Apple on Thursday made a subtle-yet-major revision to its App Store policy, enabling extra content to be sold through free iPhone apps. It’s a move that immediately impacts the publishing industry, and it could pay even bigger dividends if the Cupertino, California, company indeed delivers its highly anticipated touchscreen tablet.
While the most obvious beneficiaries would be app developers, a market segment that can also benefit from the new in-app commerce model are people and companies that create content and need to set up shop in a way that doesn’t, in effect, charge someone for just walking in — like media publishers.
Newspapers and magazines are reportedly in talks with Apple about repurposing their content onto a “new device,” presumably the rumored touchscreen tablet Apple will deliver in early 2010. Numerous reports suggest an Apple tablet would have a strong focus on redefining print media. Enabling in-app commerce through free apps was a crucial move to help make this goal a reality.
WASHINGTON, D.C. - A new mobile digital television signal means you can take your favorite shows with you on the go-- live.
On Friday, FOX 5 got a demonstration of digital TV in action. With this new signal, you can receive broadcasts on a laptop, cell phone or mobile device.
How much will that convenience cost? Prices haven't been announced yet, but one company plans to offer a connection for laptops for $99. Handsets could cost between $300 and $400.
An association of 800 TV stations agreed Thursday on a broadcast standard for the digital signals. Eventually, you could also be able to get emergency alerts customized by location, live audio feeds, and traffic information all on your mobile device.
California hacked the total size of the deal by 8 per cent to $4.14 billion bonds could not allure enough demand to achieve the desired goal.
Apart from $2.82 billion in taxable bonds, the state's deal included $1.75 billion in Build America Bonds, while $1.31 billion in tax-exempt bonds.
Yields on bonds ranged from 3.75 per cent to 7.23 per cent for the taxable debt.
Yields on the tax-exempt bonds ranged from 2.95 per cent to 5.0 per cent.
Speaking on the issue, Janney Montgomery Scott's chief strategist, Guy LeBas, said, "Unfortunately, California seems to have come to market right when buyers are starting to balk at the absolute low level of yields."
State Treasurer Bill Lockyer's office stated that retail investors purchased $505.2 million in bonds, around one-third of the $1.55 billion offered to them.
It should be noted here that California has the lowest credit ratings in the US on
Key lending rate will probably stay near zero for an ‘extended period,' Bernanke says The Fed's key bank lending rate is now at a record low near zero and will probably stay there for an “extended period,” Mr. Bernanke said in prepared remarks to a Fed conference here.
That echoed the pledge he and his colleagues made at their meeting in late September. The goal: super-low rates will entice people and businesses to spend more, nurturing the budding recovery.
In a surprise move earlier this week, Australia's central bank raised rates, the first nation in the Group of 20 countries to do so. The move raised questions about which country would be next.
Although Mr. Bernanke has previously said the United States is likely out of recession, he has warned that the recovery won't be robust enough to prevent the unemployment rate — now at a 26-year high of 9.8 per cent — from rising. It is expected to top 10 per cent this year, and rise as high as around 10.5 per cent in the middle of next year before slowly drifting downward.
Still, Mr. Bernanke made clear on Thursday that when the time is right the Fed will have the tools and the political will to reel in the unprecedented amount of money it has pumped into the economy to avoid unleashing inflation.
“At some point, however, as economic recovery takes hold, we will need to tighten monetary policy to prevent the emergence of an inflation problem down the road,” Mr. Bernanke said.
The Fed chief laid out some more details about how the central bank would sop up the money.
Besides boosting its key bank lending rate, the Fed can raise the rate it pays banks on reserve balances held at the central bank, Mr. Bernanke said. That would give banks an incentive to keep their money parked there, rather than having it flow back into the economy, where it can stoke inflationary pressures. The Fed also can set up the equivalent of certificates of deposit for banks at the central bank, another incentive for banks to keep their money at the Fed.
The Fed also can drain money from the financial system by selling securities from its portfolio with an agreement to buy them back at a later date, Mr. Bernanke said. Such large-scale “reverse repurchase agreements” can be done with banks, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and other institutions, he said. Some analysts have said that might involve transactions with money market mutual funds. Or the Fed can sell a portion of its securities outright.
“Overall the Federal Reserve has a wide range of tools for tightening monetary policy when the economic outlook requires us to do so,” Mr. Bernanke said. “We will calibrate the timing and pace of any future tightening, together with the mix of tools to best foster our dual objectives of maximum employment and price stability,” he added.
