The next step in Windows Mobile is Windows Mobile 6, also commonly referred to as Crossbow. We had the privelege to work with it and see what it brings to you, the professional roadwarrior. With this major update there is a huge focus on the mobile professional: the knowledgeworker that uses this device during his work on the road. In this review we aim to show what these improvements are and how they affect you.

We do not do product announcements, but we do feel compelled to share our experiences with the new version of Windows Mobile: it is a major change in the OS and it can affect the landscape of the mobile device market as we all know it. The question remains if this change is in fact an improvement for you in your daily life. To help you make up your mind, we have written down the experiences we have with this OS. This is a rather lengthy review, so we have added a table of contents to it, to help you find your way easily.

Our experiences are based on months of working and testing Windows Mobile 6. We used the new OS during our own work and business situation intensly. We personally focussed on the overall usability of the device for business users. In this review mainly focusses on the value of the new OS for business users, not on the esthetic value of the new appearance nor on the new possibilities for developers. We want to focus on what business users would gain from switching from Windows Mobile 5 to Windows Mobile 6. In our opinion there is a lot gained by this transition, although there are some critical notes as well.

Overall appearance

Traditionally, the even updates are more focussed on visual appearance and the odd versions are more focussed on newly added functionality and integration of a new CE kernel. THis is no exception: the whole user interface has gotten a major overhaul. Although looks certainy aren't everything, it is pleasant if the looks of the user interface are esthetically pleasing. The user interface is more aligned with the glass look of Windows Vista and the icons are aso more in line with the current Windows appearance of icons.

This new look does improve the contrast on the device, improving overall readability. Also the new 3D-like icons with larger objects will also improve readability. Overall, the usability of the user interface in direct sunlight or smaller screens has improved quite a bit.

Primairy PIM functions

Besides good looks the functionality of the Personal Information Management (PIM) applications also have been updated. Inour opinion they are not major changes and we hessitate to call them improvements of your daily life. In fact some could be considered the introduction of a problem.

Calendar

The most visual change in the calendar is rather subtle: you can now set your own personal view. This allows you to force the view you see when you open the calendar to be the agenda, day, week or year view.

The other subtle change is that there now is a timebar representing the free/busy period in your calendar. This ribbon is above the calendar view. Personally I do not see the use of this since it is duplication of information on the same screen, wasting screensize and reducing overview. However it looks nice and some people might think it is an attractive feature.

A major improvement is the handling of meeting requests. You can now see who is invited and what their role in the meeting is. You can also invite others by forwarding the meeting request. This comes in very handy when you want to dodge a meeting or want to move it. Modifying or deletion of a meeting now also triggers a dialog f you want to notify the meeting organizer.

Contacts

Contacts have undergone a small improvement that can save a lot of people a lot of time in the field. When entering contacts, you used to get a default order in which they appear in list. THis might not be the way you want that person to appear. However, the only way you could change this was by editting the contact on the desktop. With Windows Mobile 6, you can edit this information on your device.

Tasks

Although from the first glance the task view has not changed, the functionality behind it has changed. Small change is that you can now use the left softkeys to mark a task complete, instead of creating a new one (which was the normal behaviour of the old operating system).

The list-view will now show all future tasks as well, which is more consistent with the desktop version of Outlook. Huge disadvantage is that time management methods like Getting Things Done are hindered by this view, without any possibility of correcting it. Most time-management methods, like Getting things done, depend on irrelevant (future) tasks to be invisible. If you show future tasks you easily get sidetracked or overloaded with signals, making you lose focus on what is important now.

This sounds a bit overrated, but companies working with Microsoft Project Server, that propogate the project tasks through Microsoft Outlook into the task-lists of individual team-members, could easily introduce a flood of tasks for the team members. Most of these tasks are in the future and in effect you then reduced the possibilities to overview for the user.

This is also cause for some inconsistency in the user interface. The today-plugin will still hide future tasks for you, while the takslist can still show you a huge list of future tasks. In our experience this way of working with tasks will only work if you keep your complete task list short. Although this sounds simple and is the goal of any person, practice indicates it rarely is. 

Communication

The most important updates for business users are related to the communications functionality, which got a several updates. Most of the changes are not fundamental: they are small updates polishing the OS further for use while on the run. But details do matter and actually do improve the usabilityand effectiveness of the OS a lot more in business situations.

Phone

A great improvement in the overall usability of the device is the introduction of voicecontrol as a integral part of the OS. It wil read the name of the caller out load and you can select the caller byvoice as well. This works rather well while driving a car.

