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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."

10 of 123 comments (clear)

  1. disapointment comes from expectation by bombastinator · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

    1. 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.

    2. 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.

  2. World's most vapid review by Ed+Avis · · Score: 5, Funny

    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'?
    --
    -- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
  3. Worst Review Ever by Stevecrox · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  4. 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.

  5. Dissenting view by mcbridematt · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

  6. Windows XP Embedded will kill WMobile by cheekyboy · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.
  7. Re:WM5 by Bertie · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

  8. Re:iPhone... by toleraen · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.