It's sure to be a high-wire act for the Fed. Tightening too soon could short-circuit the recovery. Waiting too long could ignite inflation.
The Fed's balance sheet has ballooned to $2.1-trillion (U.S.), reflecting the creation of a spate of lending programs intended to ease the financial crisis. That's more than double before the crisis struck.
As the crisis has eased, so has demand for some of the Fed's lending programs.
Short-term lending, which hit $1.1-trillion at the end of last year, when the crisis was still mounting, has fallen to about $264-billion, a drop of more than 75 per cent since the turn of the year, Mr. Bernanke said.
“We expect this trend to continue as markets improve,” he said.
Demand for another “commercial paper” program that provides companies with short-term financing needed to pay for salaries and supplies also has declined sharply, from $334-billion at the turn of the year to less than $50-billion currently, Mr. Bernanke said.
Meanwhile, the Fed is on track to wrap up this month a $300-billion program to buy government debt. That program aims to lower rates for mortgages and other consumer debt, the Fed chief said.
The Fed also is buying $1.25-trillion worth of mortgage-backed securities, in another move to force down mortgage rates. Bernanke said both programs appear to be having their “intended effect.”
The Fed chief once again expressed his displeasure at last year's rescue of insurance giant American International Group and the Fed's financial backing of JPMorgan's takeover of Bear Stearns. Those operations were taken “with great discomfort,” Mr. Bernanke said.
The two largest US cellcos went on the warpath this week with contrasting statements about their web strategies.
Verizon Wireless formed a far reaching partnership with Google, echoing the search giant's existing alliance with Sprint and pointing to Android dominance of the CDMA carriers' own-branded web services platforms, which will be vital to differentiation in the open access world, and will take shape from 2010AT&T is exploring its own options to create an AT&T mobile web experience that will compensate for falling data rates and the loss of the usual carrier lock-in weapons – exclusives, subsidies and closed network/software platforms. It increasingly seems to be distancing itself from Google and turning to a range of partners usually more associated with European operators, from Opera to Nokia. The three mobile web models The mobile web world is likely to break into three distinct battlefields from next year, and major carriers will have to take account of all three. First, the conventional smartphone approach, where the phonemaker and carrier engage in a tug-of-war over brand visibility and commercial relationship, but the handset itself is the key to customer choice.
This choice increasingly rests on the availability of downloadable apps and the overall software environment of the phone, not just hardware features. Of course, the premier example of this in the US has been the AT&T-iPhone relationship, which Verizon Wireless has failed to match for impact with a branded smartphone range that relies heavily on BlackBerry and Windows Mobile.
It is likely to ally with Android manufacturers such as Motorola and HTC to redress this balance, but its initial Android announcements, made with Google this week ahead of the CTIA Wireless and Entertainment show in San Diego, fall into the second mobile internet category. This is the creation of an operator branded platform, with a distinctive set of user interfaces, applications (with the mandatory store) and mass market webphones.
In this model, the carrier tries to keep customers loyal by offering a cost effective, usable and attractive web experience from which users, especially those below the smartphone uplands, will feel comfortable, even when not tied in by a long contract or closed network. To make this model work at all, operators need to move well beyond their conventional and limited portals and attract large bases of developers and device partners - as Vodafone has epitomized with its transition from old-style Live! to its new Vodafone 360 (see separate item on Telco 2.0).
They also need to harness the differentiation they can derive from their networks, opening proprietary features such as address books and location to third party programmers. The operator branded 'smart pipe' approach is much discussed, but actual offerings are only just emerging – Orange Partner, China Mobile oFone, Vodafone 360, and now Verizon and AT&T are trying to create their own offerings.
The third mobile web model could disrupt the other two in time, but only when wireless networks have the capacity and robustness to support vast amounts of data traffic and still generate profit for their operators. This means WiMAX and LTE, probably both in their next iterations, plus plentiful spectrum and advanced new networks and devices geared to maximum efficiency.
This is the 'Google vision', where the browser replaces the functions of the full-blown operating system and all applications are created and run in the browser, using standard techniques like HTML 5 and JavaScript, with data and back end processes located in the 'cloud'. Downloads, apps optimized for specific devices or networks, and semi-closed portals all disappear in favour of a fully open web akin to that on the PC – where, of course, the carrier becomes a bit pipe rather than a smart pipe.
