[Gerard]

I've been using WM6.5 for many months, a number of small variants thanks to dsixda of xdadevelopers fame. And I have tried using other Today screens, but always come back to Titanium (as trimmed down a bit thanks to another xdadev offering; CHome Editor). Not entirely 'happy' with it exactly. More a matter of thumbable convenience over depth of functionality. On my current phone, an HTC Elfin, the screen is only 2.5". That is small. Cramming a bunch of small text onto the Today screen doesn't really work for me on such a small scale. The Calendar panel for instance shows only the next two appointments, one by default, the other accessed with a thumb swipe sideways. For the Weather panel I get a few days of basic predictions by default, then sideways swipes get me a more detailed breakdown of each day. The clock is just the clock, but at least it shows a large enough time that it's readable at a glance. I use a Fave People plugin with a few contacts entered for quick dialing from Today, again easy to flip through with a thumb. Voicemail and Gmail are accessed via their little panels.

And that's all I use. That short list, as edited by CHome Editor, means all my Today panels are shown at the same time, always, no scrolling to see any more. Of course some users prefer to scroll a lot, but my experience has been that if it's not displayed when I turn on the phone, I'm not going to waste time scrolling to find it, but rather take the step of launching an application via start menu. Which... well, it took some work to get that organized in a usable way. Subfolders are a big help, with just a half-dozen most used application shortcuts up along the top. The options of Move To Top and Move Down options in this menu are very limiting, but with some planning can be worked with successfully. I just envisioned what order was preferred for me, in terms of frequently needed access, then started moving the LEAST used items to the top first. Carrying on to end up moving the MOST used items to the top last resulted in a correct ordering of shortcuts and folders. There, a nicely ordered shortcut heirarchy! Took some work, but once it's done there is nothing more to think about. When installing a new program, just move the shortcut out of the \Windows\Start Menu\Programs folder and into a sub-folder. There is no possibility for ordering in the sub-folders (as Move To Top results in the shortcut 'virtually' moving outside the sub-folder into the root Start Menu folder), so one must accept the rather arbitrary ordering there. Not nice, but with some diligent planning in the categorized sub-folder names it's usually not difficult to find a wanted application.

If this were a bigger phone I may well go back to a more old school Today display. Not sure until I get a bigger phone. Maybe I'm too addicted to the speed of thumbable use to go back to hunting around with a stylus. I would like more user-defined options, such as enabling a half-dozen or more appointments displayed in Calendar's representation in Titanium. But that will probably come, as more users get WM6.5 in their hands and complain in forums and get Microsoft waked up enough on the issue to actually do something about it. Maybe with WM7 we'll see a built-in Titanium editor, something a bit more intuitive (and safe) to operate than CHome Editor, which is frankly daunting to use in any depth.

As for other elements of WM6.5, my opinion after 6+ months of use is that it is a modest improvement over 6.1. Stability is enhanced a little maybe. I like the system-wide scrolling for the most part, though it'd be nice to be able to toggle it somehow, for example when wishing to multi-select rather than to scroll. But there are workarounds for such quibbles, not a huge deal. My biggest complaint is with Pocket IE. Microsoft has changed PIE quite radically, making it so close to unusable that I just don't bother. And that's a shame, as there is a lot worthwhile about PIE in my opinion. But the view options have been reduced to an absurd degree, such that most websites are loaded zoomed out so that text measures just a few pixels in height, not readable at all, and a several-step zoom sequence must be tapped/dragged through just to be able to read a page. It's jumpy as heck, often showing strange blank places on a page once zoomed correctly so it's anyone's guess where on the page is being displayed. A lot of thumb-scrolling is needed to find anything. In the same amount of time it takes for a typical page to load I can load several tabs in NetFront, so that's been my default browser for some time. It seems odd that with Microsoft's prior disposition towards making the browser a central element of these devices, it has now been subverted to the point where Opera is being put in by the OEMs, just to keep customers happy. That was never before necessary.