Published: 01/11/2009 | Last Revision: 06/07/2010

Windows Mobile 6.5, running here on the HTC Touch2, and the Apple iPhone 3G.

I supposed I had better admit right up front that I am a huge fan of the Apple iPod touch and the iPhone 3G. Both are simply brilliant pieces of hardware, with an operating system that delivers a rich experience wrapped around a very simple user interface. I think the AppStore is a work of genius. I regularly dabble with applets on a whim, and with the price of many being less than a pint of beer, it is tempting to just press the Buy button. I have a wide range of tools available to me – from a superb application which can use the camera to read barcodes and tell me where it’s cheapest to purchase, through to a full blown TomTom route mapping tool which covers all of Europe. Of course, I don’t use all the tools all the time, but by allowing me to make my very own ‘Swiss Army Knife’ digital companion, it is wholly and entirely tuned to the way I want to work, using my choice of tools. Of course, other people have a completely different setup, and that is just how it should be – a personalised digital device tailored to my precise needs. I was therefore intrigued to read about the recent release of Windows Mobile 6.5, the latest in the long line of Windows-based phone platforms. I was trying to evaluate a Windows Mobile application, so the sensible thing to do was to buy a new phone. I went for the HTC Touch2, a rather smart device with a touch screen. At this point I would like to say that I dived into the user interface and found a treasure trove of wonderful things to play with. Unfortunately this was not to be the case. It is hard to know how to say this in a delicate way, but Windows Mobile 6.5 is a howling dog. It is truly terrible. In fact, I think I would have to say it is the worst piece of software to have inflicted itself upon me in the last twenty years. Yes, it is even worse than Windows ME. First impressions don’t help. There is a slide-to-unlock tool which lets you into the main screen – I can’t imagine where they got that idea from. In the main application picker, you have a scrollable list of icons: sounds familiar? However, the touch control is weak, and most scrolls end up being interpreted as a touch followed by a drag, which means the app opens in front of you. You might think that the user experience was OK from here on, but you would be wrong. You cannot move the icons around on this front-end menu. You can delete them or send them to the top of the list, but it is impossible to arrange them into the arbitrary order that you actually want. It gets worse. Once you fire up an application, you need to get into the internal configuration pages to do the final setup. Here you find that you have moved away from the nicely crafted grey 3D style user interface straight back into something from the early part of the decade.

Even I am not going to complain about whether a control is grey-scale or black and white. No, the problem is that the older controls, including the much-used OK button, are from a user interface that demands the use of a toothpick, or thin plastic pen to operate. Fortunately, such a device can be found on the rear of the Touch 2. However, it cannot get around the problem that the main front end of the system is designed for touch operation. This disconnect is not only visually weak but also a usability disaster. The harsh reality is that this is a hefty wodge of lipstick smeared onto a pig. No, even that’s not quite right – it doesn’t have that level of finesse and fundamental design purity. The bottom line is that this is a truly horrible platform to use. But that isn’t the end of the matter. Microsoft has already announced Windows Mobile 7 which will be coming along some time during the latter half of 2010. Will there be an upgrade route for my shiny new £300 phone to version 7? Apparently not, that would be asking too much – the hardware specifications of the two platforms are too dissimilar to allow such a route forwards. So in buying this phone, I have found myself at the rump end of a cul-de-sac, with no real way out. I cannot even look forward to ‘jam tomorrow’, and there surely is no ‘jam today’. And what of the developer story? What is going to tempt me, or anyone else, to write a line of business application for this device in the full knowledge that the version 7 platform will offer more capabilities and better APIs, and that it is just around the corner? No, I will do the logical thing – and develop for the iPhone platform in the sure knowledge that it will work today and have a future track ahead of it. And be supported by an online store solution which demonstrably works. I hardly need remind you of the video of Steve Ballmer leaping around the stage shouting “developers, developers, developers!” Clearly mobile had no place within his mindset, because this effort, and indeed the entire strategy, is the very definition of the term ‘pathetic’. With the arrival of Google’s Android platform alongside the iPhone, Microsoft’s offering desperately needs to be cutting edge, to have every possible piece of design, coding and implementation goodness that can be dreamt up. As it stands, it comes in a weak third place. In fact, having used this device for a week, I would say it comes in a poor fourth, with third going to a bog-standard Nokia GSM phone from five years ago. In a marketplace where smart-phones are rapidly growing in importance, this is not merely a poor showing by Microsoft: it is commercial suicide. Want a giggle? Go to www.microsoft.com/developer and see what you get. Yup, a whole lot of nothing. Try /developers and you get a Bing page listing Microsoft development items, but the top of the page says ‘We are sorry, the page you requested cannot be found.’ Kind of sums up the situation, don’t you think?