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Review of Windows Mobile 6-Based "Wing"
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."
You'd think after 6 revisions each of which was as bad as the last that one would stop expecting them to com out with something decent. With what appears to be the possible future demise of Palm though it may stop being thought o as awful simply because there is little to compare it to. As the old joke goes Q: how many microsoft engineers does it take to screw in a lightbulb? A: None, they just change the standard to darkness.
is ram that expensive?
Surely even 128m or 256 would only be $10 more. We had 400mhz ARM cpus in 2002 for gods sake, after FOUR YEARS, all we can do is 200mhz?
Have a 400mhz arm , that throttles down to 200mhz when used just for menus.
Or, star writing better code/apis for visual GUIs on embedded devices, none of this 18 stack layer apis, even a 16mzh 286 did FAST GUIS in DOS
320x240 in pascal in 1990.
If todays engineers/programmers cannot do a fast GUI/system in 16mhz/4megram in pascal code, then they are hopeless stupid idiots!!, get some old school
hackers to make $99 phone that shits on the iphone with 1/10th the specs.
Layers upon layers of apis/virtual machines is stupid, stupid ass!!!!
What did the N64 have? 64meg ram, 200mhz, it was good, hell, ask nintendo for rights, and shrink the N64 into ONE CHIP, then code everything
using the game APIs. What you gota reweite/make new code for mp3 players and TCPIP, big deal, four weeks worth of effort, and another 8 in testing/debugging.
Doesnt any one remember (especially todays young engineers who never probably experiences computers below 1ghz) computers running at 133mhz or even 66mhz? Todays engineers are lazy and they dont remember because they were probably 9 years old at the time of what computers running at 133mhz could do.
Hell, even the amiga at 7mhz achieved better results than anything today at 200mhz. Im sure the amiga purely cut/pasted into 65micron design from CMOS could be converted to one 5million transisitor chip using less than 500mw (btw if the amiga consortium gave up their useless desktop dreams and just make an amiga mobile phone that could run ALL amiga software it would just blow everything out of the water, especially if it had 64meg ram in it which is like running windows with 8gig ram).
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
I think you're being overly charitable there. It's absolutely dire. I got a Windows Mobile 5 phone because it had loads of seemingly useful features, and I have cursed the day ever since. Really, I should have known better. What kind of a phone crashes regularly when you go to answer a call? And what genius came up with the idea of keeping programs in memory even though you've closed them, so that eventually the phone slows to a crawl, forcing you to kill all running applications?
And as for the UI - oh my. The simplest, most common operations are incredibly complicated. The other day, someone asked me for a friend's phone number, and I went to send it as a text message, like you can with every other phone in existence, and generally with ease. It won't do it. It'll try to send it as a picture message, even though the contact didn't actually have a picture attached, and you don't get any alternative. In the end I gave up and cut and pasted it into an SMS myself. I could quote similar examples all day long.
It's windows 3.1 reincarnated, I'm convinced of it. Avoid at all costs.