Current networks do not support this however, as highlighted by Google itself in its eagerness to work closely with the carriers it eventually seeks to sideline, pushing Android even as it develops Chrome as the browser/OS of the future. This raises the ironic prospect of Palm webOS being closer to the open web dream than Google itself (see inset).
Apple's iPhone is still king of the smartphone hill. (Credit: Apple
J.D. Power and Associates on Thursday released the results of its 2009 Wireless Consumer Smartphone Customer Satisfaction Study and the 2009 Wireless Business Smartphone Satisfaction Study. It may not surprise you to learn that Apple topped the list for satisfaction among consumers, but the iPhone is also the No. 1 pick among business users, too.
The factors determining satisfaction for business users (in order of importance) are ease of operation (29 percent); operating system (23 percent); physical design (21 percent); features (16 percent); and battery function (11 percent).
Apple scored 803 out of a possible 1,000 points among business users in the survey. Research in Motion's BlackBerry finished in second place in the business category, with a score of 724.
The factors and how they were weighted differed for the consumer and business surveys. Factors used to determine satisfaction for consumers were ease of operation (which accounted for 30 percent of the score), operating system (22 percent), features (21 percent), physical design (18 percent), and battery function (9 percent).
J.D. Power said Apple came in first with consumers, scoring 811 out of a possible 1,000. LG came in second with 776, and the BlackBerry took the third spot with 724.
While the company didn't give specific numbers, J.D. Power said the iPhone performed "particularly well in ease of operation, operating system, features, and physical design."
Overall, consumer satisfaction with smartphones has gone up 23 points out of 1,000 from a year ago, while business users report an increase of 43 points during the same time.
A scientist at Cambridge University has been awarded the Nobel Prize for Chemistry for his work that has led to the development of new antibiotics. (L-R) Venkatraman Ramakrishnan and Thomas Steitz of the US and Israel's Ada Yonath win the Nobel Chemistry Prize 2009 Photo: AFP
Dr Venkatraman Ramakrishnan, a senior research fellow at Trinity College Cambridge, has scooped the prize for his work at the Medical Research Council's Laboratory of Molecular Biology.
The physicist was awarded for his contribution in developing an atom-by-atom map of the mysterious, life-giving section of a cell, known as a ribosome. The breakthrough has been essential for progress in the field of antibiotics.
While DNA molecules contain the blueprint for life inside each cell of every organism, it is the ribosome that translates that information into life.
They showed how the ribosome, which produces protein, functions at the atomic level.
"As ribosomes are crucial to life, they are also a major target for new antibiotics," the Nobel Committee for Chemistry at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in Stockholm said in a statement.
His success follows hard on the heels of Chinese-born Briton Charles Kao being awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics yesterday.
Dr Ramakrishnan, 57, is one of three winners of the chemistry prize for using x-ray crystallography, a technique which uses x-rays to determine atomic arrangements, to create a model of the DNA ribosome structure.
He won a third of the prize along with Thomas Steitz from Yale University and Ada Yonath from the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel.
He said: "I have to say that I am deeply indebted to all of the brilliant associates, students and post docs who worked in my lab as science is a highly collaborative enterprise. "The MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology and the University of Utah supported this work and the collegiate atmosphere there made it all possible.
"The idea of supporting long term basic research like that at LMB does lead to breakthroughs, the ribosome is already starting to show its medical importance."
Dr Ramakrishnan is a US citizen and was born in Tamil Nadu, India in 1952.
He currently works as a senior scientist and is a group leader at the structural studies division of the Medical Research Council Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge.
A statement on the Nobel Prize website reads said the research had led to antibiotics and the "saving of lives and decreasing humanity's suffering".
Microsoft wheeled out its answer to the iPhone today with the launch of a new version of its mobile operating system and an iTunes-style marketplace for smartphone applications.
Windows Mobile 6.5 attempts to address some of the shortcomings of previous versions that have caused Microsoft to lose substantial momentum in the highly competitive smartphone market.
The first phone in Australia to carry the new operating system is HTC's Touch Diamond 2.However, some critics had their claws out today, criticising the new OS for being too little too late from the software giant.
"Windows Mobile 6.5 isn't just a letdown - it barely seems done ... It's an interim product and a vain attempt to hold onto the thinning ranks of people who still choose Windows Mobile despite not being somehow tethered to it until the tardy Windows Mobile 7 comes out, whenever that may be. And it won't work," said a review on the Gizmodo blog.
