Microsoft Prepares Next Version of Windows Mobile: “Crossbow”
This review of the next generation of the Windows Mobile 6 OS is on my list of things to read this week:
Okay, this is probably me being unfairly judgmental since I haven’t even read the review yet (it printed out at over 10 pages and it was a busy day…), but what’s really new in the look and feel department? Well, some fancy new icons. A prettier new default theme. But so what? The UI components are still butt-ugly. Look at how the tab pages render — all blocky and so 1980’s.
Scanning through the article, it looks like the predictive text feature has been enhanced at least. Thank God! The current implementation on Qwerty devices (like the Motorola Q) totally blows. It’s difficult to work with on an email product because in the To field of a new email, we want to show potential email address matches from your address book when you type an “S” (like sally@duncan.com), not random English works like “Salt” or “Sadist”. Sadly, the OS doesn’t let us (as software developers) turn off the predictive text feature on individual text fields. It’s either on for the whole device or off for the whole device.
One of my colleagues has turned the predictive text feature off for his qwerty Windows device because it’s so unpleasant to use. I’d love to see one of the secret internal Microsoft usability test reports on that feature…
