July, 2009
Today I’m going to dive into Microsoft’s mobile offerings and there is a lot to say here. Remember that we are talking about this first from the perspective of the end user. We’ll get to the enterprise and the development perspective later. It’s tempting to trace the history of mobility at Microsoft, but I’ll just leave a couple of links to wikipedia for the curious (WM, Win CE), and focused on the latest released versions. The latest version of Windows Mobile is 6.5 which confusingly actually runs on Windows CE 5.2. WM 6.5 is an incremental upgrade to WM 6 with a focus on the user interface and web browsing experience. I’m not going to talk about Windows CE (which has moved on to version 6.0 and split with WM), but it is worth knowing that it exists and runs on a whole bunch of embedded devices from automotive in dash control panels to robotic controllers to point of sale terminals.
So what does Windows Mobile do well from an end user perspective? From a UI standpoint it contains very similar paradigms as the full Windows desktop environment. In many ways it is really Windows shrunken down to a smaller form factor. The Start menu is there, with a file explorer, Internet Explorer, and quick launching of other programs and applications. Windows Mobile phones support a variety of ways of getting on line from using a PC based Active Sync connection, to WiFi, Edge, 3G, HSDPA, etc. The entire office suite (one of the strongest parts of the Windows platform) has been brought down to the device including the recent addition of OneNote. Push email via Exchange is a snap. It is also very easy to find and install 3rd party software that can literally do anything on the device. Just look at Resco’s File Explorer for a great application that completely replaces built in WM functionality. Microsoft hopes to make this even easier for the consumer with the launch of their new Marketplace (not yet live). The variety of form factors and different packing also is a huge plus for Windows Mobile as there is a device for just about every need in every industry. I’ve seen shop workers happily banging away with a screw driver as a stylus on the screen of a WM device used to track inventory or part deliveries. There are WM devices that you can work on in a down pour or slam against a brick wall and not damage. From a usability perspective, the addition of bar code readers, 2D scanners, RFID readers, etc brings huge work flow efficiencies to end users and WM delivers here by supporting a whole range of these kinds of devices. Despite some of the complexities I will talk about below, WM offers a staggering amount of configurability. This was exemplified while I was at a customer’s site with my boss and we were locked out of any sort of network access as is often typical when you end up inside someone elses network. I was carrying my iPhone and my boss had a Windows Mobile 6 phone. We sat down in a room and after about 10 minutes of tinkering he had managed to share his phone’s 3G connection via bluetooth to his laptop and we were online. Although tethering is coming to the iPhone, at that time it would have been impossible for me to manipulate my device like that.
On the other side of things there is so much that is frustrating about Windows Mobile. WM 6.5 feels like the Windows ME of Windows Mobile. It is a stop gap solution to tide everyone over for a little bit longer. The changes to the start menu and today screen are frustrating and not very user friendly. With the resistive touch screen, drag scrolling just doesn’t work well and the device has trouble telling the difference between you wanting to scroll the start menu or click on an icon. The look and feel is fine, but it is neither revolutionary nor functional so I’d almost rather have the old WM 6 setup back. As you dive into the rest of the system you get this wonderful discontinuity between some of the new look and feel and all the old forms and dialogs. It feels like a big mish-mash of parts. Discontinuity is nothing new to WM. The ‘X’ in the upper right hand corner of applications doesn’t actually close them, it minimizes them to some unknown and unseen tray and you have to go through three or four dialogs, plus tabs to get to a screen where you can activate them again. This has been such a usability bane, that many mobile device manufactures have gone to great lenghts to create their own task manager programs that show you running applications and override the ‘X means minimize’ behavior. The general feel of the OS is chaotic and unorganized. You always feel like your file system is a mess and open or save dialogs never really show you what you expect to see. Another major issue is the complete dependency on the stylus to navigate the OS. WM 6.5 claims to be more finger friendly, but with the mish-mash of look and feel you find yourself still reaching for the stylus to accomplish most tasks or desperately trying to use your finger nail to press the exact right section of the screen. Don’t even try to use the soft keyboard if you’ve lost your stylus. I joked in one of my first posts about how the Apple Store uses Windows Mobile phones as their POS terminals. I always ask the employees if they know it’s Windows Mobile they are using and if they know who writes their software. The best response I got was from an employee who confessed to me that they thought the device was running DOS. I don’t know if I’d go that far, but WM does look like it’s straight out of 1995. Other end user issues include how difficult it is to get on a network in the stock OS (once again device manufactures have written their own apps to address this), and how unreliable Active Sync is. Once you know the 10 extra steps for working around each issue in network connectivity it’s not a big deal, but the average user will probably fall back to just playing solitaire. Even simple things like adjusting the sound have been made complicated forcing you to make way more decisions than are necessary at the moment.
Overall, there is so much wasted potential here that I’m frustrated by the current state of Windows Mobile. I know that the competition in the space is heating up and I hope that forces some real change in Microsoft’s mobile OS. I understand that it is a huge challenge to support the massive ecosystem of device manufactures, software vendors, carriers and other partners. These devices come in so many shapes and sizes. They have different screen resolutions. Some have keyboards, others don’t. There is a ton of legacy code built on WM technology that Microsoft does an amazing job of supporting on each subsequent OS release. From an end user perspective I would never recommend that a general user like my mother buy a Windows Mobile smart phone - it doesn’t meet her needs. From a business user’s perspective I’ve seen more an more people transition away from Windows Mobile and be blown away by the usability of the other platforms in the marketplace. From a mobile field worker’s perspective I don’t think there is any other choice right now, but these people are generally using 1 or more specific applications and don’t deal with the rest of the OS. As a developer who writes WM applications on a daily basis, WM has never met my needs as an end user. There’s a lot of hush hush right now about the development and release of the next version of Windows Mobile. I sincerely hope it is a game changer.
