Windows Mobile 6.1 Standard & Professional
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Introduction
The latest Windows Mobile upgrade brings minor, but very welcome additions to the platform. In this article, we'll cover both the Standard (non-touchscreen) and Professional (touchscreen) editions and show you what's to love about the Windows Mobile 6.1 update. Now, you'll notice this is not a full version upgrade, but just a ".1" upgrade so you know you can't expect a full overhaul. It really feels like just a quick update intended to fill in a couple of gaps between the Windows Mobile and Apple iPhone functionality. You'll notice some similarities between the Standard and Professional operating systems (such as the Internet Explorer and Text Messaging updates), but you'll also notice some odd differences. Read on for our thorough rundown of the next version of Windows Mobile to hit your phone!
Review Date: April 1, 2008
Picture Highlights
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| In the Sliding Panel screen layout, notice in the second row of icons how the one with a greater-than-zero number next to it becomes more prominent. This is indicating that you have a notification for that item. | The Music panel works in much the same way as the T-Mobile Shadow's "Neo" interface and links up with Windows Media Player. It will show album art and you can browse through and select other tracks to play all from here. |
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| Messages you send appear in line with the messages you receive. This makes it easier to follow the conversation, but more difficult to manage text messages in a received-time order. That's probably a fair trade off. | In the "Desktop" view mode, Internet Explorer does a pretty good job of rendering the page as intended. You can see this better when zoomed out. However, it's not very useful like this since the text is impossible to read while zoomed out and you'll have lots of side-scrolling to do while zoomed in. |
Overall Impression
Windows Mobile 6.1 is certainly an incremental upgrade meant to stave off defection until Microsoft can release a completely overhauled Windows Mobile 7. In terms of feature functionality, the only real advantages the Apple iPhone had over Windows Mobile Professional were the zooming web browser and threaded text messaging. Both of those holes have been (mostly) filled by the 6.1 upgrade. Windows Mobile still needs a much faster web browser rendering engine, but at least they got the interface right.
The Standard Edition of Windows Mobile 6.1 is a much bigger upgrade. The new "Sliding Panels" home screen layout is very well designed, and is sure to sell many new phones in the future. Most of the confusing parts of Windows Mobile have also been fixed.
Overall, unless you're dying for a zoom-able browser and threaded text messaging (both of which are also available from 3rd party developers in potentially lesser forms of usability), the Windows Mobile 6.1 upgrade is not a very compelling upgrade for existing users. For new users on the other hand, there are definitely some major improvements (especially in Standard Edition) that we can look forward to.
Rating
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