Windows Mobile 6

With Windows Mobile 6, Microsoft set a skilled handyman to work on the creakier joists of their mobile OS, but they stopped well short of a gut renovation. The new OS is really more of an honorable version 5.5 than a true 6 – an accumulation of new, useful features that doesn't disturb the OS's underpinnings or solve some of its deeper problems.

The biggest change with Windows Mobile 6, in fact, is probably the names. Say goodbye to Pocket PC and Smartphone. Say hello to Professional, which means former Pocket PC phones, with touch screens; Standard, which is former Smartphones, without touch screens; and Classic, for those few remaining touch screen PDAs without phone capability.

Windows Mobile 5 users won't be wowed when they boot up a Windows Mobile 6 device. Devices still take 40 seconds or so to start up, and performance is roughly the same as measured by SPB Benchmark and TCPMP video tests. On the other hand, the new version doesn't break most third-party software; all of the software we tried, including Opera Mobile, SPB Benchmark, Skype, TCPMP and StyleTap, still worked.

The most striking application improvement is the new Office Mobile for Standard. One of the big criticisms of Windows Mobile for Smartphone was its inability to edit Microsoft Office documents. Now, Office Mobile lets you view PowerPoint presentations and view and edit Word and Excel documents – a little. In Word, editing is restricted to inserting and deleting text, and a few very basic formatting commands like bold and underline; there's no font or paragraph formatting, nothing rich. In Excel Mobile, there's a neat zoomed-out "overview" mode, basic formula functions and support for multiple spreadsheets, but there's no "new" option in either program. That's right, these programs are for editing e-mail attachments, not creating new documents. The new OneNote Mobile, part of OneNote 2007, can create new documents, but it isn't included by default with Windows Mobile 6.

The other feature that thrilled me was SmartFilter in the Windows Mobile 6 e-mail client. Anything that reduces key presses is good, and this one is a doozy: if you type a couple of letters, your e-mail starts automatically filtering to only include messages with those letters in the sender's name or the subject line. This is a lot like the Smartdial function, now on both Standard and Professional models, which lets you essentially dial by name in the phone application, and it makes finding e-mails much, much easier. When you're entering e-mail, you'll find new keyboard shortcuts and a better predictive text system that offers more word options. The e-mail application also now supports and displays HTML e-mails from POP3/IMAP, Windows Live Mail and Exchange 2007 accounts, using the Internet Explorer Mobile engine to show inline graphics and formatting. As always, sometimes you have to scroll horizontally when graphics are wide, but it's a good step.

The Windows Mobile PIM applications and Internet Explorer Mobile also got a bit of a refresh. The calendar, for instance, has a nifty bar across the top that shows when you're free in the day. The contacts app includes call history information for individual contacts. IE Mobile now launches with a home screen giving you easy access to Live Search, your Web history and your favorites. See? Useful little stuff.—next: Time To Upgrade All Your Microsoft Stuff? >

Time To Upgrade All Your Microsoft Stuff?

Windows Mobile 6 also works with Windows Vista to make syncing over Bluetooth and using your device as a laptop modem much, much easier. Once your handheld and PC are paired, you don't have to enter arcane command strings or set up virtual COM ports – you can just pick Bluetooth as a sync method in Vista's Device Center. (You do have to remember to download Device Center from Microsoft first, as it isn't built in to Vista.) To use a WM6 phone as a modem, launch the "Internet Sharing" application on the device. Then, set up a new network connection on your laptop, attaching to a "Bluetooth PAN." It worked simply and easily for me, a big difference from Windows Mobile 5 and XP. Attaching to Wi-Fi networks also seemed much more reliable on our Windows Mobile 6 devices than on WM5, which is a big relief.

Windows XP users will be less entertained by ActiveSync 4.5 Beta 2, which you'll need to download to use a WM6 device. In our experience, it crashed even more often than Activesync 4.2 and refused to sync our contacts; Microsoft said they'll have a bug-fixed version soon.

