WMPoweruser.com

rad Reply:
December 12th, 2009 at 10:35 pm

See regardless of hardware, though, WM 6.x has other major issues that reskinned UI controls will never fix.

Outlook Mobile is a very poor mobile email client– it's terribly slow (again, with full signal on T-Mobile in NYC, iPhone on EDGE is faster than TP2 on 3G) and has broken IMAP support (hardcoded folder share names, incompatible with most Linux IMAP servers). Office Mobile is also quite poor– Word can't display a properly-formatted document for its life, and PowerPoint (and to a lesser degree, Excel) have similar issues. For content viewing, the iPhone has a much better viewer for Word/Excel/PPT/PDF, and for content creation, there's QuickOffice Mobile for $9.99 (similar apps on WM like SoftOffice cost $80).

Desktop syncing with WMDC is nice when it works, but it's highly unreliable– often it'll be plugged in and charging but for whatever reason, WMDC won't see it or sees it but won't sync. When taking my phone out in the morning, I never know if it actually synced or not until I check and see if things are missing. Ironically, the iPhone syncs more reliably with Outlook via iTunes, though granted, it doesn't sync some obscure contact fields and has a limit to how much text it syncs from the "notes" fields of a contact or appointment.

The paucity of decent third-party apps is a problem on WM. If basic things like email, office docs, syncing, etc. worked well on WM, I might not mind this as much, but the fact that an iPhone can do all that and so much more (including lots of things that you can't do in a browser, like control your car via manufacturers' apps, manage a ZipCar, play decent 3D games in downtime (which pretty much don't exist on WM), and more) just adds insult to injury. Even basic things like Facebook are not usable on WM (the MS app is trash, and opening up the desktop site in Opera/SkyFire is slow and impractical).

But more than anything else, even on the HD2, WM 6.5 is a highly quirky/buggy OS. Things randomly happen that shouldn't– just like my TP2, for instance, sometimes, even in a full-reception area, it'll just randomly drop signal and report no service. Then when you discover it, you can try toggling the phone radio / airplane mode or resetting the phone to fix it, but in the meantime, you've missed all calls and texts. Lag is obviously a huge problem on WM phones– my TP2 has led to potentially highly dangerous situations, when the messaging app decided to lock up, and I couldn't send anything for nearly 5 minutes. Sure, that's fine for a $5 featurephone, but especially for something targeted at business users, you could be dealing with mission-critical communications, and WM doesn't cut it. Thankfully, the HD2 is much better in this regard, simply by throwing so much horsepower at the problem, but even it is not consistently lag-free. It's quite telling than a first-gen iPhone, on a 412 MHz ARM11, is more consistently fluid than the HD2, with 1 GHz Snapdragon.

For just another of so many different examples, the HTC SMS app occasionally doesn't work– haven't seen this on the HD2 yet, but on the T-Mo TP2, about 40-50% of the time, sending a text message from the HTC UI gives an error that the phone is not enabled, so you have to switch to the WM SMS UI to send the message, and of course the HTC UI doesn't support text selection (on the TP2 at least), so you need to remember and retype the message.

So these are the sorts of things that make me hesistant to pick up a US-model HD2 when it hits T-Mo in February. That would've made a lot of sense if WM7 (which will presumably address all these issues) were to arrive in a decent timeframe, so I could wait it out, but now it seems getting an HD2 would entail sticking with WM 6.5 for up to another year, which is torture I'm not putting myself through. Let's see how things pan out…

Baz Reply:
December 13th, 2009 at 12:27 pm

If I had such a hard time with WM as you seem to, I think I would have cut my losses and gone with apple by now, from your comment's, you seem to think much more highly of the iphone OS, is there a particular reason you seemingly persevere in torturing yourself with windows mobile?

Call me silly, but I don't really understand people using thing's they don't really like, it's personally quite a simple decision, what I like better….I use

rad Reply:
December 13th, 2009 at 1:08 pm

It's mostly because I need something that'll sync my PIM data with Outlook (without any online connectors in between), which means either WM or iPhone, and from there, only the TP2 has T-Mobile U.S. 3G support. I also do .NET development, so WM is nice in that I can relatively easily port over functionality from my apps for my own purposes (random robotics projects and such), and easy file system access is nice, though the platform's limitations mean these things are usually only of marginal utility.

After using WM since 2003, I got an iPhone, which I used (jailbroken, unlocked) on T-Mobile for about 1.5 years before getting the TP2 at launch. I was hoping WM had evolved enough since WM2003SE and WM5 to make it usable, alongside HTC's UI replacements, and that it'd be fine for a few months until WM7 launched. But of course, that's not happening for yet another year, so even if the HD2 launches here in February, it's sort of a toss-up, because it'll probably be running 6.5 for the better portion of a year after launch.

