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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.
Typical Slashdot FUD. I've been using WM6 with my Dash for a few months now and think it is great. I can do pretty much anything including monitoring my house through wireless cameras while I'm away and play a ton of bittorrent content I've downloaded. The Voice commander is just awesome as well.
..from "decent" sources, and still the submission with a CoolTechZone review makes it to the front page. CoolTechZone sucks, leave it out of here, even if the occasional Microsoft-bashing does go on there..
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I will never get back the 30 seconds of my life wasted reading those two sentences. Could they not have said 'it is blue'?
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
I have no idea if this particular phone is good or not that review was quite pants. For starters yes its larger and heavier than most smartphones most Windows Mobile phones are, is it substantially heavier than those? Mentioning outlook synching and the fact location appears with the appointment makes me question if they even used a Windows Mobile 5 phone (hint a WM5 does just that.) What is a 'heavy' document and how does WM6 compare to WM5? I want to know if the word functionality is better I already know trying to open a 2MB document in Word Mobile takes ages (10 seconds or so.)
That review was awfull to read, they didn't compare it with other offerings or even talk about its features my computer iliterate sister could have done a better job.
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.
Being a former Palm user, I'm quite happy with WM6, and theres no way in hell I'm going back.
Unfortunately better quality control is needed from all manufacturers. There seems to be a habit from all sides of sending devices to the shelves with woefully crap software.
Considering that this is yet another Windows Mobile device that tries to go way beyond a normal mobile device giving you a PC on a phone, and presumably why it has a QWERTY keyboard and you can work with Office documents, then it's a bit of a failure really.
As mini cpus get better and low power, such as .9W 600mhz style x86 based CPUs, with ram over 100mhz and 128meg being cheap, its no
sweat to have XP EMbedded, which actually still runs quite nicely on 333mhz Geode CPUs using 128meg ram at 33mhz on 1998 style busses.
This style setup would work well on a phone, and give better results. As creating your own XP embedded allows you to choose which
services/apps to include to make it as small as possible.
Windows Mobile RIP 2007, XPE to the future.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
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.
This certainly isn't a large organisation -- http://www.cooltechzone.com/contact/Authors/
Could easily be `run from a bedroom'...
-1 not first post
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.
Since when is doing reports and presentations "productive"? These are bureaucracy-feeding tasks, not productivity tasks.
CoolTechZone are all trolls, all the time. I have no idea why they keep getting linked here. Even with this review, it's so obvious they completely and totally subscribe to the Microsoft line when they review something that didn't come from Microsoft.
Whith articles such as there, who can take them seriously?
"Report: Mac OS X Market Share Declines"
"iPhone and Mobile OS X: Doomed to Fail!"
"Amazon Unbox: iTunes Movie Store In Jeopardy"
"Apple: Mac OS X Doomed?"
"Column: Apple Tries Hard to Wake Up to Consumerism"
Just to clarify that "cut and paste" part, if your friend's number is in Contacts, you have to open their contact page, tap "Edit" from the bottom menu, select the number from the correct field on the edit page, then tap "Edit" from the bottom menu again. Don't worry, it's a different "Edit"...
Then you start a new text message, tap "Edit" from the bottom menu yet again, select "Paste" from the pop-up, add any explanations and/or apologies for the delay, then tap "Send".
If your OS hasn't crashed in the mean time, you'll have sent your friend's number. Congratulations!
I'm just amazed that after six iterations, it's still as clumsy, unintuitive and unrefined as ever.
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
from TFA, right out of the gate "After the success of T-Mobile's Sidekick series..."
I owned a sidekick3, 2 of them to be exact, and both of them met a violent demise. One took a trip off the 4th floor into a concrete wash, the other, stomped into oblivion in the parking lot after work.
Before the upgrade (which it nagged you ever 5 mins of the day to do with no option to opt out) I had ZERO problems... first day into the upgrade, that son of a bitch would freeze up in the middle of summer on the equator(A Christmas Story quote...)
The sales might have been a success, but after that bastard locking to the point of pulling the battery and it wiping ALL of my saved emails, pics, texts contacts, etc(like wtf is the goddamn miniSD and SIM card for!?!)... Id call the product itself a total failure.
Other than that, when it did work, it was a kickass device
I dont know if this post would be considered a rant or informative?
With that said, Microsofts 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 files that it wasnt possible for us to work with the device without messing up somewhere and not realizing it in the end. This lag is present across a number of other scenarios as well.
...followed by...
If nothing else, its an interesting gadget for the young and hip crowd, though we wouldnt recommend it for productivity hounds that are looking to do reports and presentations on the Wing. Not to mention, the sexy and strange appeal of the device can't be pleasing to serious professionals. For $299.99 from T-Mobile, its a worthy Sidekick replacement.
