First Impressions of Windows Mobile 6 on my T-Mobile Dash

Although this post first appeared in my personal blog some time back, I thought it would be a good idea to share it with the broader audience here. This summarizes my initial impressions of the Windows Mobile 6 upgrade on my T-Mobile Dash.

Major Improvements

There are several significant improvements in this new operating system, some that I am probably not yet aware of. But, the ones that impress me a lot are:

• HTML email — I love being able to view HTML email on my Dash.
• Calendar improvements — The calendar now shows timebars on the daily view so that you can graphically see where your time is going, and the new weekly view is fantastic: it is a graphical view of your appointments, and you can see the details of each by just using the D-pad to scroll from left to right throughout the week.
• Task application — the built in Task application is now more than just the simple task viewer it once was: you can actually create new tasks with the app and edit existing ones.
• Mobile Office — You can now view and edit Microsoft Word and Excel documents on the Dash and you can view PowerPoint presentations on it (no editing capability for the latter). Moreover, the viewing mode for Mobile Word has a great smooth scrolling feature: makes it darned easy to read a Word document on the Dash.

The built-in Internet Explorer also seems to be much nicer, although I am not sure how to quantify the improvements in it.

I won't inundate you with screenshots, since there are tons of WM6 screenshots on the web now. But here is one to show the timebars in the new Calendar application:

It's Still a Smartphone Operating System

When it comes to installing third party software on this implementation of WM6, one has to note that it is still a Smartphone operating system. For example, when I install eWallet, I have to install the Smartphone version of eWallet. And, I can still use the Smartphone app, Jeyo Personalizer, to organize my Start Menu. Now, it could well be that software developers still have to tune their applications to run with this flavor of WM, and my suspicion about this comes from using Documents To Go for Smartphones. It seems to work great, except that it coughs on a couple of PowerPoint presentations. Unfortunately, I can't say whether it coughed on the previous WM implementation I had on the Dash or not, since I didn't try those particular PowerPoints out until today. It does fine with some PowerPoints and can't handle others ... whether this means it needs tweaking for WM6, or that it is a bigger bug, I cannot say. Update: By the way, PowerPoint Mobile handles well all of the PowerPoint presentations I threw at it, so there is nothing wrong with the files that Documents To Go couldn't handle.

Some Strange Behaviors

I've had a couple of really strange things happen since doing this upgrade.

First off, I now get an SMS message for every email that is delivered to my inbox. This a huge nuisance and I don't know how to turn it off ... I sure hope I'm not paying for these messages. To go even further with the strangeness, I have actually gotten a couple of text messages that were addressed to someone other than me. Really strange. Now, I will have to say that I am not totally convinced that the blame for this, which just started, is to be placed with the upgrade: I also had some repairs done to my DSL lines two days ago, and one of the fixes they implemented was to switch my circuitry to a different port. Perhaps this is the culprit. Perhaps neither is. But it is darned strange.

The other strange thing is that Agenda One didn't show yesterday's appointments in any of its views. I finally got it to show them by editing the appointments using the built-in calendar application, simply adding a space to the end of the appointment descriptions. Strange, huh? I have no idea what caused this. I can say that these appointments were either created on or modified on my Dash (rather than in Outlook), but so were other appointments that did show. Anyway, all seems to be well with this now. (Not sure if the problem has to do with modified databases within the new operating system or what.)

Well, those are my initial thoughts.

For others who have done the upgrade, what would you add?