Gadgetory

hey guys it's Brandon Minnemann from pocketnow.com and this is the last part of our series of the pocket now throwback we're taking a look at the old legendary eye pack 3650 which came out of the gate in 2000 running an operating system called Pocket PC 2000 it didn't have Wi-Fi did that phone functionality it had a horrible display but it really revolutionized mobile devices and a computing power that you could fit into your pocket so in this video we're going to compare it to a present-day device the HTC Touch pro2 running the version of windows mobile 6.5 that we'll be shipping on devices coming up in the in the fall of 2009 and we're gonna kind of compare this experience to see how far we've come and how far we really haven't come with Windows Mobile so we're in turn on both devices and right away you can see the contrast in the screen they use different screen technologies and obviously the resolution on the touch pro2 is much much much greater than you will find on the eye pack so let's take out a stylus so we can kind of control things so back in Pocket PC 2000 in 2003 we saw Microsoft bring forward this concept of the today's screen and we still have that today the idea of the today's screen is that in one glance you should be able to see your next appointment your next task who has called you who is text of you who has message do everything in one screen because most of us are busy people we have a lot going on and our device should show us in one quick glance what we're doing versus the iPhone where you have to journal into every application to see where you need to be who has called you know what messages you have things of that nature so the today's screen actually has been replaced in windows mobile 6.5 with what they call titanium and this is kind of a more expansive version of the today screen so instead of just owner information upcoming appointments messages and tasks we have pictures and music missed calls voicemail text messages which have become huge in the last nine years email calendar and favorites so a really very versatile way to see all of your stuff and we can actually revert back to the old old Windows Mobile today's screen quite simply we just turn this off and we hit all of these things and now we're back to the standard old today screen that lets you see all of that information in one glance it's not necessarily the most beautiful screen but it's very customizable and anyone that's been using Windows Mobile will tell you that you can just customize the heck out of the screen you could have icons for people you want to call and weather in stocks and pretty much anything you need to see you can customize on the Today screen so let's drill into the Start menu which obviously previous 26.5 was a drop-down menu kind of like you get on the desktop version of Windows but now in windows mobile 6.5 you get a larger finger friendly list of programs a big focus in 6.5 is on finger friendly optimization because that's really where touch phones are going in no longer do people want to use a stylus so we go into programs to see how limited the amount of programs and what kind of compare things here so let's start with games and as we talked about in a previous video what once was called jawbreaker is now called bubble breaker but they do basically the same thing these are the stock games to come with min Windows Mobile for the longest time and then we have good old solitaire which Microsoft also puts on all of its desktop version versions of Windows which hasn't changed very much the resolutions a little higher but that's pretty much it let's take a look at some other programs to see how they've changed let's go into the calendar application and again this hasn't changed very much but of course you can get third-party programs like Pocket informant to really spruce up your calendar so we can go to the next view which is day you can go to the next view here which is the month view this is the week view and the month you again it's very similar to how it was nine years ago what is different and what you're gonna notice here is that the buttons on the bottom are different back in I believe Windows Mobile 5.0 they introduced standardized soft keys on the left and the right so instead of having a bunch of buttons here you just had two menus but that created another problem so now we have menus after menus in some screens not here but sometimes we'll have an over arrow than one an over arrow and before you know it you have many many different screens Windows Mobile seven is likely to finally fix this problem let's go into the contacts application to see what that looks like again contacts application not much has changed you can type in the name up here here you have an alphabet you can jump right to it although if you have a lot of contacts here you'll actually get the alphabet along the side we can tap on new tap on new outlook contact pretty much the same thing something that HTC has done is spruced up this screen so that when you have a newer device like the touch pro2 and you're running touchflo 3d you get a nicer looking display here rather than the dull windows mobile contact form that hasn't been updated in ages or really since the beginning so let's zoom out again and take a look at some other programs quickly that we have loaded onto here such as Pocket word Pocket word is hardly changed although it was called Pocket word then now it's called born mobile although word mobile can read obviously 2007 file formats and that sort of thing a really quick reference to the keyboard this is the only keyboard that you could get back in the days of the Pocket PC but now you have the HTC keyboard which is fantastic and you can use your thumbs to type you can turn it into landscape to get a wide screen keyboard back in the days of Pocket PC you had the tap tap keyboard that you had the use with the stylus and you really couldn't use your finger to type here buttons were way too small but this is really HTC's changes and Microsoft is very fortunate that HTC is a hardware partner and they've made all of these changes to Windows Mobile to really bring it up to speed to where other mobile phone operating systems are what I want to do now is kind of drill into settings to see what settings are the same and what's different and you're gonna find that they're pretty much the same it looks a little different on the right here because the menu system has been changed for 6.5 but we still get personal system and connections and here is personal system and connections so we're gonna go to the system tab and we get pretty much the same items we have the about certificates and let's see the difference in the about screen looks about the same the tabs have been kind of rounded off in windows mobile 6.5 that's one of the problems with windows mobile 6.5 it doesn't go back to the previous menu screen that you are in before so we'll go back into system take a look at memory here obviously modern-day windows mobile devices have a lot more free memory so we have 120 megabytes of free RAM which is great but over here as you saw before we only have five megabytes of free RAM and of course this doesn't have flex crawling I just tried to do flex scrolling if to use the sidebar completely and totally and impersonal you still give the same old screen that you get for the did the today's screen they actually brought it out in one level so you can change the theme of the today screen or you can go to items and choose which items you want to have on the on the today's screen and obviously there are more that have been added in this particular on this particular device we've touched both 3d and windows default which is titanium and right now we have just the standard Windows Mobile stuff turned on so settings really hasn't changed the menus to get into them look a little bit different but at its core they are the same settings that there were many years ago so overall at least from a visual standpoint Windows Mobile or Pocket PC hasn't changed that much in the last nine years we still have the basic same thing at its core although they're running different versions of Windows CE II although there's a lot of different underlying technologies but visually speaking they're very much similar which is a good and a bad thing it's good because developers have had a ton of time to customize the interface you can totally revamp the entire Windows Mobile operating system to really be your own but it's bad because a end user gets it and they want something that looks awesome out of the box and sometimes Windows Mobile doesn't bring that unless you're getting a touch pro2 or one of the newer devices that has the whole customization so we hope you enjoyed the look at the old compact Ipek there's a legendary device that really brought a lot of change to the world of Windows Mobile we're looking forward to the next evolution of Windows Mobile as we see the six point five point one or the interim release before seven and of course we're looking very much forward to Windows Mobile 7 and all the awesome hardware to come so that's it for the look at the old Ipek 3650 that's it for now