I have an HTC Mogul (6800) phone which uses Windows Mobile 6.0. When I originally bought the phone I thought it would be a great opportunity to build some custom .NET Compact Framework applications for it. Five months later, I'm throwing in the towel. Sprint has received so many complaints about this phone and as much as I'd like to blame the hardware, I'm going to place a good part of my frustrations/blame on the software (Windows Mobile 6.)
Here's a rundown of some typical day-to-day problems:
- Locking up / freezing for no apparent reason (and no 3rd party software installed.) Remedy? Pull the battery (i.e. reboot.)
- Slow response to touch-screen input for dialing phone numbers. Remedy? Disable the keypad tone sound. Apparently playing a 'wav' file puts too much strain on the hardware... I'd buy that if my 1996 phone couldn't do it with 1/10th the processing power.
- My biggest gripe about Windows Mobile phones is...they're pen-centric. That's great if you have a chauffeur driving you around, but when I need to dial a phone number while I'm driving, I expect to use my fat fingers. Microsoft has yet to understand that their pen interface doesn't translate well to phones. Look @ the great work PointUI has done to make Windows Mobile devices achieve an iPhone-like interface. Unfortunately it's not 100% complete yet - they haven't replaced the default dialer for example. It's a decent work in progress.
Sprint had no qualms with swapping my 5 month old phone out for a new BlackBerry Perl 8130 - at no cost to me. It didn't take much to get it done, so I'm assuming this phone is not getting any rave reviews from their customers.
For another year or two, I say adieu to Windows Mobile. Maybe next time.
