Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Review of Windows Mobile 6-Based "Wing"

Posted by kdawson on from the waitin'-for-june-29 dept.

opeeeerah sends us to Gundeep Hora's review of the Wing, the first Windows Mobile 6 OS-based smartphone from T-Mobile. He concludes: "Microsoft's Windows Mobile 6 is a disappointment. Working with a number of applications or 'heavy' documents was painful. The delay was too much, especially in Word and PowerPoint... All in all, the T-Mobile Wing is... a decent smartphone. If nothing else, it's an interesting gadget for the young and hip crowd, though we wouldn't recommend it for productivity hounds that are looking to do reports and presentations... Not to mention, the sexy and strange appeal of the device can't be pleasing to serious professionals. For $299.99 from T-Mobile, it's a worthy Sidekick replacement."

3 of 123 comments (clear)

  1. Where's the hardware spec? by simong · · Score: 4, Informative

    My guess is that it's just underpowered for Windows Mobile 6. Hmm, it takes a while to find information - HTC Atlas:

    Microprocessor
    CPU: 32bit Texas Instruments OMAP 850
    CPU Clock: 201 MHz
    Memory, Storage capacity
    ROM capacity: 128 MB (accessible: 41.42MB)
    RAM capacity: 64 MB (accessible: 43.8MB)
    Hard Disk capacity: Not supported
    Display
    Display Type: color transflective TFT , 65536 scales
    Display Resolution: 240 x 320
    Display Diagonal: 2.8 "

    That doesn't seem particularily powerful or have a great memory capacity. In fact I had a HTC Blue Angel (in its Orange MPV2000 guise) that was more powerful than that two years ago. I'm sure Windows Mobile adheres to Moore's Law in the same way as every other version of Windows does so it is going to be disappointing.

  2. Re:disapointment comes from expectation by ClarionCall · · Score: 5, Informative

    Blaming the Operating System for the speed on this is off base. The specs on this 200MHz TI processor, 2-megapixel camera, 64MB of internal RAM, 128MB of ROM Show that this is a step back down from other HTC machines, the Old HTC Blue Angel had a nominal clock speed of 400 MHz. The other things is all of the junk that T-Mobile loads up on the machine, with a 200 MHz Clock, and a limited 64 MB of ram, you really don't want to fill up the available RAM with all sorts of junk like all of the standard carrier roms do. But heck, blame WM6. I know that WM5 was slower in some ways than WM2003SE, but it had data persistence that was missing in WM2003 & WM2003SE. WM6 is faster in my experience than WM5 on the same hardware, other than that I don't see a big difference. The Bluetooth stack is said to be more stable, but I still use wired headsets, so I can't comment on that.

  3. Re:disapointment comes from expectation by toleraen · · Score: 4, Informative

    Exactly. I'm running WM6 on an HTC Hermes, and it's extremely fast and responsive. There are several improvements 'under the hood' such as Office Mobile 2007, updated Pocket Internet Explorer, HTML email, improved internet sharing, Windows Live integration, better bluetooth, better battery life, windows update, etc. There aren't any blazingly new features over WM5, just a lot of tweaks to the software. I'm guessing that's why MS has offered free WM6 upgrades to the carriers.

    Of course the carriers will load down their roms with a ton of crap, so to get the most out of it you'll have to cook your own rom to get rid of it...but they should be blaming their carriers for that one.