The biggest PIM improvements demand that you have an Exchange 2007 server, which will irritate folks who don't have control over which server they use. With Exchange 2007, you can search global address lists, view the status of meeting attendees, manage meeting request conflicts, and set out-of-office messages.

Windows Mobile 6 also puts Live Mail (formerly Hotmail) and Live Messenger literally front and center, letting you integrate your Live contact book with your device contact book, giving you presence information for Live Messenger contacts in your address book, and sticking optional Live icons on the home screen. Live Search also plays a larger role, with a Web search bar popping up on the home screen and on the home page of Internet Explorer Mobile. The integration works smoothly, and the ability to bring over contacts from an online service lets consumers in on something that's previously been restricted to enterprise customers. But in a world evenly divided between AIM, Yahoo! and Live Messenger, it would have been great to see a cross-service API that could bring them all together.

Finally, Windows Mobile 6 cures the hideous affliction that has scarred the Palm Treo 700w: it now supports more screen resolutions including 320x320 and 800x480. Hopefully, we will never have to see a 240x240 screen device again.—next: Our WM6 Wish List >

Our WM6 Wish List

With all of these changes, I wish we'd seen some improvement to Windows Media Player on handhelds. Windows Mobile 6 fixes the old bug which prevented videos from playing in full screen on some Smartphone devices, but otherwise that app is exactly the same – complete with confusing "library" interface that steadfastly refuses to integrate the stuff on your media card with the stuff built into your device. Weirdly, WMP on our Windows Mobile 6 devices even looked worse than on Windows Mobile 5 – some of the smaller icons were oddly scaled.

I also wish we'd seen more changes deeper down. Most disappointingly, the Standard and Professional versions still have separate pools of applications, wasting developers' time and energy and reducing the general number of apps available. I still ran out of memory when I launched too many programs, because there's no way to quit programs and the OS doesn't come with a task manager by default. While I only had WM6 for a few days, I expect it will still slow down with time and need occasional reboots to clear memory the way WM5 devices did.

It still takes two clicks to start a new appointment in the calendar. There's still a confusing overlap between the Start menu and the Programs listing on Professional devices. The home screen on Standard devices still scrolls too slowly. The kernel is the same Windows CE 5.0, not the new CE 6.0. In other words, we're still dealing with basically the same OS as we did before.

Windows Mobile 6 is the best mobile operating system out there, but I say that guardedly. It's still clunky, with some memory leaks and seriously unintuitive parts. But the other mobile options fall short in major ways. Palm OS still doesn't multitask, and doesn't work at all on new GSM 3G networks. It's an OS of the past. Symbian suffers from a low profile in the US, with relatively few devices available, and it has its own quirky ways of doing things. Blackberry OS is smooth and stable, but just beginning to develop its potential in terms of media and third-party apps. We've heard great things about Linux, but nobody's yet managed to convince a major US carrier to pick up a Linux smart phone. The radically new interfaces of Apple's iPhone could give Microsoft's team a kick in the pants, but that phone isn't out yet.

Windows Mobile is available on a broad range of devices with several form factors. It's enterprise friendly. It has thousands of third-party applications, and it runs on many devices, at many price points, with many form factors. Windows Mobile 6 doesn't rock Microsoft's successful boat. It smoothes the waters towards total mobile domination a bit. And if the real version 6 isn't as amazing as the version 6 we had in our heads, well, there's always Windows Mobile 7.

Windows Mobile 6 will start appearing on devices soon; Samsung showed their SCH-i760 at CES. Microsoft will also make upgrades available for many Windows Mobile 5 devices, though it's up to individual device manufacturers and carriers to decide whether they'll offer those upgrades to consumers.

More Operating system reviews:
•   Apple OS X Yosemite 10.10.1
•   Microsoft Windows 8.1 Update
•   Apple OS X 10.9.2 Mavericks (for Mac)
•   Google Android 4.2.2 'Jelly Bean'
•   Apple iOS 6.1
•  more