Smartphone Round Robin: Triumphant Return to Windows Mobile!

[Jerry Raia]

<div class='os_post_top_link'><a href='http://www.wmexperts.com/reviews/smackdowns/smartphone_round_robin_triumph.html' target='_blank'>http://www.wmexperts.com/reviews/smackdowns/smartphone_round_robin_triumph.html</a><br /><br /></div><p><em>&quot;<font face="Arial">And so The Smartphone Round Robin ends: I&rsquo;m back on a Windows Mobile device (a Motorola Q9h, if you&rsquo;re interested) and I&rsquo;m happy to be here. Ecstatic, even. There are lots of reasons I love Windows Mobile and why it&rsquo;s a great fit for me. One of those reasons is pictured above. You can choose pretty much any form-factor to fit your lifestyle and have a powerful Smartphone OS in it.&quot;</font></em></p><p><img alt="" border="1" src="http://images.thoughtsmedia.com/resizer/thumbs/size/500/spt/auto/1197343421.usr6.jpg" /></p><p>If I had kept every WM device I ever owned my picture would be much more cluttered. I can see why the Q9 h brought him back from where ever he went. It is a compelling device I think.</p>

[Stinger]

I moved away from Smartphones a while back and I'm still not ready to return. Windows Mobile Standard is still missing a lot of features that are priorities to me. My main uses for a smartphone (apart from making calls!) are web-browsing, taking photos and general multimedia stuff (music/video playback). Windows Mobile (Standard) sucks in all these areas, especially with just the standard apps installed.

Mobile e-mail is nice, but why is there no Smartphone to compete with the Nokia N95/iPhone?

Maybe everything will change with Windows Mobile 6.1...

[Jerry Raia]

I have to admit, the N95 is pretty slick.

[mpaquette]

I'm thinking of jumping ship to an iphone. It's pretty obvious that At&t has no intention of releasing the WinMo 6.0 update for my Blackjack. It's starting to look pretty beat up anyway. Plus, 5.0 to 6.0 doesn't appear to be that much of an upgrade anyway. I find myself using the Exchange push features less and less.

[superrrguy]

Overall WinMo is pretty powerful but a pain to use and using both a WinMo Pro and "Standard" can be quite frustrating!!!.

I hate that on Pro that when it's locked you can't see your today screen and that the 0 button is huge and the clear button is small. I have 6 numbers in my pin and not one is a 0!!! How can they still have the 0 so big after all this time. It's not a calculator! Give me a bigger clear button.

On "standard" you can see all your info, sometimes too much and it really doesn't tell you any way to contact the owner of the phone. No name or # like it does in Pro.

As you can see I'm a big fan.

Let me just say that WinMo 6 is a huge improvment over 5 and worth the upgrade but maybe that's just becasue WinMo 5 is so bad.

The main enhancement that has made my life so much easier is the filtering and hot keys. Filter songs, filter emails. It basically works like the contacts app always did. I could never find anything before without endless scrolling. If you would tap a key in IE Favorites it would jump down to that letter, in email, it would do nothing, in Media Player, it goes back to the top! WTF?
Now type a few letters and you see all matching items. Also, with hot keys in the email app you can hold a button to reply, foward, mark read. Nice. HTML emails are not all they could be. Scrolling was awefully implemented for HTML emails. I'm back to text emails but you can always click here, there and here to get the HTML version.

WinMo still needs a lot of work. The endless pile of SMS messages? I don't want to sit and delete them. Just flush it out after 30 days. Inbox/Sent box? When's 6.1 coming with threading and "delete conversation".

Overall, if you use the messaging app a lot (even for SMS), and even Media Player, it's a worthy upgrade.

I've been a "Standard" user since 2003 and now I'm back on a touch screen device and even though it takes 3 to 7 clicks extra for some things, it can do a lot of stuff.