was always crap.

    I am now a blackberry user. There are few things I miss like on-board development but at least it's damned reliable. I can actually use my BB as an alarm clock and don't have to worry about a missed wakeup because of a crased OS. I will never purchase a windows based device every again.

    BTW, palm wasn't good as an alarm clock eit

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      BTW, palm wasn't good as an alarm clock either.

      This is anecdotal, of course, but my Treo has reliably been my alarm clock for nearly two years.

    • by ricegf ( 1059658 )
      It may not have worked for you, but I went through three Treos (100, 300, and 650), and every one of them served as my daily alarm clock with no surprises. Played a mean game of Hexwar, too (have to rely on the Garnet emulator on my N800 for my Hexwar fix nowadays). :-)
  • sorry but in my opinion, MS will have to pull a great phone out of their Tech labs if they want to have a competitive phone in 2010... The mobile market is way more competitive than the PC OS market is, and whats nice now, could be worth nothing on the phone market in 12 months
  • by PPH ( 736903 ) on Sunday September 28, 2008 @12:57AM (#25182303)
    Mr. Clippy: You appear to have thrown your telephone with considerable force. I am unclear as to your intentions. Could you please provide me with some addition..[Splat!]
  • Surely the real name is [i]Vista[/i] Mobile!

  • Visa wants to become a part of your mobile phone, working with Nokia Corp. on realizing mobile payments and also announcing services for Google Inc.'s Android platform. The idea of using the mobile phone as a payment device has been around for a long time, but has not yet encountered widespread success. With more than 3 billion mobile devices already in the market today, though, Visa sees a big opportunity to extend its reach, according to Elizabeth Buse, global head of product at Visa. For future owners
  • I like Windows Mobile. It's open and it's easily the most 'powerful' OS you can get on your phone.
    My main issue with it, is whilst under the hood it's wonderfully complete (all manner of fancy stuff you can fiddle with and ability to shove on any app that's popped into anybody's mind) - the actual GUI layer ontop of it all is utterly shite.
    HTC have made a decent stab at pasting over the most obvious cracks in the 'experience', but it's still just a skin and eventually you get dumped into the vile default

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