Key features of the new OS are a re-organised user interface, larger touch-friendly icons and a more advanced web browsing application. The company has also packaged in a free back-up service for photos and data called My Phone to protect users whose smartphones have been lost or stolen.
Microsoft said that My Phone synchronised the content from contacts, appointments, texts and photos to a password-protected website, and also let users publish photos from My Phone or their handset to Windows Live, Facebook, MySpace and Flickr.
The Windows Marketplace is a crucial addition to its mobile offering as the company rapidly loses ground to other popular smartphone platforms used in the BlackBerry (Research In Motion), and the iPhone, which are firmly established in Australian business and consumer markets respectively. * New apps marketplace launched * Free back-up tool to protect data * Re-organised user interface * Larger touch-friendly icons * More advanced web browsing
Microsoft said its competitive advantage lay in the ability to duplicate work and productivity applications from the computer screen to the mobile phone.
"Customers are telling us they want a seamless, integrated experience over the three screens in their life; the computer, notebook and mobile phone. Our next step is in breaking down those walls," said Alex Stewart, Microsoft's local consumer and online manager.
But the company has some ground to make up according to Australian telecommunications research firm Telsyte. In a recent survey conducted by the researcher, the BlackBerry emerged as the operating system of choice among Australian businesses for 22 per cent of firms, while Microsoft slipped to No.2 with 16 per cent, down from 21 per cent last year.
“That Windows Mobile is no longer the top-of-mind OS platform hardly came as a surprise, given that the vendor has been quiet with no major announcements in the past 18 months in a market where new competitors have risen to the forefront,” said Warren Chaisatien, research director at Telsyte. The sentiment was no warmer in the consumer segment where Telsyte conducted a similar survey on 900 smartphone users, which revealed the iPhone had been adopted by one-quarter of Australian consumer smartphone users in the short time it has been on the market.
“The rapid rise of the Apple iPhone and the strengthening of the BlackBerry in the consumer space have come primarily at the expense of Symbian-based and Windows-based smartphones,” the researcher said.
Aside from having no apps marketplace, Windows Mobile OS has been widely criticised for its non-friendly user interface and a lack of streamlined functionality with many applications and settings inaccessible from the home screen.
To get around this, Microsoft licensees HTC and Samsung have been overlaying their own interfaces onto Windows Mobile “to create more competitive products and make up for the usability constraints of Microsoft's platform”, Gartner said.
Figures from Gartner reveal that Microsoft's global market share of mobile phone operating system fell in the second quarter of this year to 9 per cent of the market, while Research in Motion and Apple both increased their shares.
Adding to the intense market pressure is Google's relatively new Android platform, which will be the driver of numerous new smartphones due for release over the coming year.
HTC's Touch Diamond 2 is already being sold in Australia on the previous version of the OS, and users will be able to upgrade their handsets once their carriers support version 6.5.
Telstra is the first to support the upgraded HTC Touch Diamond 2 with others expected to come on board in coming weeks.
Other HTC smartphones due to carry Windows Mobile 6.5 at a future date will be the Snap and the Touch Pro 2 and Telstra said the LG GM730 would also be upgraded.
Although HTC has overlayed its own user-friendly interface onto the Touch Diamond 2, users will now be able to choose between the HTC interface and Microsoft's new interface.
While changes to the actual function of the Touch Diamond 2 will be subtle, the new Marketplace and Myphone back-up will help to boost the popularity of the product, said Anthony Petts, sales and marketing director of HTC Australia.
“It allows end users to customise their devices and make it more of what they want it to be. With the back-up service as well, these are certainly good enhancements.”
Microsoft's new Marketplace, launched today for version 6.5, has about 250 applications available including popular games and Facebook and Myspace apps priced from $3.99 to $20 (and above) for productivity applications. These will also be made available to all phones running Windows Mobile 6.0 and 6.1 by the end of the year.
But whether these developments can carry enough momentum to bring Microsoft's operating system back into the game is by no means assured said Chaisatien.
He believes "complacency" has prevented Microsoft from dominating the mobile market and that its greatest challenge now is to create a visible product roadmap to get more application developers interested in the platform.
“Market presence, mindshare and roadmap are what matters to developers and we still don't really know what Microsoft plans to come up with in 12-18 months."
