Windows Mobile 6.5 Launched, Panned

Barence writes "It's not Windows Mobile 7, but at least it's here. PC Pro has posted its full review of Windows Mobile 6.5, as found on the new HTC Touch2 handset, which is also reviewed. If you're expecting something to challenge Apple OS and Android, prepare for a very large let-down. The damning quote: 'Business users, as much as consumers, deserve a phone that's quick and intuitive to operate as well as one that hooks in neatly to Exchange and Outlook and is easy to manage centrally. If this is the best [Microsoft] can muster in the year-and-a-half's worth of development time since Windows Mobile 6.1 appeared, we'll be dramatically lowering our hopes for Windows Mobile 7.'"

Comments

Ouch. If that's consensus...

[Saint Fnordius]

...then Microsoft is headed towards irrelevance in this field.

The most damning part is how it claims it is less for private users and geared towards businesses. That's just another way of admitting that they were driven by bullet points and not by how people would actually use the devices. They only expect IT departments to buy them, and not the people who actually use them.

Windows Mobile has become a Terry Schaivo. The only reason it's not dead is because Microsoft refuses to pull the plug on the poor thing.

Re:Ouch. If that's consensus...

[DrgnDancer]

Yeah, but how much longer for 7? There are no fewer than 4 next gen smart phone platforms out there that MS is slowing but surely losing market share too. The iPhone OS, new Palm OS, new BB OS, and Android are all in the wild, and the worst of them is considered better than Win Mobile by most people at this point. I mean, stop gap measures are nice and all, but it seems that the time for them past a year or two ago. When it was just the iPhone, MS had time. Especially since the 1.0 iPhone OS was clearly not appropriate to business uses. Since them Palm and Black Berry, both big players in the business phone market at one time (RIM of course still is), have released their own attempts, and Apple has done a lot to improve business functionality. Android hasn't made a big splash in business yet, but it's improving too.

How much longer before MS has past the point of no return and releases its brilliant new mobile OS to a market already saturated. Even if Win Mobile 7 really is a good answer to the competition (and that remains to be seen) it won't matter if everyone has already standardized on something else before it hits the market. You gotta figure that if they're bothering to release 6.5, 7 is at least 6 months to a year out. There's always going to be a baseline of "OMG Windows, Yay!" IT managers out there who'll buy whatever MS gives them, but if they lose the rest of the market they've got problems.

Re:Direct ascent.

[Runaway1956]

"In fact, 6.5 might be lousy because all effort is going into mainline instead."

You're serious, right? Or, are you playing on the posts above that say MS is a joke?

I'll answer you, with a serious answer. Mobile devices are being sold NOW. More and more people are becoming accustomed to devices that WORK. MS knows better than anyone (witness past exclusivity agreements) that the time to corner a market is in the early days. If MS wants to be relevant in the mobile devices market, they need to get into it NOW, not next month, not next year. It's a now or never thing. Each day that passes without a compelling reason to use MS OS's is one more nail in MS's coffin.

The mobile market belongs to *nix and Apple. It's just that simple. Chrome may or may not become relevant, but again, time is working against them, just as it is working against Microsoft.

And the rest?

[mdwh2]

If you're expecting something to challenge Apple OS and Android

Well actually as well as Android and "Apple OS", I was more interested in how it compares to the likes of "Nokia OS", "Blackberry OS" and "Motorola OS". It seems odd that Slashdot only seems to acknowledge the existence of the Iphone and now Android, when the vast majority of the market is made up of other manufacturers...

(Once upon a time it was the case that "smartphones" ran a branded off-the-shelf OS like Symbian or Windows, like Android today, so I could understand doing a comparison of only those ... except "Apple OS" doesn't fit into that category anyway.)

Hardly a suprise

[Xest]

Even Ballmer admitted it's not the release he wanted and that they'd wished they could've got Windows Mobile 7 out the door earlier instead. It's wrong to assume that Windows Mobile 7 will only comprise of a year and a half of additional work on top of Windows Mobile 6.5 when Windows Mobile 7 has been receieving development time in parallel with Windows 6.5.

It's too early to judge how 7 will end up, and it's no suprise 6.5 is dissapointing. Microsoft knew they were caught with their pants down in the mobile market and now they're frantically playing catch up. Whether Windows Mobile 7 will be their catch up we'll realistically have to just wait and see, but it's wrong to assume what the quality of 7 will be like based on this rather poor release that is 6.5.

Then why didn't Ballmer kill it?

[hellfire]

If Ballmer says this isn't the release he wanted, then why didn't he kill it? It says a lot about a company if you "have" to release a product even though it's crappy, and all that it says is very bad. Not to draw yet another cliched Apple parallel, but look at Steve. Rumors abound that Apple has been working on this tablet mac since 2003, and that Steve has been unsatisfied with it and has refused to release it because he doesn't feel it's a product people want. Yet Apple's stock isn't tanking on this news. Why the hell can't Steve reign in something like this?

Thus continues the long slow decline of Microsoft, who can't even generated shit that smells like shit any more.