Yeah, 300 bucks for a 'trippy' smartphone that is painful to use as a smartphone. Make up your mind.
BTW: Kudos for the 8 hours of real-life battery time (in use). For a smartphone, that's kinda impressive.
Now that it's Jobs is saying that iphone will support 3rd party apps, they'll be setting the bar for phone OS's. I d bet the market for phones gets stratified just like the MP3-player market is now -- there's IPods, and then the rest are all followers. http://30days.itious.com/
21st-Century-Citizen
Contacts --> Press and hold on contact --> Select Send Contact --> Text message from the context menu.
Tick the items of contact info you want to send.
Select recipient of text message in the usual way.
No editing or pasting.
But I suppose it is more fun to hate on Microsoft.
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?
Makes a lot of sense on a desktop PC when disk is orders of magnitude slower than RAM and you've got the room to implement a proper memory manager to handle such behaviour.
Actually, a similar explanation works for almost any piece of poor design in Windows - ask yourself the question "does this feature make more sense on a single, probably not networked desktop PC which is used by one person?" and 9 times out of 10 the answer's "Yes".
to be perfectly accurate, this feature was added in WM5 AKU3.2 I believe - hence not all of them have it. There are downloadable tools to add this feature if your ROM doesn't have it, and of course there are zillions of alternate ROMS available for most of the WM devices at places like www.xda-developers.com.
The thing I love about my HTC Wizard is the sheer customisability of it. You can tinker with *everything* - OK, it's not open source but there's so much free stuff out there for it that's really great.
You do realize that he basically said that the iPhone is too unstable for third party development? What bar, exactly, will they be setting?
Not on my version, it doesn't.
But I suppose it is more fun to hate on Microsoft.
It'd be MUCH more fun to have a decent phone/pda operating system.
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
Not any more, there aren't.
Microsoft insisted that all ROMs be removed as of February this year. They're all gone now.
Offering these ROMs has been an invaluable resource to many developers and enthusiasts. Every once in a while someone uploaded an image that was not supposed to be released yet, but when Microsoft or someone else complained we immediately took it down. Recently Microsoft has begun to complain on a different level, asking us to remove _all_ the ROM images.http://www.xda-developers.com/modules.php?name=Ne
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
Well, Jobs hasn't said anything of any great depth. If the iPhone is as beholden to the powers-that-be as iTunes is, functionality will be an issue when it possibly curtails money-making activities of other parties involved in the iPhone. iTunes used to have lots of functionality in its SDK that has since been taken away because of the possibility of piracy, even though the functionality was massively useful for legal purposes. I won't hold my breath for its release, but I hope it's not as much of a cluster-fuck of conflicts of interest as other Apple SDKs. Let's just wait until the thing hits the shelves before proclaiming it the bar-setter of the smartphone world, ok? Lest we look like fanboys, which I'm not saying we are.
> What kind of a phone crashes regularly when you go to answer a call?
I had a SONY-Ericsson T616 from Cingular (OK, the old AT&T Wireless) and it would restart/reboot about 1 in 20 times when I would try to answer a call. I cannot remember the Motorola L7 that I have now ever doing that. Motorola also understands direct shortcuts, and I can even carry a handful of favorite songs along with the L7's (rather limited) iTunes. The T616 had a case of "really bad UI", often unable to do the obvious thing (i.e. your text message example).
Well from a personal perspective, I still find it easier to deal with. Most windows mobiles I find viable come without touch sensitive screens which I have always found annoying. I do take your point about palmOS being long in the tooth.
If one compares palmOS 5 to the versions of WinM available at the time it came out it was really much better. The problem is that palm has been unable to successfully update it.
Even compared with the modern versions though the main disadvantage is merely that palm is unable to incorporate drivers for such things as wifi and native (rather than 3rd party) solutions for such things as flash. The actual GUI itself is IMHO still superior. If Palm can ever get a meaningful OS update together it could get real interesting. I have limited hope however.
From the article: "Basically, it's going to be awkward making phone calls with the Wing."
Might as well end the review right there.
I don't know whether the iPhone will be any better, but Steve Jobs was dead on when he said "The killer app is... making calls."
I have a Swiss Army knife, and while I find the magnifying glass, scissors, and Phillips screwdrivers to be very useful, I use it mostly as a knife. If the knife blades weren't sturdy, sharp, and easy to open, I wouldn't carry one... not even if it included a microscope, pinking shears, and a full set of Torx bits.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
OK, what I should have said is something like:
"There used to be loads of ROMS at www.xda-developers.com - these are no longer hosted on their FTP server but can be found via rapidshare links in their forums. There are tons and tons of reg hacks, applications etc available if you register with their forums though."
