Well, I'm still not chuffed with Windows Mobile 5 and thought while I drink my tea I might try to articulate why.

Firstly, I'm looking at it on its own merits. No doubt comparisons to the Palm will pop up but this is not a glowing endorsement of Palm OS - it's well past its use by date, unstable and lacks basic features like a file-system and multi-tasking. But it does do some things very well.

Backup - you can't back up a Windows Mobile 5 device without third party software. ActiveSync doesn't support it for WM5 and there's no concept of a device sync with AS - you sync applications, not the device. Now this is something the Palm does well. The entire device syncs, so when you need to upgrade your firmware or drop it on the Tube you just plug the empty device in and hit sync - and that's it. Back to normal (usually, anyway). However, to upgrade your firmware on Windows Mobile you need to reinstall. Why? Because a complete backup restore buggers up the system if you try after the device has been upgraded. At least I presume that was the cause of my un-dismissable alarm - it certainly never came back after I surrendered and did a clean build.

Speed - where the hell is it? Starting tasks on my HTC Wizard (200Mhz TI OMAP) - 12 seconds. With 2 active tasks and only a couple of hundred completed tasks. Same task on my old 144Mhz Tungsten T - under a second. We're not talking about launching something complex here... hell, I used to run Windows 95 on a 33Mhz 486 and it went faster with only 16Mb to play with

Stability - atrocious. Like using a Palm again. I was stunned when, without warning, it rebooted while sitting unused on my desk last week. Yes, just what you want in a phone. If only that had been the only time...

And on stability, the bloody alarm problem. Windows 2003 was famous for not playing your alarms. How did this bug manage to creep into Windows Mobile 5? It appears to be gone now that the first T-Mobile patch has appeared but it doesn't inspire confidence - I'll certainly be keeping an alarm set on Polly's Palm OS device as well for the foreseeable future.

File-system - great, overly complex. Managing files is like using Windows again - start menu, programs, quick launch bar. Why does it have to be this hard? The Palm and the Mac both reduce it to one level - why can't Microsoft? And on the same theme, why do I need a Windows PC to use the thing? MS have made a big thing out of how it's not a 'connected PDA' but a mini-computer - so why do I need a Windows box to install the .NET Compact Framework 2.0?

Multi-tasking - great. Rubbish implementation. Why does everything need to keep running? Why can't Tasks save its state and kill itself when you run low on memory? (Oh yes, because it takes 12 seconds to start). I don't need the majority of applications running all the time. So why doesn't the OS persist their state and kill them when needed, rather than just letting the device get slower? Yes, plenty of third party solutions (I'm using Magic Button) but this isn't a new problem. Hell, it's been around and bitched about since version 1.0...

In short, it lacks a hell of a lot of polish for a 5 year old OS. It's shocking that Palm OS Garnet (5.x) can still hold its own against it for the most part, despite being well into Death's hallway and admiring the hat-stand. Maybe I'll have to get a Symbian device next time - I'm certainly not sold on another WM toy.