[Pony99CA]

Originally Posted by Cattle-Dog

I respectfully disagree. I think a phone of the caliber of Windows mobile phone, should not have to dig through menu's to find needed applications or information.

You don't have to "dig" through menus to launch programs or find information in Windows Mobile. On the touch version, you use one menu (two if you count the Programs folder as a menu).

Have you looked at a lot of feature phones? You select what category of stuff you want to use, then use a Menu key to get more specific! They are very menu-driven.

Originally Posted by Cattle-Dog

The start button is a great way to manage hundreds of applications and 100's of GB's of information and optimized for a mouse interface.

I disagree. I always thought the Start menu was kind of a kludge. I thought OS/2 was much better. The Start menu is actually quite horrible managing hundreds of applications. Have you seen menus with so many items that they take more than one column? Yuck. (I arrange my programs into logical categorized folders to keep the Start menu smaller.)

The Start menu also has nothing to do with managing "hundreds of GBs of information". Files are managed by Windows Explorer, and the only relation it has to the Start menu is that there's an icon to launch it there.

Finally, remember that the Start menu debuted in Windows 95. Did anybody even have hundreds of GBs then?

That said, given that's how Windows 95/98/2000/ME/XP worked, it makes sense for Windows Mobile to behave similarly.

Originally Posted by Cattle-Dog

I don't think it is the best way to organize a user interface for a small screen (even for the Touch HD relative to a desktop) device that (should) specializes in keeping you most import information and applications as easy to get to as possible.

The Start menu is meant to give you access to all of your information. The Today screen (or Home screen on the Smartphone) is meant to make accessing your important stuff easier.

Also, if you don't like the menu part of it, check out the Smartphone OS. The Start menu is just the left softkey on the Home screen, and just takes you to your list of programs (like tapping Start and Programs on the Pocket PC), with a couple of minor differences (you can have some favorite programs listed first, and Settings appears in the list).

Originally Posted by Cattle-Dog

In short, I don't think you have to sacrifice flexibility as a mobile computing system at all while modernizing and specializing the UI for a small phone based device. Short of the home screen, even 6.1 is essentially the same UI that was on my HP 300LX.

That's actually the beauty of it. It works (sort of) like your PC and provides a sense of consistency and familiarity (which are good things). For a good defense of the Start menu, see Why We Love the Windows Mobile Start Menu.

By the way, in case you don't know the history of Windows CE/Pocket PC OS/Windows Mobile, the original Windows CE Handheld PCs looked much more like your desktop PC (Start button in the lower left, task bar at the bottom, system tray in the lower right, menu bar at the top, desktop with icons, etc.). It was very nice and very familiar. (Microsoft even called these "PC Companions", because they were intended to sync with your PC, not generally be used as stand-alone devices.)

When Microsoft created the Palm-Size PC, they kept that similar interface and added the virtual keyboard. This and the switch from landscape to portrait displays made the task bar very crowded. I don't know of many people who liked that user interface.

So, when the Pocket PC UI was being designed, Microsoft did change things to make it work better on smaller screens. Didn't you ever wonder why the Start menu is now at the top left and much smaller, or why the menu bar got moved to the bottom?

Steve