My HTC Wizard was sold as a T-Mobile Vario when I bought it 2nd hand off ebay. It came with a load of horrible pink T-Mobile branding and a very, very slow ROM. I flashed it with the "Mr Clean" ROM and not only was it about 40% faster, it had a nicer interface, added A2DP stereo bluetooth, push email and the AKU2.3 update. It's twice the phone it was before, and I've even got it to dynamically under and overclock the CPU for better battery life and performance.
I've even just got the threaded Treo-style SMS working...
What does the iPhone add to the mobile phone market that isn't already there? Symbian, Linux, and Windows Mobile already have SDKs out there, and have for quite some time. As far as I can tell the iPhone is the follower.
How many is Tmobile offering? 50? 100?
When will these phone companies start to think about simplfying their phone product line. Make it at most 5 phones
That way they can focus on support, better quality phones, etc.
what do you expect? its the hardware at fault, not just the software. the wing is nothing more than a glorified MDA (that they released 2-3 years ago)
same CPU, same RAM, same display, different keyboard/housing.
they install a full, bloated WM6 install with all the applications running on the desktop.
i have an MDA (overclocked to a whopping 273MHz) running WM6 that runs perfectly fine, and fast enough for daily use.
its like a bad review of Vista.........running on a Pentium Pro 200 box. duh.
dreemkill.
after 3 buggy windows mobile phones, locked to the point of uselessness by att/cingular i just got a blackberry pearl a couple of weeks ago. the only other phone that just worked this well was a sony-ericsson i had a couple of years back. the difference between my 6 month old WM5.0 phone and the blackberry is night and day. the blackberry is just more responsive, the interface is easier to use. i cant put my finger on it, or maybe i can, but i had this phone figured out in 10 minutes, it just makes SENSE.
Windows mobile just gets more bloated and i've found i keep the windows mobile phones for less and less time. I'm moderately willing to put up with flakyness, crashes, incompatibilites on my desktop, but damn it i just want my phone to WORK.
I'm pretty sure I just used my phone 5 minutes ago. I plan on using it again pretty shortly. Wanna go in depth, even just a smidgen?
"Not to mention, the sexy and strange appeal"...but, but i like sexy and strange.
How many companies can compete by introducing so many products that are so disappointing for so long? Is there even a single MS product (outside the Xbox) released in the past 10 years that hasn't been disappointing? Where do these expectations of good quality come from? And how come consistently low quality doesn't lower them?
The expectation - delivery = disappointment formula is reversed for Microsoft success. That is the surest measure of a monopoly's PR power.
--
make install -not war
Funny thing is, I used to do that too - I wrote an auditing tool and an explosives management app that we used to load onto ruggedised Palms and sell to mining companies. It was simple enough that you could hand it to a field assistant and expect they'd be able to use it.
I still believe that's what the design brief for PDA phones should be - not this mess of arcane menus and half-arsed apps that you can't even be confident will sound it's alarms when you need it to.
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
Not on mine either, and I'm on v3.5. I only have the option to 'beam' it. That might have been helpful in 1999.
Let me start by saying that I have owned a Blackberry 7100 and a Pearl, the MDA, and the new Wing...
Of all of these devices, I prefer the Wing.
I was excited when I bought the MDA: WM5, miniSD, WMP, and a phone...
I was quick to test all of the features, half of them I never looked at again. I'm not a huge fan of bluetooth, T-Mobile locked the MDA so bluetooth was headsets only. The WMP was garbage: I ripped a movie that I owned down onto my 2 GB miniSD card, and to my suprise - it didn't play well, slow choppy, audio was out of sync (the movie was fine on my xp box)... The camera was a 1.3, but the images weren't great, and the speed of the device wasn't great also...
With all of that said, I loved my touch screen, slide out QWERTY keyboard, phone!
When the wing was announced I purchsed it the next day AS A MDA REPLACEMENT.
Again, I tested all of the NEW features, I'm still not impressed with the camera, but it's not a big deal, the bluetooth has been unlocked for syncing via activesync, I haven't tested WMP, so I can't comment, however the 2 greatest improvements were the BUILT IN TASK MANAGER, and the DIALER UPGRADE... The dialer on the MDA was slow, and I often dialed wrong numbers, because of the delay between button presses, this has been corrected in the wing and it will dial as fast as you can dial, and the built in task manager is a great plus...
I would say that hands down this device beats out the Blackberry (7100, Pearl) and the MDA. It is faster, the spring loaded keyboard is solid, it is slimmer than the MDA and I like the rubberized blue coating on it.
