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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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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."
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!
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.
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?