Well, I’ve had a few days with Windows Mobile 5. In some ways, great. In other ways, it doesn’t seem to have come as far as it should.
Let’s start with the old complaints – who came up with the idea of the ‘close’ button hiding an application? Yes, you can fix it with task managers like Magic Button, but why should you have to? It wouldn’t be nearly so much of a problem if the ability to close programs wasn’t hidden away in the control panel.
This pales in comparison to the problem with locking and alarms mind. Should you set the device to lock after an hour you can give up on your expectations of an alarm in the morning. I had a mixture of results – sometimes the alarm sound would start, otherwise not a peep. You had to clear the device lock to view the alarm. Rather unfortunate for a PDA, especially when I need to get to work on time.
WiFi… it’s a mess. Set-up isn’t too obvious and it often gives superfluous message – if you move out of coverage while it’s connecting it often complains about an inability to get an IP address via DHCP. Mind, it’s better than the oft-seen problems with zero-configuration on WinXP SP2.
Programs/Start Menu – again, a mess. No great organisation options, no easy way to link other programs (e.g. unzipped files) into it (you need to bugger about creating links in File Explorer). Hence you end up messing around in the filing-system more than you should have to. Oh, and you can’t move some applications from the root as ‘it may break some applications’. Sigh.
Device backup… nope. ActiveSync only supports backup for WM2003 devices, which seems an oddity. So only what’s synced is backed up – contacts, tasks, calendar. Which seems silly for a mobile device.
Oh, and some junk mail support for Pocket Outlook would be nice.
On the upside, a real file-system on the device is great. It’s a shame they didn’t simplify it a little more though.
It’s definitely a bit more solid than Palm OS 5.2. MIDP support is great. There’s still too few applications which code with WM5 nicely, but those will come.
My general feeling so far is that for most users there’s no great reason to choose WM5 over Palm OS or vice versa. It’s really picking the right device, and I’m still really chuffed with the Wizard, and I suspect I’d be just as chuffed if it ran Palm OS or Symbian. After all, how many people buy a phone for the OS?
