By Oo Gin Lee

LESS gridlock and more tweakability - those were my first thoughts about Windows Mobile 6.5, Microsoft's new operating software for smartphones and mobile devices.

Applications are laid out as large icons which you can scroll through with a finger flick on a touchscreen phone.

Getting into Marketplace was a challenge. I failed to log in using the HTC Touch2 and Acer neoTouch phones provided to me by the phone makers and only succeeded with an Acer neoTouch sent by Microsoft.

But once I got in, the interface looked good, with apps easy to search for.

Facebook is installed by default and a really neat feature is that it automatically pulls the phone numbers of your Facebook contacts so that you can phone a friend through his Facebook profile.

What I want most in a smartphone is the ability to synchronise my contacts, e-mail and calendar over-the-air to a hosted service like Gmail. This is the beauty of the Android as well as the BlackBerry for those trying to sync their corporate accounts.

Windows Mobile 6.5, however, falls short.

Microsoft is trying to redeem itself with a new service called My Phone. It backs up phone contacts and calendar over-the-air to a server.

But it does not handle e-mail, so if you want to synchronise Hotmail or Windows Live mail, you would have to do it via default the e-mail client in the phone.

You can also launch Windows Live for Mobile to synch your Windows Live Messenger contacts to your phone address book. But it gets complicated: Windows Live for Mobile and My Phone do not talk directly to each other and you end up with a phone that tries to merge contacts from two separate databases - My Phone and Windows Live.

This is unlike the Android, where the calendar, contacts, instant messaging and e-mail all link directly with Google's respective services over the air.

The generic e-mail software, by the way, works terribly with my Gmail account. It could not complete the first synch on all three phones. I managed to get only about 30 of my G-mail messages - out of the thousands I have - at first synch.

Thankfully, a new cool feature - ActiveSync - now supports Gmail in addition to corporate e-mail accounts.

The good thing about ActiveSync is that I could tie up my Google calendar and contacts over-the-air to the phone.

I am also disappointed that Windows Media Player 10 on the phone does not comply with the networking protocol for entertainment gizmos - Digital Living Network Alliance.

I could not stream music and video from my Windows 7 laptop directly to the Windows phone.

I liked Internet Explorer 6 on the new OS. I managed to view live video feeds off my home IP camera via Internet Explorer, but could not do so on the Android browser.

Final say

Windows Mobile can now say it looks good via 6.5, but it needs to catch up to iPhone and Android which have a better apps store and a sexier user interface.

ginlee@sph.com.sg

This story was first published in The Straits Times Digital Life.

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