Windows Mobile 6.5 Announced

The latest version of Windows Mobile was finally unveiled today at MWC2009. I have been a long time user of Windows Mobile devices (Pocket PC’s as they were previously known as). Lets take a look to see if they have fixed the regular frustrations of a sluggish GUI and bad browsing 🙂

The latest version is named Windows Mobile 6.5. 3 highlights were to be found at the launch with the best one being a new GUI (graphical user interface). Long time users of Windows Mobile/Pocket PC devices will know that a stylus is often needed as some icons are just too small to cope with. This is where the new design comes in. The menu system now uses a honeycomb/hexagonal style layout which makes the area around the icons larger and in turn, makes you hit the right option when you need to. The whole system is designed to be used with just one hand. A zoom slider can also be found on the device allowing you to get closer to what is on the screen. To access various features of the phone a gesture system is used where you can simply swipe up/down/left/right to access various programs.

One of the bigger annoyances is Internet Explorer on a Windows Mobile device. It’s just slow, unfriendly and really annoying to work with normally. Pocket IE luckily has had an update too. The page can now be zoomed with a slider and all of the non-essential UI elements have been taken off screen so that they do not take valuable screen estate. Another cool feature is the double-tap on IE. You simply tap the screen and the page zooms in to allow you to read the part of the page you want. Hopefully the new Pocket IE interface will help with the let down that previous versions have had.

The Windows Mobile 6.5 also will give access to Windows Marketplace which seems to be pretty much the same idea as the Apple App Store. What the Marketplace will do is allow you to buy WM6.5 apps right from your screen rather then having to hunt around in a small IE browser or copy from your PC. This alone is excellent news.

The last feature is not new but is still in Beta. The feature is called MyPhone which is an online backup system that allows you to sync up your phone data to a password protected web site. The MyPhone system does not allow Exchange syncing or Wi-fi details to be backed up, but it does backup contacts, SMS, media files etc… making it very handy should you lose or break your phone.
When is this coming out?

Smartphone running the new Windows Mobile 6.5 should be available around the middle of 2009 with some older phones being upgradable if they have the power and memory needed to run it.

Via: UberGizmo