About two years ago I purchased a nice solid phone called the Samsung i760. We used Microsoft Outlook as our main contact & appt applications so the seamless Outlook connectivity with the corporate Outlook server was a big plus. Beyond this the phone was OK re making calls and had the standard PDA stuff on board and was a mostly solid piece of hardware.
Beyond Outlook compared to the iPhone which had been released around the same time it was a huge joke. Web surfing was like … well there’s really no acceptable metaphor, it was just godawful.
OK. So that’s the lay of the land 2 - 2.5 years ago. The phone runs windows mobile 6/6.1 and I’m thinking that MS is going to come out with some upgrade to improve the OS and browsing functions, They are a billion dollar company and this is the way the future is going.
One year clicks by, then two and nary a peep from Microsoft about phone OSes or PDA anything. Never mind being hung out to dry with the POS Windows Mobile 6.1. It’s like the exploding phone OS platform does not even exist for them. The Microsoft mobile OS sub is running deep and silent.
So my question is. How is this possible? They are not idiots. How do you virtually abandon the field and think you’re going to have some kind of credibility when you come crawling back with a new Microsoft mobile OS? Beyond this WHY would they think is this is a slick move strategically? Was there some notion this phone thing was a fad thing that was going to blow over? It’s not like they didn’t have the cash for some Mobile OS R&D.
I’m curious what the thought process was in making this determination. I’m on an Motorola Droid now and not going back after being hung out to dry.
I don’t know anyone who was enthousiastic about their windows phone (though the earlier windows CE versions for PDAs were quite popular and fairly well liked, AFAIK).
I used to have an i760. I thought the websurfing was pretty good (woo WiFi!), but the phone was horrible for texting, because it would lag way behind the keyboard and miss keypresses. Also, if a message didn’t send properly, it would give me a popup window telling me that, which I’d have to close before I could try to do anything else.
Never used Outlook on it (though I was amused that my phone came with its own version of Microsoft Office), and the battery life was outstanding (TWO batteries with the phone! Woo!). Also, the answer/hangup buttons were horribly placed, and I was always accidently mashing them when grabbing my phone from my pocket.
I did like the camera though. Never had any particular problems with it as a phone, answer/hangup buttons aside.
:eek:Wow… I had no idea they had taken that big a dump. It’s like they are in some alternative universe re what the market is looking for when it comes to mobile devices.
because Windows Mobile sucks hard. It’s beyond repair. The APIs simply don’t support the type of touch-centric UI that a modern smartphone requires, and to overhaul them enough to make them adequate would break most existing Windows Mobile software anyway. So why not just make a clean break?
the only people I know who claim they “love” their WinMob phones have something like the HTC HD2, and what they really mean is that they like HTC’s attempts to paper over the misery and fail that is Windows Mobile.
