First Impression: Windows Mobile 6 Pro
Regular Windows Mobile 5 users who pick up a Windows Mobile 6 device probably won’t notice much difference, apart from the Today screen with its mock translucent effects, spruced-up icons and larger fonts. Everything else looks pretty similar - WM6 has been designed to improve on its predecessor.
Just for fun let us reminisce and find out what codenames were given to the previous versions of mobile Windows platform:
- Windows Mobile 6.0 – Crossbow - April 2007
- Windows Mobile 5.0 – Magneto – May 10, 2005;
- Windows Mobile 2003 Second Edition – Ozone Update –March 24, 2005;
- Windows Mobile 2003 – Ozone – June 23, 2003;
- Pocket PC 2002 – Merlin – October 4, 2001;
- Pocket PC 2000 (Palm-size PC v2) – Rapier – April 19 2000;
- Palm PC v1.0/1.2 – Gryphon/Wyvern – January 8, 1998 (3 moths later Palm PC was renamed to Palm-size PC).
After upgrading my HTC Artemis, WM6 is significantly faster than WM5, especially when you have lots of applications running. The release build also seems stable, with far fewer resets required than with WM5 devices.
A welcome addition in WM6 is the ability to view HTML emails, including any embedded graphics - fast becoming the format of choice within many businesses. Other mobile platforms will only show a simplified text representation, often with links stripped out. There are several other enhancements to WM6 email, but many will work only if you’re running Exchange Server 2007 - tasks such as setting an Out of Office message, searching your complete mailbox and intelligent attachment handling. While on the subject of email, WM6 Standard users in particular will appreciate a new set of keyboard shortcuts available using the numeric keypad, making common tasks much quicker.
There’s a new search facility that works across several applications. Just type a word while you’re looking at your inbox, for example, and it will quickly find the messages that match.
Another area where the improved speed is really noticeable is the web browser - it’s much faster than WM5 when rendering pages containing large tables or using complex CSS-based layouts. But my preferred mobile web browser remains to be Opera 8.65, as of now, and am eagerly looking forward for Opera Mobile 9 release as well as mobile version of Firefox.
Windows Live is now fully integrated, including Messenger, Mail and Search. Messenger is becoming an increasingly important business tool, and with WM6 it integrates with your contacts list, allowing you to instantly see who’s online - not bad. I really like the voice clip in Messenger, and really dislike the results that Live search presents - Google or Yahoo is much better.
Lastly, there’s now a mobile version of Windows Update incorporated into WM6, but Microsoft has said it’s only intended to be used rarely, and purely for critical updates - hope they will not keep up with XP and Vista cycles of patches.
While at first glance Windows Mobile 6 might look much the same, there are plenty of important changes below the surface - some things that improve the user experience and others that are important from a corporate operation and security point of view. But by far the most noticeable change with WM6 is the improved stability and speed of operation - it’s been a long time coming, but is one of the most welcome enhancements, as are the visuals.
Here is a comprehensive review of WM6 - by mobile-review.com.
My Artemis: Spb Mobile Shell Now Screen and Today Screen listing few applications that I use frequently.
June 14th, 2007 at 2:53 pm
[...] surprise, which leads me to believe that the power management has been improved considerably on Windows Mobile 6.0 Pro. Which is definitely a good [...]