Gadgetory

hey guys it's brandon minuman from pocket now calm and we're excited to show you a tour of windows mobile 6.5 or at least the beta of windows mobile 6.5 that comes from XDA developers this beta has some of the features but not all of the features that will be out in windows mobile 6.5 when devices start shipping with it later this year I don't recommend that you try this on your device because it's still a little unsteady and it doesn't work completely and if you don't get the rom update right you may break your device so let me take you through this here the home screen as we've seen many times before comes right from windows mobile standard which is the non-touch screen of windows mobile so we have this kind of sliding panel that jumps around on the screen a similar concept here although it's slightly different what happens is that there is a there's a little window in the center and it doesn't move and so when you slide your finger along the screen what you're actually doing is moving the background so if we slide the background down two messages we can see we have no new messages we can go to the time and swipe our finger to the side although nothing happens there we can go to voicemail and favorites it'll launch pocket internet explorer 6 mobile we can see our next appointment we can add a new appointment by tapping in you know stuff that you would find on Windows Mobile standard home screen okay so that is the they're still calling it to today's screen by the way they may change that later on the bottom bar and top bar are transparent which is really cool because you get to see more of the wallpaper in the background and it's likely that windows mobile 6.5 will ship which with a pretty nice wallpaper as we're seeing Windows 7 and Windows Vista compared to windows XP at a lot nicer wallpaper okay so let's go into the start menu and of course the Start menu doesn't exist anymore you press the start button and you're taken right to the honeycomb now you may be wondering why did Microsoft decide to go with this scrollable honeycomb interface well as Adam Lane described on pocket now the honeycomb shape or the I guess that would be a hexagon shape provides a lot of surface area making for very easy finger friendly operation compared to the iphone and I'm not knocking the iphone but it's kind of an improvement over the square iconic interface on the on windows mobile 6.5 and I like the honeycomb I agree that it makes it very finger friendly so what we can do is scroll through the honeycomb and the scrolling is a little slow right now because this is a beta but you can kind of get the point that it would be really easy to find a program in this list now what you can do you can move a program to the top of the honeycomb if you use it a lot like file explorer you tap and hold and you click move to top and it jumps and because this is a beta it doesn't always work let's try it with calculator move to top I didn't work here but you get the point so we can go into other parts of this of the menu if we go into settings settings is no longer a separate screen it's really part of the honeycomb it's just another section of the honeycomb and what we can do is we can scroll through all of our settings we can actually bring one of these items to the main honeycomb so I just clicked add to favorites so now if I close out and I go back in we see Communication Manager added to the favorite part of the honeycomb interface so the honeycomb is customizable you can move things around which is good you can put your top most use programs right on the top so that you don't have to scroll down to the bottom let me show you something else about windows mobile 6.5 I'm going to go into file explorer and here's something that you can notice right away is that the highlighting is kind of 3d not that big of a deal of course but I think it's a nice visual touch also there's a new physics engine that allows for a really good flick scrolling at least improved upon from previous versions of Windows Mobile and so and we also get the little Vista spinning spinning waiting cursor so we can go to the top and flick scrolling works quite well you can stop it with your finger flip faster and of course the scroll bars on the side are faster now so you can easily grab them with your finger and slide that around also all of these soft de menus have been over halt so if we press menu we kind of get this hovering menu pop-up and what we can do is we can click the down arrow to get to the other entries or we can actually flick our finger up and kind of carousel through all of the options and it's really easy to just choose any option here from the soft key menus now that they're a lot bigger on the screen and of course the X button in the upper right corner is a lot bigger to making it more apparent that to get out of this screen you press the X button up there and you're taken back to the main screen and of course windows mobile 6.5 has a new lock screen although this lock screen is still the beta it's not actually what we're going to find on the final shipping version the shipping version will have a lock button here and then you can actually slide downward and see if you have a new any new calls new messages new emails and then you can slide the respective slider to the right and it will take you directly to the SMS application or the email application depending on whether you have new messages so a great way to save some time but this beta just has a simple little slide to the right block a mechanism up at the top so that's pretty much it for the windows mobile 6.5 beta like I said this has some of the features but not all of the features of the upcoming windows mobile 6.5 of release and of course to keep abreast of the latest windows mobile 6.5 news keep it to pocketnow.com or follow us on twitter at twitter.com slash pocket now tweets that's it for now