I have never been a great fan of Win­dows Mobile on mobile phones. Prob­a­bly it is because I start­ed using Win­dows Mobile on embed­ded sys­tems a long time ago in my pre­vi­ous jobs and at the time it was not so impressive.

If we look at Win­dows Mobile phones on the mar­ket today we see that it basi­cally run on high end mobile phones, usu­ally smart­phones or PDAs. Unfor­tu­nately it needs a very good chipset to pro­vide you with the right speed and respon­sive­ness and this basi­cally lead to higher prices on the final product.

The Win­dow Mobile user inter­face has been the same for ages and it stands still even in new ver­sion of the oper­at­ing sys­tem. Apart from minor changes I do not really see any­thing dif­fer­ent from the past. It seems that Microsoft con­cen­trated more on adding func­tion­al­i­ties than on build­ing an eye candy sys­tem for the end user.

I think that the one mil­lione 3G iPhones should tell some­thing. I know, this is a sem­pli­fi­ca­tion of the prob­lem but let me go for it.

I would like you to have a look at these two pictures:

The first one is the idle screen you can see on the new HTC Touch Dia­mond, while the sec­ond one is com­ing from a great appli­ca­tion from Vito Tech­nol­ogy, iWin­dows­Mo­bile.

Both these appli­ca­tions are great appli­ca­tions and they basi­cally hide the default Win­dows Mobile idle screen with their own implementation.

Does the suc­cess of these two appli­ca­tion should tell Microsoft something?

Well, if one of the major Win­dows Mobile hand­set man­u­fac­turer and one of the best soft­ware houses devel­op­ing soft­ware for Win­dows Mobile see an oppor­tu­nity to deliv­ery to the end user a bet­ter idle screen and they hit the mar­ket with suc­cess I def­i­nitely think there is some­thing wrong with the Oper­at­ing Sys­tem they are using.

That kind of expe­ri­ence should be the stan­dard offered to OEMs.

Related posts:

  1. The Fight for the Idle Screen
  2. Turn Your Mobile Phone In A Mobile WiFi Access Point.
  3. Is It Time To Waste Tran­sis­tors In Mobile Phones?
  4. Let The Cus­tomer Choose
  5. Mobile Oper­at­ing Sys­tems, some­thing is (slowly) changing