Gadgetory

hey guys it's Brandon Minnemann from pocketnow.com there's a lot of rumors about what Microsoft is going to announce at Mobile World Congress 2010 but one thing's for sure they're likely to talk about an involved version of windows mobile 6.5 really what 6.5 was supposed to be people are calling it Windows Mobile 6 point 6 or at least that's the rumor and Microsoft will sort of branded as the capacitive this capacitive supporting version of Windows Mobile 4 sort of lower end devices and then it remains to be seen whether they're going to talk about Windows Mobile 7 our guess is that they will there's rumors that there will be two versions of Windows Mobile 7 so a lot of different versions of Windows Mobile in the past we've shown you sort of this evolved version of windows mobile 6.5 which a lot of people have called six point five point three so what we wanted to do is take you through the latest which is build twenty three five one eight from xda-developers and show you sort of all of the things that have come together to really make this different than Windows Mobile 6 point 5 that you would get on a Windows Phone that you could buy in a store right now so let's go through a few things ok let's take a look at the Start menu so we're gonna go to the button on the bottom here and that's really the most noticeable difference about six point five point three or six point six whatever you want to call it compared to six point five all of the buttons reside on the bottom of the screen making them more finger friendly so you don't necessarily have to use a stylus and they're very graphical too they're not necessarily text-based for example for lock there's a lock icon whereas in windows mobile 6.5 that same area has text that says lock so here's a HTC hd2 and down there it says lock six point five point three actually has a little icon another thing you can do in Windows Mobile 6 point 5 point 3 that you can't do in 6 point 5 is move around icons to anywhere on the screen whereas in six point five you could move them around but you would have to tap and hold and do move to top or move down there wasn't really anything else you could do so this should have been the way six point five was off the bat right and this works in the settings screen or really any other place something else that different in six point five point three is the notification area at the top of the screen so if we tap up there we get serve this magnified view of icons that we can action on and let's say we want to tap on the battery and we're taken to the battery application and you get the point and if there are too many notifications up there you can actually scroll to the right and scroll to the left if it's five on the screen at one time let's go into email because there are some changes in the email application or outlook mobile as we know it very well by now something that's new is now we get a preview of the email which is nice underneath the sender we also get threaded messaging so here I've got an email with Malatesta if I tap on his email I get all of the different emails that I've had with him sort of putting them all into one screen and at the top it says Mouse email very convenient and as you can see of all these graphical buttons are down here and they all represent something different they're a little bit cryptic and they'll take some getting used to if this isn't indeed the final the final look of Windows Mobile 6.6 but they do pretty much the same thing that you've come to expect you just have to sort of memorize what they mean and you can filter by different criteria up here right now it's filtered by conversation view but of course you can go back to message type or from received subject and so on and so forth something that's also new is that the scroll bars on the right side of the screen are different they're a little bit thicker and we saw this a long time ago in six point five point three but they're much more easy to grab than you would find in windows mobile 6.5 let's get out of here and go into another application let's just go into the alarms application to show something else a lot of the user interface elements have been made bigger such as the check boxes and also the drop-down list much much larger much better suited for a capacitive touchscreen display where you can't use the precision of a stylus okay let's go out of this and go into another application this time let's go into context okay here in context they're an entirely new way to add context so again we get these icons down here instead of text and by the way if you slide up in the keyboard and look at this same screen in landscape it looks really bad because these buttons get very spaced out and very ugly take a look yeah so here they are and there's just a bunch of random buttons scattered about anyhow let's go into the create a new contact screen it will flip it back to portrait and we'll go to outlook contact and this screen has been made much more finger friendly compared to the other sort of database looking contact entry form so we can add a telephone number by tapping here we get a nice large pop-up and by the way all of the buttons have been changed to this larger style rounded windows esque style of buttons we can add an email address and so on and so forth and it's much easier to add a new add a picture for the person we could swipe to the right to go to the next tab and that's bringing up notes so the keyboard just popped up then we can go to set ringtone and you're back to where you started so a nicer interface for adding contacts and there's one more thing we want to show you in this version of windows mobile 6.5 point three pocket Internet Explorer actually looks a little bit different although strangely different so if we go into Internet Explorer mobile the buttons on the bottom have been sort of reconfigured and right now there's a little error message I'm gonna click cancel and if you take a look down here on the bottom we have a start menu button Y in the browser I don't know and we also have an X button so let's take a look at how that looked in windows mobile 6.5 just as a comparison okay so here are the buttons in 6.5 here there are in 6.5 point 3 there now there's an extra X button which does make sense but there's also a Start menu button which is really strange and it literally opens the Start menu for some reason so a lot of mysterious changes in windows mobile 6.5 we're really at the end of the day unsure what Microsoft is going to do at Mobile World Congress but it's a good bet that they're gonna release some evolution of windows mobile 6.5 possibly called six point six that will bring support for capacitive touchscreen displays and sort of buy them a little bit more time before shipping you know the amazing Windows Mobile 7 will keep an eye on it be sure to follow us on Twitter for the latest on Windows Mobile 7 and Windows Mobile 6.6 or whatever they're calling it at twitter.com slash pocket now tweets that's it for now