Here I stand, I can do no other, God help me. - Martin Luther
I'd like to see someone make a comparison review between the Wing and HTC's TyTn.
They look pretty similar, but the TyTn looks to be a bit more robust in the processor department.
/sig
The only issue is that it is an MS phone, so if you do not like MS mobile phones then this would not be good for you.
In any case, crave ( http://crave.cnet.com/8300-1_105-1.html?search=htc +wing ) has more photos of this phone than the posted article. This is worth a look. They also have a link to a full review.
I'd be curious, if anyone is hacking these phones to install Linux or BSD on them, and if so can they still using them with their phone providers. Is this even possible or does it violate some license?
Only 'flamers' flame!
Does slashdot hate my posts?
And you know this because you've been using the iPhone without a usability complaint for, what, how long now? Weeks? Months?
There were hard-drive mp3 players on the market before the iPod too, I used to own one of them long before the iPod came out. Who's the follower now?
Not that I'm predicting the iPhone will sweep the cell phone market. I think that's going to be a much harder market to dominate. But just because there are competitors out there now doesn't mean a new company can't come in and take the lead.
Each has its problems. With Symbian it's cost (don't know about the available developer resources). At a few dollars a seat, the licensing fees add up quickly. With Linux its standardization. There is no one Linux OS out there with a ubiquitous platform SDK; but that will all change if/when LiMo pans out. As for Windows, its, cost and end-user usability. Windows has a great suite of developer tools and resources, but for a mobile OS it really sucks. Win CE is essentially stripped-down Windows with a different shell. Plus, the costs are astronomical. I think its current $3/seat for the Smartphone build and $16/seat for Pocket PCs. Now, that's a kick it your CFO's gut. If iPhones can hit the market with all the bells and whistles that users want, lower cost, and Mac's reputation for usability, they can take over the market. Symbian is still king, but the mobile OS market is wide open with the collapse of Palm and Microsoft's failure to step up to the plate.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
Similarly sized and priced phones, with comparable features, are already on the market and include full keyboards. Removing the keyboard without reducing the size of the unit is a giant step backwards in usability for something billing itself as a "breakthrough internet device."
Usability != Usability
Come on, have you ever seen an ad for a cellphone which _only_ shows the UI and nevertheless blows you away? I haven't.
this sig is useless
Since no one outside of Steve Jobs and the dude in the ad (which might very well be Steve Jobs) have ever used an iPhone, your claims of superb usability simply cannot be taken seriously. Just wait until it's released and some random non-Apple-fanboy techie can write a real review based on facts instead of optimistic expectations.
Web2.0: I love when people Flickr my cuil and digg my boingboing until my google is reddit and I start to yahoo
Oh, yes, that's true for sure, but you can't deny that what you see in the ad is already standards-rising. Sure, I want to hold one in my own hands to see how it works, especially the on-screen keyboard. But hell, I loved my Palm until I saw what actually can be done with todays technology.
As for the 500$, don't forget that you get a video-iPod with it, too.
this sig is useless
If it's the ad I'm thinking of (at work, can't check it), I remember thinking "Great, all things I can do with the d-pad on my 8525." I don't particularly care about flash, I just want functionality. Are there videos yet of someone typing an email or text message? That's the part of the UI I want to see. The forced on screen keyboard (and the lack of 3G) are generally the only things that are keeping me from having any interest in this thing. The ultra-hype isn't helping either, but objectively it's just those two.
Those ads are mainly about "fun" things, sure. On this one you see the mail client, but not composing a message. You can see a demo with the mail client here, though. As for typing a message, me too, I want to try it myself.
I think people who say "Great, I can do that with my XY, too" still didn't get the idea. It's all about the UI, a coherent UI. It's not so much about WHAT you can do, it's about HOW you do it. Simple example: On my phone, I need to press two buttons to read the latest text message. Same on the iPhone. But if I want to read that new text message later and first view some sent messages, I have to dismiss the alert telling me that a new message has arrived, open the menu, navigate to messages, choose "text messages" (3rd entry!! how stupid), choose "Sent" (again, 3rd entry in the menu) and look for the message. On the iPhone, it's still two taps. The same two taps.
this sig is useless
I have AKU 3.5, and that feature isn't there. It's the Hemi_C ROM. Are you sure it's standard 3.5, or something that most people making 3.5 ROMs add in?
"That which does not kill us makes us stranger." -Trevor Goodchild
I'm running the AKU 2.3 "Mr Clean" ROM - it's not standard, but it's not too wacky. I've got it in mine. Some standard ROMS *definitely* contain it though. Have an ask at xda devs? In their forums you'll also find a cab file that adds this functionality if you dig around... Ric