Returning to the iPhone would mean dropping to EDGE on T-Mo US, which might be worth it if the 4G model introduces something interesting enough (especially given that my most common task while not in WiFi range is email, which the iPhone is much faster at getting, and EDGE is fine for (except larger attachments)), but that won't be coming till June 2010, by which time we'll probably (hopefully!) have some more info on WM7, so let's see.

rad Reply:
December 13th, 2009 at 1:08 pm

It's mostly because I need something that'll sync my PIM data with Outlook (without any online connectors in between), which means either WM or iPhone, and from there, only the TP2 has T-Mobile U.S. 3G support. I also do .NET development, so WM is nice in that I can relatively easily port over functionality from my apps for my own purposes (random robotics projects and such), and easy file system access is nice, though the platform's limitations mean these things are usually only of marginal utility.

After using WM since 2003, I got an iPhone, which I used (jailbroken, unlocked) on T-Mobile for about 1.5 years before getting the TP2 at launch. I was hoping WM had evolved enough since WM2003SE and WM5 to make it usable, alongside HTC's UI replacements, and that it'd be fine for a few months until WM7 launched. But of course, that's not happening for yet another year, so even if the HD2 launches here in February, it's sort of a toss-up, because it'll probably be running 6.5 for the better portion of a year after launch.

Returning to the iPhone would mean dropping to EDGE on T-Mo US, which might be worth it if the 4G model introduces something interesting enough (especially given that my most common task while not in WiFi range is email, which the iPhone is much faster at getting, and EDGE is fine for (except larger attachments)), but that won't be coming till June 2010, by which time we'll probably (hopefully!) have some more info on WM7, so let's see.

Baz Reply:
December 13th, 2009 at 12:27 pm

If I had such a hard time with WM as you seem to, I think I would have cut my losses and gone with apple by now, from your comment's, you seem to think much more highly of the iphone OS, is there a particular reason you seemingly persevere in torturing yourself with windows mobile?

Call me silly, but I don't really understand people using thing's they don't really like, it's personally quite a simple decision, what I like better….I use

rad Reply:
December 12th, 2009 at 10:35 pm

See regardless of hardware, though, WM 6.x has other major issues that reskinned UI controls will never fix.

Outlook Mobile is a very poor mobile email client– it's terribly slow (again, with full signal on T-Mobile in NYC, iPhone on EDGE is faster than TP2 on 3G) and has broken IMAP support (hardcoded folder share names, incompatible with most Linux IMAP servers). Office Mobile is also quite poor– Word can't display a properly-formatted document for its life, and PowerPoint (and to a lesser degree, Excel) have similar issues. For content viewing, the iPhone has a much better viewer for Word/Excel/PPT/PDF, and for content creation, there's QuickOffice Mobile for $9.99 (similar apps on WM like SoftOffice cost $80).

Desktop syncing with WMDC is nice when it works, but it's highly unreliable– often it'll be plugged in and charging but for whatever reason, WMDC won't see it or sees it but won't sync. When taking my phone out in the morning, I never know if it actually synced or not until I check and see if things are missing. Ironically, the iPhone syncs more reliably with Outlook via iTunes, though granted, it doesn't sync some obscure contact fields and has a limit to how much text it syncs from the "notes" fields of a contact or appointment.

The paucity of decent third-party apps is a problem on WM. If basic things like email, office docs, syncing, etc. worked well on WM, I might not mind this as much, but the fact that an iPhone can do all that and so much more (including lots of things that you can't do in a browser, like control your car via manufacturers' apps, manage a ZipCar, play decent 3D games in downtime (which pretty much don't exist on WM), and more) just adds insult to injury. Even basic things like Facebook are not usable on WM (the MS app is trash, and opening up the desktop site in Opera/SkyFire is slow and impractical).

But more than anything else, even on the HD2, WM 6.5 is a highly quirky/buggy OS. Things randomly happen that shouldn't– just like my TP2, for instance, sometimes, even in a full-reception area, it'll just randomly drop signal and report no service. Then when you discover it, you can try toggling the phone radio / airplane mode or resetting the phone to fix it, but in the meantime, you've missed all calls and texts. Lag is obviously a huge problem on WM phones– my TP2 has led to potentially highly dangerous situations, when the messaging app decided to lock up, and I couldn't send anything for nearly 5 minutes. Sure, that's fine for a $5 featurephone, but especially for something targeted at business users, you could be dealing with mission-critical communications, and WM doesn't cut it. Thankfully, the HD2 is much better in this regard, simply by throwing so much horsepower at the problem, but even it is not consistently lag-free. It's quite telling than a first-gen iPhone, on a 412 MHz ARM11, is more consistently fluid than the HD2, with 1 GHz Snapdragon.

For just another of so many different examples, the HTC SMS app occasionally doesn't work– haven't seen this on the HD2 yet, but on the T-Mo TP2, about 40-50% of the time, sending a text message from the HTC UI gives an error that the phone is not enabled, so you have to switch to the WM SMS UI to send the message, and of course the HTC UI doesn't support text selection (on the TP2 at least), so you need to remember and retype the message.

So these are the sorts of things that make me hesistant to pick up a US-model HD2 when it hits T-Mo in February. That would've made a lot of sense if WM7 (which will presumably address all these issues) were to arrive in a decent timeframe, so I could wait it out, but now it seems getting an HD2 would entail sticking with WM 6.5 for up to another year, which is torture I'm not putting myself through. Let's see how things pan out…