[Jason Lee]

You do need to keep in mind that the xbox and the zune are appliances. They are a one trick pony. Their UI was designed for one thing and one thing alone. My pocket pc is just that. A computer in my pocket. Honestly i think it does a very good job of that. If i wanted a one trick phone i would buy an iphone or a nokia.
I want a computer in my pocket not a little device with a nice flashy UI that does only what it was designed to do.

That being said... There is definitely a lot of room for improvement in the WM OS. Especially when it comes to the smoothness and general speed of the UI. Just take a bunch of 3 megapixel pictures and try to scroll through them using the default Pictures and Video program. It chokes hard core... Things like that are what bother my most about WM.

[Jason Lee]

You do need to keep in mind that the xbox and the zune are appliances. They are a one trick pony. Their UI was designed for one thing and one thing alone. My pocket pc is just that. A computer in my pocket. Honestly i think it does a very good job of that. If i wanted a one trick phone i would buy an iphone or a nokia.
I want a computer in my pocket not a little device with a nice flashy UI that does only what it was designed to do.

That being said... There is definitely a lot of room for improvement in the WM OS. Especially when it comes to the smoothness and general speed of the UI. Just take a bunch of 3 megapixel pictures and try to scroll through them using the default Pictures and Video program. It chokes hard core... Things like that are what bother my most about WM.

[Jason Dunn]

Originally Posted by Jason Lee

If i wanted a one trick phone i would buy an iphone or a nokia. I want a computer in my pocket not a little device with a nice flashy UI that does only what it was designed to do.

I guess we'll have to see what happens when developers start releasing applications for the iPhone, but even only looking at the core applications, the iPhone manages to balance functionality and slick looks pretty well. There are definitely things that Microsoft can learn from the iPhone...

Originally Posted by Jason Lee

...Especially when it comes to the smoothness and general speed of the UI. Just take a bunch of 3 megapixel pictures and try to scroll through them using the default Pictures and Video program. It chokes hard core... Things like that are what bother my most about WM.

...just like that! That's my #1 complaint about Windows Mobile devices today - they're sluggish, slow, prone to becoming unresponsive, and generally feel like a Windows XP computer running on 256 MB of RAM.

[Sniff]

My feelings were mixed about Windows Mobile before reading your post.

On the one hand, I feel that they could have done so much more and dominated the mobile industry with this jack-of-all-trades if they gave it enough attention. It could have been the device for everybody, playing music, games, email, calendar, web browsing, Powerpoint presenter, calculator, etc, etc...

But on the other hand, it's SO "slow," after a couple days of use and opening and closing various apps. It needs a soft reset/reboot after about five days. After six months, it needs a hard reset...

I can't exactly say I never fathom the thought of getting rid of it entirely, but I was a big fan of it and kept that thought to a very very quiet squeak. But since the news of the Jesus Phone, the voice has been getting louder and louder; "this fr**king thing is so fr**king slow and unintuitive(in it's factory form)!"

And now after reading your post, I agree and acknowledge that maybe getting rid of it and building something new from the ground up might be the solution to my love-hate relationship with Windows Mobile...

[Damion Chaplin]

I had high hopes that MS would pull WM out of the gutter and make it a real OS that could compete with anything anyone threw at it. All you need to look at is the iPhone to see how abysmally short they've fallen from that mark.

I had to get rid of my ol' imate K-JAM because as a phone it just stank. It was a great pocket PC, but it seemed like it whenever I wanted (read: needed urgently) to make a phone call, it would bork out on me and I would have to reset it. All because I wanted to call a cab. That's why I finally settled on the smartphone (WM Standard): It was a phone first and a PDA second. Turns out I needed the phone functionality more than anything else I got from the PPC. So now here I am with my trusty (and awesome) Pantech Duo, drooling over the HTC Touch Pro. Do I dare go back to a PPC? Is WM6.1 really that much better than WM5 that I won't experience the same shortcomings? Well, I'll probably go back eventually, but right now I'm just a little gunshy from my prior experience.

So yeah, I'd say MS needs to start over. Stinger's right: Their original idea of trying to make it look and feel like Windows was a good idea, but it's time to ditch it. The iPhone may be based on OSX, but it looks and feels nothing like it. If Microsoft doesn't go back to the drawing board and give us a new and innovative operating system, they're going to find themselves playing "catch-up to the iPhone" until Ragnarok.

[kdarling]

Keep in mind that Windows CE 6 totally revamped the OS memory map, and got rid of many problems. It also has IE 6.0 on it.

Unfortunately, WM 6 was still baed on CE 5. The roadmap presented a couple of years ago was that WM 7, a major rework of WM, was to finally be based on CE 6.

When that happens, it should be a much better experience, especially with all the RAM now becoming standard.