[General Topics] vijay555:
I entirely agree.

My wife has a Gen 1 iphone, and I recently updated it to version 3 and unlocked and jailbreaked.

In the old days, WM had thousands of apps as one of its killer features.

I recently spent a few evenings installing apps on the wife's phone, and I was blown away. Not necessarily by the quality, but by the experience.

Everything is smooth, everything works, the user experience is "unchallenging".

I love tweaking, I love coding, I love spending MONTHS dissecting the WinMob OS to implement a tiny hack. But you know what? Why bother?!

I can't see myself giving up on WinMob - it's got momentum, and I can't be bothered to learn Objective C. I'm barely coping with C++ as it is.

But, to paraphrase Gauntlet, "WinMob [may be] about to die".

In defence of WinMob:

It's p*sses me off something crazy that when Gizmondo et all were reviewing the Palm Pre, multi tasking was one of the killer features. WinMob has had it FOREVER.

It's a good OS, it multitasks, it generally works, it can make calls and emails and whatnot.

But - the user experience is OLD.

And I think one of the most fundamental flaws is also one of the biggest strengths - WinMob runs on a hundred kinds of hardware. But the problem:

WinMob runs on a hundred kinds of hardware.

Some of those have graphic accelerators, some don't.

Some have dpads, some don't.

Some have 600mhz CPUs, some don't.

The iphone is a single homogeneous ecosystem.

Coders know they can anti-alias without trying to code to the lowest common denominator 200mhz phone with 16mb of ram. They know exactly what they're gonna get with an iphone. And that fact means they know the limitations, and how to pitch what they've got at the right performance considerations. They know what they're working on. The Human Interface spec is incredible, and incredibly helpful. Users expect an experience, naturally, because it feels natural. Apple encourages that, and coders have to honour it.

I think most of the iphone experience can and should be emulated on WinMob.

I'm not just talking about cloning Springboard and everything else. Yes, we can emulate this and that - our coders on XDA devs are incredible, and could do every bit of it.

But we need more: the experience of just being able to use the phone and expect it to work needs to be emulated.

I don't think the iphone is necessarily a better piece of hardware: I prefer my Touch HD. But clearly the user experience, the user interface paradigm, the reward of just being able to use the thing easily needs to be implemented - from the ground up.

I don't think this is going to happen on WinMob; I think the strength/limitations of a wide open platform means this probably can't happen. I think that like Win CE before it, WinMob will end up being relegated to a certain environment that has low expectations (eg Enterprise markets).

But if "Windows" devices are going to survive, I think the change has to happen at a much higher level. I can only hope that Pink or whatever is on the horizon for WinMob 7 is an integrated piece of hardware and user experience designed from the ground up to feel like it's the 21st century... using WinMob out of pity is going to get old, very very soon.

V