[Touch Pro, Fuze ROM Development] aceofspades1217:
How has your experience been with windows mobile 6.5?

I used shepards ROM at first and it would crash sometimes when I opened the text message application and would require a soft reset. Now I have been using RRE and it has tended to be much more stable. Though it still locks up sometimes when I open the text messaging program and sometimes pressing the home button or opening comm manager through the PTT button gets it out of it...its just weird. Anyone else getting a lot of lockups with winmo and if not what rom are you using.

/rant

But on a more general note. I have mixed feelings about WM 6.5. I think WM 6.5 is definitely an improvement but it doesn't really go far enough. I mean I like all the features that were added and I do like the home screen better than touchflo and the start menu is pretty nice...but really did microsoft put enough effort into it.

Titanium is definitely a little thin and the start menu really isn't a big change. The start menu really is just a zoomed in version of the old start menu. But I will give a point to the honeycomb. It does kind of help you use your fingers because of the spacing and I've never really hit a wrong icon. The scrolling works pretty well so no complaints there.

I also do like what they did with the text messaging app. But really all they did was a few simple tweaks. It just doesn't show message sent...which is simply awesome because I used to hate that. It also marks all the messages as read when you open someone, which it didn't always do in WM 6.1.

PIE (pocket ie) is definitely getting better..although its still on the bottom of my list on the browser scale.

Overall I just feel like microsoft needs to do more to compete. I mean the iPhone is taking over the winmo market hand over fist and blackberry is also hitting them hard. They can't just get away with small UI tweaks in order to 1UP the competition. They didn't change anything from the OS at all. Its still the same windows CE that everyone hates and is as unreliable as ever.

I mean seriously microsoft...try a little harder. Microsoft has more resources than any company, certainly more resources than Apple and RIM. Apple has been putting out some crazy innovative changes and has done some about faces with their OS.

I mean as much as I don't like apple and as much as I am just not a fan of Mac or the whole sandbox "you don't have to worry about anything" mentality of apple products, apple does know how to innovate. I mean look at all the crazy changes they made. When the iPhone came out they didn't have any apps and apple was vehemently against customizing the iPhone because it would break the "it just works" mantra and make it more winmo like. They took a semi-passive stance towards jailbreaking and denounced it but didn't bother with it too much. Than they out of the blue released an official SDK and the app store, although the app store is super limited and jailbreaking is still popular thats still quite an about face.

Now they are coming out with MMS, a NSFW category, copy paste etc.

All I'm saying is microsoft shouldn't be so afraid to start from scratch. Give us something crazy that is just baffling. Put some creativity into it and just go all out. I mean look at windows 7, although my feeling are mixed on that too at least they were creative. They grouped tabs, added an XP mode, jump lists, etc. Although I'm not saying windows 7 is better than mac or anything, the stuff they put in it wasn't just stuff other OSes were already doing like in vista.

I mean why can't microsoft just toss the old winmo in the trash and get out their whiteboard and think of new stuff. You know...not make winmo so terrible. It really is clunky, slow, and rather outdated.

I just hope windows mobile 7 is going to be as game changing as microsoft claims it will be although I have huge doubts (as does every tech news site). Just prove us wrong and be different and radical...and stop ripping off other people's ideas.

/endrant