Windows Mobile 6.1 walkthrough... Zzzzz.

Is this for Standard devices only? Heres an idea MS, why don't you let me have profiles on my $400 "Professional" device?

The reason they take small steps in updates is because you can't just throw out a completely new user interface. People are used to the normal one, it's familiar, and this is good. In order to progress, you have to take small steps or else people are going to see something completely new and different and they're going to hate it because they can't do the stuff they normally would (i.e. work).

Just look at what happened when Apple released OS X. The first version was horrible. Long-time Mac users hated it. It was so drastically different from OS 9, it was buggy, it couldn't run existing programs, the excellent GUI conventions in OS 9 were lost. Numerous Mac faithful decided to switch to Windows for the increased stability and application compatibility since they would have to learn a new OS anyway and the original Mac OS X was obviously designed more for demonstrations and marketing than for getting actual work done.

This is also probably why so many people are not upgrading to Windows Vista. It looks like it's designed for flashy eye candy and not for getting work done efficiently.

Not sure what you guys are referring to regarding the alleged Task Manager difficulties. It is clear that there were two different task managers that were pulled up so that we could see the differences. The first one was pulled up via the 'Start\Settings' menu, then he closed the other one using the first 'Task Manager'. He then pulled it up again from the 'Recent Programs' list. They are two distinct screens with different functions and were both brought up for us to see them. It appears that they are the analog to the 'Applications' and 'Processes' tabs respectively, of MS desktop OS. The second Task Manager had information regarding the Overall Memory Usage, to which the first one did not, and appears to have a 'kill' process option.

David Pogue clearly has no clue as to how an effective open platform infrastructure works. If he did, he would not be yipping about a task manager as this is a great diagnostic tool for application issues and application control in an open platform OS. All of the best OSes on the market have them and they are necessary as an assumption that we can somehow make perfect software which never has issues is nothing more than an exercise in mythical thinking.

I am surprised and disappointed that it took this long for MS to bring an effective Task Manager with a kill function to take out those processes which secretly chew up memory.

The zooming feature in PIE looks kewl, but it looks like the rendering is still crappy. Hard to tell, cause he did not wait for the whole page to load before he closed the app.

Not sure how I like the new 'Start Menu' but the Today Screen looks promising. I just hope it is open to third party plug-ins.

Overall, it is worthy of a .1 label versus the huge, misrepresentative, label change from 5 to 6. I just hope they do not try and make it so that folks have to buy a new device to get such a small leap. Guess that is really up to the folks who made your devices, you know the real ones to blame for the incredibly short lifetime of these devices.

Lol! Jerry thats funny! I looked back at it and yup you are right.

Like David Pogue said "You shouldnt need a task manager"

Oy vey!

Of course I am joking.......


Did you see how many clicks it took just to get to the task manager app? First you have to get to the task manager panel, then when you select it, you are thrown into a task manager screen then you have to select the app to close then press the button to close it. Oy vey!

Wouldn't it be great is someone from M$ actually wanted to make a good interface? How about having the actual panel show the tasks and be able to close them from there? Common sense, no?

Jerry you are joking right? It took Palm a year to get the darn upgrade in the phone. Forget 6.1 you are never seeing it.

Hey....didn't anybody notice the only feature that makes WM 6.1 a killer update?

"IE also uses a new font, which looks worlds better"

Oh man, I can't wait! Maybe AT&T will get this on Treo's ASAP. :) LOL! (Man, I crack myself up)

i expected more when I first heard about this

Its sad Mickey. This shouldve been a bigger splash.

Love the article title....Agree 100%.

At least you can cut and paste now on the WM6 standard phones, that was very annoying!