What I find interesting about WM is that it can be what you want. I have my customised and most people who see it think at first its an iphone cos I have it shelled, installed all the fancy slide appz etc, and does basically everything the iphone does and more. There is a big base of appz out there, and who uses internet explorer anyway. Opera mobile and others out there a lot better and safer to use. And even better I can add bigger memory cards, or swap them out with new ones etc. In the end I use my as a mobile office, syncs well with my pc, and I must say I do prefer being able to write my sms's in cursive and jave the thing type it out for me. But I also have multiple keypad appz which give better predictive than the default. And I rarely get crashes, and I do have it set to automatically reset once a day, but that's just a system maintenance thing. Always good to have a reboot every now and then.

Home screen can be modified but how is the performance and battery life drain with the OS? I had a smart phone and a WM5 & 6.1 for many years just went to iphone because I was tired of constant restarts and lockups with my 8125 & Titl

eeesh.

I upgraded my old Blackjack from WM 5.0 to 6.0 and had less functionality. This hex configuration blows.

This is one time where I have to say the iPhone GUI kicks a** over any Windows mobile O/S. Windows Mobile always seemed crappy, the only thing I liked was Windows Media Player.

This is ugly junk.

get an iPhone.. but really.. 6.1 was a great improvement atleast for my phone..

I hope the web browser has tabbed browsing.

Perhaps the icons can be rearranged, but for the most part I agree with others on the UI. The hexagonal arrangement just does not seem to make sense. More icons can be displayed with the traditional perpendicular grid layout without needing to scroll as much to see the remainder of them. It's a waste of precious screen real estate.

the sad thing is they copied the home icon from OSX. Well, it is not exactly they same...they photoshopped off the chimney. LOL. How pathetic.

Microsoft should just throw in the towel on Windows Mobile. This is horrible. They can not compete. This OS is a disaster. Talk about fugly. And alls they can do is copy Apple with the App Store and "My Phone"....how original.

If I was a Microsoft shareholder i would demand they kill Windows Mobile, XBox and Zune and focus on their OS monopoly and Office monopoly and stop wasting their money; they can not innovate or compete on a level playing field.

Actually I've now officially played all three new gen gaming systems, and have come to the official (personal) conclusion that I like the XBOX more than any other system. PS3 is far too expensive for their selection of crappy games, Wii, while in its own league r/t the the accelerometer, has crap and underdeveloped graphics.

XBox totally for the win IMHO.

As for the Zune, I can't say much.

NOW for windows mobile, it's been around for "business" users, while more and more home users are definitely getting on the bandwagon. I do have to say they have a long way to go, but are slowly catching steam. They'll have to if they ever want to stay in touch with reality.

...

At least you don't have to go with one cell vendor ONLY to get their product tho. 1000000000000 points off for Apple for being selfish pricks.

Windows Mobile is still a push telephone and not a touch phone like IPhone and just adding new icons ain't gonna cut it the system sucks big time compared to others I been on windows since my qtek 9090 i have htc hd htc cruise and a p3300 and they all suck in each there way all due to the windows system.
And the no upgrade option was what it took for me to skip windows and jump to Iphone and that phone really kicks a** tho the Navigation sucks so I still have my HD when going on holidays with GPS

"and they all suck in each there way"

"tho the Navigation sucks"

So...you're saying all phones suck in one way or another?

Agreed.

Not bad. The interface is nice but the browser really really sucks.

There isn't much to go on here at all. Would have to play with it for a bit but not impressed with this snippet. Hexagons? Clumsy when the iPhone interface seems to attract the kiddies well enough with a standard grid layout. Windows Mobile 7 is going to have to be something special but that would require substantial real innovation from our favourite punching bag. Still Windows 7 looks the goods so maybe 7 will be the magic number before we all migrate to the cloud.

The more I see WM, the more I like Symbian, Mac OS X and Android... Presenting the 'new' IE6 in 2009? Not a chance to update from WM 6.1 (which uses IE4!!)? I cannot understand how WM still exist, MS should be ashamed...

Not impressed. I'm on a WM phone (Sprint / HTC Mogul) and don't have much of a problem using my finger to navigate as it stands, so I'd need more than a hexagon system to impress me. I'm waiting for the Toshiba phone - it looks like the best option on the horizon outside of the Palm Pre.

Messy.
It always amazes me what Apple can accomplish compared to Microsoft when it comes to these devices.
This is fairly disappointing.
I've been on WM for almost 3 years and I've resisted Apple, even while watching coworkers move on.
Going to look past this and see what Google is planning next.

"Windows Mobile 6.5 comes bundled with a new Internet Explorer Mobile, which is built on the foundations of the now eight-year-old desktop version of IE6"

To be fair, you could just as easily say it's built on the foundation of "Mozilla Spyglass". What changes they've made (rendering, compatibility) might be a tad more informative, though less likely to draw flames (aka hits).

Sucks it won't be coming to older devices, but then, from what I saw of the "S Class" interface by LG in Nate's article...I can wait until I upgrade. Hopefully there will be improvements or we'll have a decent Android phone.