He added that the company should look at carving a new market niche in the smartphone sector.
“When it comes to entry-level pre-pay smartphone market, it has not yet been serviced. I think if Microsoft can move very quickly to service that market [it will be] an opportunity for them.”
Windows Mobile has always been at its best when used with an Exchange server, and 6.5 looks set to show its true colors when Exchange 2010 debuts. That will bring with it Conversation View, which groups sent and received emails into a themed conversation, the ability to check whether a contact is free or busy from their global address list card, and a “nickname cache” which auto-suggests contacts for the To: field in an email based on previous correspondents, even if they’re not a saved contact. It’ll also debut speech-to-text transcription of voicemails, which will slot neatly into unified messaging, and preserve reply/forward flags not only on the smartphone but over to Outlook on the desktop.
Even before Exchange 2010 arrives, however, there have been some much-welcome usability tweaks to contacts and calendar management. It’s now possible to select more than one contact entry and beam them wirelessly, copy them to the SIM/Outlook, or delete them, something we can’t quite believe has taken this long to arrive. Push-To-Talk has also been integrated with contacts, SmartDial and call history, and since conference calls are now more common your Windows Phone can now not only keep one caller on hold while on a second call, but alert you to an incoming third call too. You can also bypass the contacts app altogether, and save new numbers directly to your SIM. Similarly, emails embedded in SMS or email messages can be pulled out and saved to a new or existing contact, and Windows Mobile 6.5 now supports the Bluetooth Phone Book Access Profile (PBAP) for remote administration.
Little changes make pleasant differences when trying to navigate within and between apps, such as the ability to call a phone number in the body of a meeting invitation (complete with passcode sequences) and new typing shortcuts; tapping “T”, for instant, shoots you to the top of the page, while “B” moves you to the bottom. A double-space tap automatically enters a period and a space, while holding letters capitalizes them. There’s also a new Gesture Physics Engine which introduces common “rubber band”, “bounce” and “scroll” animations to gestures, which means that kinetic scrolling is possible and lists bounce when you flick down to the end of them. Third-party developers will be able to access these touch and gesture APIs for their own software.
The biggest graphical work comes in the new home, Start and lock screens, however, which see Windows Mobile 6.5 Professional learn – and advance – from the non-touchscreen 6.1 Standard. The new Windows Phone homescreen has been well previewed in various pre-production leaks, but basically lists key apps as touch-friendly plug-ins that serve both as shortcuts and as notifiers. As standard, Home/Clock, Calendar, Music, Photos, Phone, E-Mail and Text are included, and as you scroll or tap through them they each show their status: how many new SMS messages are present, for instance, or how many missed calls there have been. A second tap takes you directly to that app. The lock screen, meanwhile, becomes far more usable, with notifiers brought down from the status bar across the top of the display and into the main body of the page. That gives Windows Mobile 6.5 room to list missed calls, voicemails, e-mail, text and calendar items separately; not only that, you can unlock the smartphone and go straight to the item of interest, rather than having to navigate there from the homescreen, or even listen to voicemails or return calls without unlocking the handset at all. This is actually one of the most successful changes Microsoft have implemented, and makes far more sense – using the main body of the display rather than merely the uppermost quarter-inch – than in previous versions.
Finally, the Start menu gives up on attempting to recreate a Windows desktop feel on a mobile device, and instead kicks you into a distinctive honeycomb launcher. Bigger icons (together with kinetic scrolling) make finger-navigation more straightforward, and it’s easy to reorganize the default list to suit your commonly-accessed apps. Rather than picking 8-10 top applications and then having to kick through various panes of the Programs menu for titles beyond that, all of the programs – plus folders, such as for Games shortcuts – are presented on the one screen. It’s quicker, certainly, than navigating the Windows Mobile 6.1 Start menu, and there are some neat touches like the honeycomb scrolling in screen-sized chunks each time you flick.
Altogether it’s a significant change to the native UI, though it’s hard to tell exactly how many new Windows Phone users will ever see it. Part of the problem lies, ironically, with Microsoft’s own hardware partners, who over the past few years have been forced to become software developers in order to keep their products competitive. Given the comparatively dreary UI of Windows Mobile 6.1, companies like HTC and Samsung have developed their own interface shells that sit on top of the core OS and generally aim to make it more finger-friendly. HTC TouchFLO 3D and other shells have helped keep Windows Phones afloat, but they also mean that some of the more obvious changes – to 6.5’s UI – can be lost by to the end-user.
