As I scroll through them each new message spins up from the bottom of the screen in what looks like a tornado of whirling letters before coalescing into a readable message. however as soon as I want to reply or get more information the TouchFlo interface disappears and I’m shoved into windows. This is true for each and every one of the phones features. contacts, programs, email all of it. It all looks great for about a second but as soon as you try to actually use any of this stuff the facade disappears and you’re navigating through f*****g windows.
He goes on to voice other concerns, many of which are applicable to the platform in general. My first Windows Mobile phone was the HTC/Cingular 8125. This phone had it’s issues, the first of which was the fact that the screen was prone to becoming "de-synced", forcing me to occasionally have to navigate the menus using other methods to get to the little screen calibration program. Additionally though, the device was also slow and perpetually starved for resources.
Due to the fact that AT&T is a dreadful company, we switched providers at work when our contract was up. Since we went with T-Mobile I elected to get the HTC Wing. My belief was that since the phone was a generation or two newer and had a newer version of Windows Mobile that it would be a vast improvement over my old 8125 (which had since died). Fortunately the screen seems much more well behaved, but little else improved. Despite the price drops for comparable memory in the intervening years, the Wing comes with the same 64MB of user memory that the 8125 did (most of which is eaten up by the programs needed to run the device). If you want to make use of an SD card it will require a generous amount of registry hacking using a third party utility, at which point the card is married to the phone and you can forget about taking it out. Speed and memory management, always issues for Windows Mobile, persist in this latest rev and I’ve made ample use of the reboot button on the phone during the number of times that I’ve locked it up doing fairly innocuous tasks (such as loading a decent sized web page). It goes without saying that the interface is the same mediocre experience. With all the faults I feel like I’m transported back to using a desktop in 1995 whenever I use my Wing phone to any great extent.
As insult on injury, I had a brief chance to use a friend’s iPhone and I was amazed at how much better the whole package was, everything from interface to speed were much, much better. Insult on injury was the fact that at the time of my purchase, the iPhone sold for the same (list) amount as the Wing. Getting an iPhone wasn’t an option for myself, but I don’t see how Microsoft is going to pull this out considering that their cutting edge phone products are suffering from the very same faults that have dogged the Windows Mobile products for years.