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."

Comments

disapointment comes from expectation

[bombastinator]

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.

Re:disapointment comes from expectation

[ClarionCall]

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.

Re:disapointment comes from expectation

[toleraen]

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.

Re:disapointment comes from expectation

[mgblst]

Blaming the Operating System for the speed on this is off base.
 
Sure, this sort of makes sense, until we think about hardware from the past. When I think about what we used to do on the original Palm 33mhz machines, or even back to the old Amigas. The fact is that Microsoft is not trying at all to produce a better operating system, they are just shoe-horning the PC version of windows onto these things. That is why it is so slow, and there is no excuse for it.

Re:disapointment comes from expectation

[everphilski]

If a companies embedded OS cant work on that speed of a processor then they need to simply give up and stop.

Yeah, at the speeds processors were running nine years ago. I had a Phillips Nino with over 200mHz processing speed in 1998. Seriously, the hardware is gimp, that's the problem.

World's most vapid review

[Ed Avis]

T-Mobile has always gone after the young and hip crowd, and the Wing is no different in that regard.
The vibrant exterior of the Wing is bluish in color, an ideal color choice for teens and 20-somethings. We get the feeling that T-Mobile may be going after the professional crowd, but we doubt too many professionals would go after such a trendy looking device.

I will never get back the 30 seconds of my life wasted reading those two sentences. Could they not have said 'it is blue'?

Worst Review Ever

[Stevecrox]

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.

Re:Worst Review Ever

[thebdj]

I have one, so let me give you an idea. First, it is about on par with most smartphones I have used. I am talking real ones that have full touchscreen and QWERTY keyboard. None of these lame ripoff phones like the Q (from Motorola) or Blackjack (from Samsung). Features wise it is pretty complete, except for 3G, but then again, T-Mobile doesn't have a 3G network yet, so you have to live with EDGE. But you can get T-mobile hotspot plans and it does have 802.11 support. The one problem I have is the program memory is bordering on insufficient. Unlike a normal PDA (and maybe some smartphones), I cannot find away to adjust more storage to program memory, since I can always gain more storage using the microSD.

If you want to know about large documents, you'll have to give me time to hunt one down to load onto here. I believe it handles it pretty well. Overall, the device is a pretty well built HTC device. I hardly consider the "blue" exterior something "hip". I actually prefer it to all the fake metal colored plastic. BTW, the slide mechanism on this is the smoothest I've ever had in a phone. The battery life is also rather impressive. I spent nearly two days without charging it. Two days that including heavy talk time (probably close to 2 hrs) and large amounts of data usage with both EDGE and 802.11. I would give it a pretty good ranking overall and have to say it is a good replacement for an MDA. The Sidekick is not in the same league, since the Sidekick was obviously made for texting, this is designed to be a heck of a lot more.

For a fair comparison of WM5 to WM6, I would really need to review both systems on the SAME device. It seems to me you would have a hard time comparing WM5 to WM6 in terms of performance across two different platforms.

Where's the hardware spec?

[simong]

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.

Dissenting view

[mcbridematt]

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.

Windows XP Embedded will kill WMobile

[cheekyboy]

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.

Re:WM5

[Bertie]

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.

Re:WM5

[ozmanjusri]

of course there are zillions of alternate ROMS available for most of the WM devices at places like www.xda-developers.com

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=New s&file=showarticle&threadid=294142

"it's going to be awkward making phone calls"

[dpbsmith]

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.

Re:iPhone...

[toleraen]

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.