FINALLY someone writes this on a blog!!
With all the criticism that WM gets, I keep wondering why people complain. Its okay if WM hasnt changed MUCH, it was always WAY ahead of its time.
iPhone users are still getting all excited over VIDEO and MMS and COPY paste for gods sake. Functionality wise WM has done this for AGES. And what about click and hold context menus. I cant live without them!
There are just so many things I can say in favour of WM but I will just leave it to just agreeing with this post. I am a through and through WM fan and with the ICON system beautified over its old Windows 3.1 styling, I will DEFINITELY be checking it out
And can I just also say that with the RADICAL changes promised for WM7, I am afraid it might be a ‘dumbing down’ of the platform which frankly worries me a little

This is interesting, because it sounds like you and I want very much the same thing from an OS — stable, robust, and customizable via 3rd party software — and that is a lot of what drove me to the Windows Mobile platform when I chose my smartphone.

Unfortunately, “stable” and “robust” haven’t really characterized my experience. Maybe it’s because my device, the Samsung Epix, seems to be Samsung’s problem child. But whatever the cause, I have *not* been impressed by the stability of the platform. On a stable platform, I’d expect applications may misbehave every now and then, but have the problems confined to that application. Instead, I see the whole device get sluggish (i.e. take ten seconds to wake up), or entirely unresponsive, or interfere with the ability to take or place phone calls.

And I have no confidence that behavior on my device will improve. On a desktop OS, i expect platform updates to fix things every now and then, but it’s not clear I’ll ever get those with WM on the Epix. We *might* get WM 6.5 someday, but last time I checked there was no date set for that.

I haven’t tried the other smartphone platforms for myself, so I’m not really sure how low the bar is in this market, but I’m kinda hoping that Android catches up in functionality by the time I need to replace my device and I’ll try that.

Oh, and if I’m unfairly blaming WM for what is really a failure of implementation of Samsung or AT&T, let me know, and I’ll certainly take that into consideration the next time around.

I’ve been using Windows Mobile 2003 on a touchscreen device for six years now, and it still meets my needs and performs great. And there is a ton of free (and cheap) software available for it, just have to do a little searching instead of them being all in one place like the iphone app store. Almost any program written for Windows Mobile in the past 10-12 years can be run on my device. No complaints here!

I agree with Tabish that I am concerned about the potential direction of future Windows Mobile versions, for multiple reasons. I’m hoping they retain backwards compatibility and a ‘classic interface’ option.