A look at the new Windows Mobile 6.5 smartphone OS

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Today marks the official availability of Microsoft's Windows Mobile 6.5 smartphone operating system. The main push behind 6.5 was to make the Professional (touchscreen) flavor of Windows Mobile more finger friendly and visually appealing, in an effort to keep up with the rest of the industry. Sure, the individual manufacturers, including Samsung, LG, and HTC, had all put there own enhanced user interfaces over Windows Mobile, but on its base level the UI still largely was the same as it was many, many years back.

That has changed now. I've shot two video introductions to some of the more obvious new aspects of Windows Mobile 6.5 as they appear on the HTC Imagio for Verizon Wireless. The videos go through the new default home screen view, which looks all the world like the menu on a Zune HD, as well point out little UI tweaks, the new honeycomb start menu, the IE6 browser, and the cool new lock screen. There's also some new functionality, like the Windows Marketplace app store (seen in the video) and cloud based backup system known as My Phone (not available when the video was shot).

In the end, though, the new UI is an improvement, but still lags behind much of the competition. Also, at least on the case of the HTC Imagio that was the subject of my video, few people will disable the HTC TouchFLO 3D system to get to the new WM6.5 user interface. And that's probably in their best interest, too. Windows Mobile 6.5 is better, and has some compelling features, but there are some obvious problems with stability, and the new IE6 based browser made me very glad that HTC still chose to include the very fine Opera browser on the Imagio.

But what's there to like? Plenty.

For starters, in spite of bugs I experienced with it, I really like the new lock screen and the idea that you can deal with missed events (calls, messages, etc) directly from the lock screen. Just tap on the lock icon and additional unlock controls appear, one for each type of missed event. Then you just slide the appropriate control to get to, say, the missed call log or the messages inbox. It's a good idea, it just needs to work a bit better.

Next up, the new Zune HD styled home screen. I really like it. Think of it as the evolution of the sliding panels home screen we saw on Windows Mobile 6.1 Standard (non-touch) devices. You can scroll through it with a finger easily, and swipe left and right to get to different aspects of that section of the home screen. The new designer themes, while a bit wild, certainly look good on the phone as well and are much deeper integrated into the OS. Watch to video to see it all in action.

There are also a lot of smaller tweaks in the UI widgets used throughout the system. The pop-up menus are much more finger friendly, and scrollable. The tabs on the setting screens (and elsewhere) now have rounded corners, just like many other aspects of the phone's UI. Even the OK button at the top right corner of some screens has ben rounded. The new look of the messaging client is also an improvement, too.