Still, it’s possible to turn off TouchFLO 3D, TouchWiz and the others, should the mood take you, though we found it wasn’t as straightforward as it could be on the Windows Mobile 6.5 review devices we had in. Happily there are other places where the new Windows Phone OS makes its mark, one being the browser. In previous iterations, Internet Explorer Mobile fell far short of the usability experience of rival third-party browsers, prompting manufacturers to put alternatives such as Opera Mobile in place instead. With 6.5, Microsoft debut Internet Explorer Mobile 6, and it certainly offers more flexibility than its predecessor. In addition to supporting Flash Lite, for online video, there’s also better touch-zoom control and a cleverer rendering engine. Even so, however, we found it struggled with some CSS formatting, while the success of streaming video proved very dependent on the smartphone’s processor and available memory.
Also new to the platform is Windows Marketplace for Mobile, Microsoft’s own take on the on-device application download store. Like Palm and Android’s stores, Windows Marketplace lacks the breadth you’ll find in Apple’s App Store for the iPod touch and iPhone; however, unlike those two, Windows Mobile already has a vast back catalog of software that’s already been written for the platform. The Windows Marketplace only went live this past week, but the limiting factor for what’s on offer is likely to be how fast developers can submit their wares (tweaked to satisfy the policy guidelines Microsoft demand for inclusion) and how fast Microsoft themselves can check and approve each submission.
The download store itself is split into categories (and sub-categories), including most popular apps and most recent additions, with filters for paid or freeware titles. There’s a full search function, and each app has a description, reviews and screenshots; to download, you’ll need a Windows Live ID, and paid apps are either charged to a credit card associated with that ID, or directly to your phone bill if your carrier supports it. Downloads take place in the background and are queued up for installation, and a similar system flags up available updates; from that same menu you can rate, review or remove an app.
It’s all straightforward, and should make finding new software for your Windows Phone a much easier endeavor than it has been in the past. Interestingly, Microsoft is looking to play ball with carriers and develop individual Marketplace sections for them, but in return the network has to offer mobile billing. Since that’s arguably easier for the end-user than associating and maintaining a working credit card with a Live ID, it’s a neat way to make the consumer experience slicker. As before, you’re free to sideload applications from outside of the Windows Marketplace for Mobile, or use a third-party software browser if you choose, which does at least make Windows Mobile 6.5 more open than, say, Apple’s iPhone.
Another addition to 6.5 is Microsoft My Phone, the company’s wireless smartphone backup service. As we’ve seen in beta for some months now, My Phone keeps an online store of contacts, photos, videos, text messages and other information which is not only there in case your Windows Phone is accidentally wiped, but can be accessed via the web-interface. Should you lose your smartphone you can ring it, lock it or even remotely wipe it via that same website, similar to how Enterprise users or Apple MobileMe subscribers are able to. However, it’s worth noting that Microsoft offer MyPhone free (though the remote-wipe demands a fee) whereas both of those other systems are not.
Microsoft have obviously put a lot of work into streamlining the smartphone ownership experience, and given how far ahead in the consumer space rival platforms are, that’s a good thing. Over-The-Air (OTA) firmware updates are now supported – network and handset manufacturer depending – and there are many behind the scenes bugfixes and tweaks intended to make the OS less clunky. In its native form, it’s a more attractive, cleaner and more usable platform than Windows Mobile 6.1 could manage.
However, it’s not the all-out OS relaunch that many are, not only hoping for, but relying on to pull them back to Microsoft’s platform. The menus may have been reskinned, the settings pages streamlined, but Windows Mobile 6.5 still feels a lot like its predecessor; those coming from devices with manufacturer-led UIs, such as HTC’s handsets, will be even harder pressed to identify the changes. It’s saying something when an OS refresh many months in the making feels, to some extent, like another UI shell.
Faster, more stable and more capable it may be, but Windows Mobile 6.5 still leaves us hungry for Windows Mobile 7 simply because that OS promises the revolution Microsoft’s platform so badly requires. Windows Phones do some things very well – their Exchange integration is superb, and that functionality will only get better once Exchange 2010 launches – but Microsoft face a tough struggle promoting them as consumer devices. Enterprise users will likely find this latest version a decent mixture of the familiar and the new, but Windows Mobile 6.5 still falls short of a knock-out blow against webOS, Android and the iPhone.
