Windows Mobile 6: The Straight Dope

What do we know about Windows Mobile 6? For starters, it’s coming to the T-Mobile Dash before it comes to anything else in the U.S. and it’s also coming to Cingular, but there is definitely no real information on which handsets will run it.


The Dash is T-Mo’s First WinMo 6 Smartphone
Most of our pet peeves have been addressed in the new version. WinMo 5 was so abysmal—I tried using it for a few days last week and even though my Sidekick has been screwing up in a major way I had go back to the Danger OS—that’s how bad it was.

The real improvements are in messaging and search. First off, there is a dedicated delete button in the email menu, which is a huge deal. If you’ve every tried to delete with WinMo 5 you’ve learned it was an exercise in aggitation that required three distinct operations. Now you can just hit a menu key. There is full text search both on-or-off the Exchange server, which means you can scan remote servers for info. Very interesting.

Email now includes inline HTML viewing as well as a number of one-click options for each message, reducing clicks considerably. There are also “usable” versions of Office on WinMo.

The calendar is slightly improved as well with a number of different views including the standard Outlook or iCal “week at a glance” view with the big blocks appearing during events.

WinMo 6 will also support VoIP as well as improved mobile modem handling for those times—like trade shows—when the wireless Internet sucks the goose.


The BlackJAQ4

It also includes integrated MSN Live messaging with little notification icons in the contact record and includes Live search with high res map searching as well as traffic information. MS is also launching a DRM technology called—who cares? It’s just another DRM technology.