JeffKirvin.net

pocketnow.com - Reviews - Windows Mobile 2005: Exposed! - v3.0

PocketNow has a really nice set of screenshots taken from the recently leaked beta of Windows Mobile 2005. I realize this isn’t a finished product, but I’m still disappointed in a number of things.

First, let’s talk about the good stuff. I really like the “soft button” concept borrowed from the Smartphone side of the house. In WM05, the input method button sits in the center of the bottom menu bar, and the labels to either side of it can change based on the application, like you’d see on a cell phone. Very slick.

The graphics are very pretty, but really, aren’t we almost done with the whole “soft focus glowing blue” thing?

Email can now scroll the entire screen, meaning the header is now considered part of the document and not a separate frame. Cool, but why is this a big deal? SnapperMail’s been doing this on the Palm for years.

Pocket IE has some nice enhancements. First off, it loads text first then goes back to fill in graphics. This can make a big difference when you’re talking about browsing at GPRS speed. It also has a progress bar at the bottom so you get an idea how much of the page is left to download. Nice. There’s a full screen view, but no obvious way to get out of it.

Charting in Excel. Yay. Wait, don’t Documents To Go and Mobi-Systems Office do this already on the Palm? Yeah…

Pocket Word (renamed to Word Mobile) can now view charts, but it can’t create them. Maybe next year, guys…

WM05 supports Powerpoint viewing, but it may not support editing. No last minute changes to that presentation.

The biggest and most interesting change, though is that they seemed to have ditched the whole dynamic memory allocation thing. Now all the system RAM is used for Program Memory, and storage is dedicated Flash memory. Not sure I like this, but it does make things a little simpler. In a lot of ways, memory on the PPC under WM05 works the exact same way it does on the Tungsten T5 (and presumably, new NVFS PalmOne devices like the E2 and Zire 73). Less and less difference hardware-wise between the two platforms.

ActiveSync also gets an update, but it’s mostly cosmetic.

On the whole, a bit underwhelming. I’d hoped for more out of “Magneto”, but let’s face it. This isn’t a real priority for Microsoft. The Pocket PC is just a placeholder until Windows XP-based ultraportables catch on (the way Tablet PCs never did).