Friday, March 14, 2008

Windows Mobile is dead! Long live Windows Mobile!

Ok, maybe not quite as dramatic. Let's get the obvious out of the way,  Windows mobile has been around for about ten years now and in that time has had little substantial improvements at all. On the other hand, the new kid on the block, the iPhone, is already eating into WinMob's market share . If Windows Mobile is to survive this onslaught and avoid becoming the next Palm OS, they have to rethink a few things.

 Direct updates: when there is a new release of WinMob (even just bug fixes),  Microsoft releases it to the mobile operators who then decide whether to give it to existing customers or force them to buy new handsets. For the iPhone, all updates come directly from Apple to the user and are therefore not only frequent but also lets Apple, the software expert just like Microsoft in this case, decide what to have on the handset instead of the mobile network operator.

Memory Management:  it is stated in the iPhone SDK documentation that only one third party app can run at a time and no background applications are allowed. When a user switches to a different app, the previous one must save its state and exit; thus ensuring that the phone always runs at optimal speed as the forefront app has all the resources it needs. This decision by Apple has angered a few developers who believe that a resource limited device should be treated in the same way as a desktop computer that has an abundance of resources (plus hard-disk for virtual memory). WinMob on the other hand takes the opposite approach. All open apps stay in memory unless the user specifically quits them (usually from the task manager). This then leads to a device that gets slower and slower until the user soft-resets it - so much so that it can then take up to 10 seconds to answer an incoming call.

Better and  stricter hardware specs: Apple is lucky in that it only has to optimise its OS for two devices (the iPhone and the iPod touch). Microsoft on the other hand has virtually no control on what device the OS will be run on. The net result is sub-par performance of the OS due to sub-par hardware and the user ends up blaming Microsoft. MS needs to stop selling its WinMob licenses to every Tom, Dick and Harry (read Ubiqiou) unless their device meets the hardware specification.

Better browsing experience: there are two things that mobile users like to do most; checking emails and surfing the web. Pocket IE is a pathetic excuse of a web browser. MS should either port IE 7 to Windows Mobile or license the excellent Opera Mobile browser.  Pocket Outlook isn't too bad although I am not sure what is so hard about rendering HTML emails from all sources (not just Exchange 2007)

Re-architect: the iPhone OS is based on the same core as Mac OS X (a modern Unix based desktop/server OS - talk about being built on the shoulders of a giant). WinMob is built on the very
aging Windows CE 5 platform. MS would be wise to use the Windows 7 mini kernel for future Windows Mobile releases.

Save screen real-estate: iphone-wm The screen on a Windows Mobile device is abused by the OS and applications end up left with very little screen space to be useful. Compare the iPhone UI with Windows Mobile and you will quickly see what I mean. The iPhone OS has a bar at the top that's 3mm thick. There is no bar at the bottom. Windows Mobile on the other hand has two bars, one at the top and another at the bottom, both of which measure 5 mm each.

Stop the me too dance (aka stop promising and start delivering): All we have heard so far from Microsoft ever since the launch of the of the iPhone are empty promises. First, we heard about how the next version of WinMob (due out in 2009) will bring a touch based UI that will be better than that on the iPhone. Shortly after that, we saw some pictures of WinMob 6.1 which has some very pathetic attempts of some of the iPhone features such as dynamic zooming in the browser and chat-like SMS interface. Most WinMob devices today are still shipping with v6.  Then recently, they announced how the Zune Store will
soon (also in 2009) be coming to Windows Mobile devices so that users can buy and download music/movies/games directly on the device (this was announced a week after Apple announced the iPhone appstore). As noted in my "the problem with being a copycat" article, this leaves MS a step behind its competition as they continually shout "me too!"

Next up: Things the iPhone needs to learn from Windows Mobile.

On a completely unrelated note, this is my first article to be written completely on the iPhone. The keyboard does take getting used to and you need to trust the auto-correction feature but after that, I would argue that I type faster on the iPhone than I did using the hardware keyboard on my previous phone (Ubiquio).

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