I purchased an HTC TyTN II several months ago. I loved the idea of what this phone could do.
In the real world day to day use, with 80% being as a phone and most of the rest for quick web based financial updates, I found the phone interface intolerably slow.
As a result I went back to a Samsung Blackjack II. The Smartphone does a much quicker job as a phone, I can still browse the web, and the few times I use the GPS Live update works great. I was sad to see the Ty TN go but I just got tired of the waits and lockups.
To me it's the same "progression" as with the regular Window operating system--Vista for example. As devices get faster, Microsoft software gets slower. I've been a big fan of Winmo devices since the Casio E-100 and original iPAQ, and I agree that the overall speed has NOT improved. It seems many things with Microsoft software development has changed over the past 7-8 years and they just do enough to "get consumers by" nowadays. I've been pretty dissapointed with the direction many of Microsoft's software products have been going in terms of overall speed and "bloatedness". My T-Mobile Wing is just as fast as my Casio E-100 in 1995.
Best Windows Mobile phone I owned was the original MDA by T-Mobile. It worked great, although the physical form factor was terrible.
I have a T-Mobile Dash. It's a tad on the slow side. I've worked with other PPC/WinCE/WinMob devices at work...they're slow too. The kicker to me is that when I migrated to my Dash from my Tungsten C, it drove me nuts how slow the contacts application was. I had about 4k contacts in my address book. On my TC, I could access ANY of them in less than 2 seconds. On my Dash, it took 20 seconds just to OPEN the address book app.
Lame.
The acceptable work around is that you can just start typing names on the homescreen and it will start looking up pretty quickly. Not as fast as my TC, but still workable. Now that I think about it, my 66Mhz Palm Vx was faster than that. The Vx couldn't do a fraction of the multimedia/phone functions, but for the functions that it did support...it was faster.
What drives me nuts is how often I have to reset my WinMo device. Several times a day mainly because of how the OS mismanages memory/memory leaks.
Is this underpowered? Absolutely. Especially since it seems that the WinMo OS has so much overhead.
I agree with you and posted a similar rant last July: http://www.pocketpcmag.com/blogs/ind...&pb=1#more2122 If my old iPAQ h1945 were still alive I'm sure it would still be able to hold its own against newer models...
I would like to point out that the HP iPaq 110 is a fine PDA with a 624 MHz processor. IMO, it's the best QVGA unit ever built. Of course, it is saddled with WM6; and that's a shame.
When I had to replace my PDA, I tried to consider alternatives. But if you aren't an Apple lover, what's out there? Not much. Disclaimer: I don't want my phone and my PDA combined into one unit. And I do have quite a bit of software that makes it harder to convert to Palm. Still, I maintain that WM units are the best there is.
What's on your list of the worst things about WM6? My top two:
1. It takes forever to soft reset, and there's not even any user feedback. The first time I did it, I thought the unit hang. WHAT WERE THEY THINKING?
2. Active Synch (plus whatever they call the Vista version). It hangs. It disconnects. I refuses to connect. It simply does not work very well. I have three XP machines and a Vista machine. It's the same on all. And it was no better with my WM5 unit, before it died. A high school programmer could do better than this.
I own a Loox N560, HTC Mogul, and iPod Touch. I have to agree with all the previous posts that Apple got the interface for a mobile touch sensitive screen device right the 1st time. The Touch also flies through various tasks (like a rocket even with all of Apple's fancy animations active). However, one should keep in mind that Apple maintains tight control over what gets on the iPhone/iPod Touch. A WM6 PDA/Phone out the box without customization is pretty snappy. Once we load on all the bloatware to customize WM6 to our liking, the resource drains slows down the OS. I wonder how many lockups and memory leaks are due to buggy 3rd party software and not the OS. I will agree though that if Apple can create such a robust, fast, and efficient interface out the box on the 1st try, WM days may be numbered. MS just keeps churning out the same tired interface that is not optimized for such a small PDA screen with each new version of WM. If Apple had MS Office support and synced fully with MS Outlook, I would be ditching WM in a heartbeat especially given upcoming 3rd party software which should fill any niches Apple misses.
i am also thinking of abandoning the htc and wm ship. apple got it wright at first try. imagine what iphone 2 will be like
You can find this info in the article here: http://money.cnn.com/2008/03/28/maga...Phone.fortune/
And Release date sometimes in June is not that far away. If you own iPhone already you can download 2.0 Beta from Apple website, so you won't have to use your imagination anymore, just facts
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I don't think anyone has mentioned this yet, but keep in mind that the whole WM performance problem started when they switched to a persistent memory-model a few years ago with WM5. (NVRAM) Couple that with the fact that clock speeds haven't gone up, and you have a double-whammy effect.
I still occasionally use my Dell Axim X30 high with the 624 mHz proc. Man it flies! But it's not just the fast cpu, it's also the old volatile ram configuration.
It's true that processor speeds haven't improved dramatically in the past few years, but you can also blame battery technology. The majority of new phones/PDAs have some variant of the TI OMAP CPU usually running at around 200Mhz. This is plenty fast if you write good code. The only thing stopping the manufacturers from using the 624Mhz (or faster) chips is the battery life and cost. A better CPU could be designed with more cache memory and better power usage, but then that would cost more. The right solution is to use what we've got to the fullest by writing efficient software.
Apple has done a good job with the iPhone; it's just another ARM-based device running at about 400Mhz. 400Mhz is plenty for what it has to do because Apple cares enough to optimize their software.
If you want to see what's possible on a lowly 200Mhz ARM CPU, try some of my software.
Yes, Windows Mobile Phones Underpowered....
Grossly underpowered in a bloated world
It's not all true
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