The phone physical interface has changed as well, it now comes with a smartdialer developed by Microsoft by default. This is a rather complex beast that shows the last 10 calls in your call-history, your speed-dial numbers and then your complete adressbook. By using the D-Pad you can scroll down, but there are no tricks like the normal contactlist (that starts to scroll down the alphabet instead of individual contacts after 2 seconds).

The smartdialer uses the keys to find a contact. By entering the letters through the numeric keys (press the 4 once for an "i" etc.) you can select a telephone number or name. This might not work as well in northern European countries where there is a high overlap between the given name and the- family name, resulting in huge lists if you look for people called Erik, Jan or Piet. We have investigated the use of the smartdialer in some northern European communities. 50% of the people did not want to use a smartdialer because of usability problems. Our estimate is that some people will learn to use it anyway, and others will hate the solution forever.

Unfortunatly this also removed the quick access to the contacts. The button for the contacts has been replaced with a button for hiding the keypad. Keypad hiding allows you to see more contacts (partially solving the problem of the many similar names), but it does remove the "contacts" button. Especially when you normally search for contacts by company a lot, this might be a problem. So it might not be an improvement for people with many contacts in a business situation.

An improvement is that the quick dial-list is always visible when you open the interface. The first three persons in this list are always visible when you start the user interface. Since evidence suggest that many people call around 80% of the same 2-3 people anyway, this can be quite a good improvement.

A major improvement is that the history belonging to a number can be retrieved. By pressing the number in the call-log you can get an overview of all calls to that number. THis is a great way to identify when you called a certain person. This information is also partially included in the contact: you will see when you last called a certain person. Unfortunatly there is no way of finding all calls to a specific contact, so you do have to remember which number you used to contact a specific person.

Another practical and much wanted improvement is the possibility to save a number to an existing contact. This reduces the hassle when somebody calls you from an unknown number and you you want to save it to an already known contact: with older versions of the OS you could only creat a new contact from a number, but could not add it to someone alreay known to you. My best guess is that updates to existing contacts are more frequent than additions of contacts.

Another practical improvement is the removal of the lock during phonecalls. It is quite annoying that during a long phonecall you can be faced with the challenge of keep talking and unlocking your device to read some e-mail. Although this sounds like a small change, in practice this removes a real pain in the neck.

E-mail

One of the most important aspects of a Windows Mobile device is the possibility to check e-mail. Mobile e-mail is an important part of business life: around 37% of mobile users use their mobile phone to retrieve e-mail and around 76% of the executives uses mobile e-mail. So improving this e-mail client makes a lot of (business) users happy. There are some major improvements in that area. They range from support for HTML e-mail to optimizing the capabilities for effective e-mail management.

Support for HTML e-mail

Windows Mobile 6 has a big improvement for the average e-mail user: it now supports HTML e-mail. Many, many people had that on their wish-list and it was the one of the major reasons why alternatve e-mail clients were so popular: many people wanted to see e-mail like the sender intended.  So were in the past you needed an alternative e-mail client, now it works out-of-the-box.

One of the best improvements is that by doing so, you can also read handwritten e-mail sent to you by people that use a TabletPC. This used to pose a problem since there is no alternative plain text associated with the handwritten content.

Integrating into your own back-office

Routinely people past links from the internal sharepoint server into their mails indicating you can find a certain document there. Which is great if you are on a laptop connected to your own network. On a Windows Mobile device it would save you the download of a (possibly enormous) attachment, but it also effectively cut you off from that document. Now you can simply go to the server and pick it up: it is all integrated into the mail client.

Flagging support

Another boost for you effectiveness is the possibility to flag e-mails, just like you do on your desktop. For many people this is their favourite way of triaging e-mail, so it can mean a lot for the effectiveness of people on the road. According to the documentation the flags should synchronize back to the server, allowing you to keep the flags identical to wherever you are (we have not tested this).

Improvements for the real roadwarriors

On of the most important improvements for road warriors is the automated blocking of the unattended download of e-mail when you are roaming abroad. This can save a lot of people a lot of surprises after a long businesstrip. Although most of us are aware of the huge price for GPRS/UMTS roaming, forgetting to turn off e-mail checking happends often, resulting in tremendous bills.

Another improvement is the possibility to download a specific message, instead of having to do a complete send/recieve. Many people triage based on sender and header and only download these. But when something requires your inmediate attention, you do not want to do a complete send/recieve, but you just want to download that specific message. This really saves you time when you are working on unreliable wireless connections and you want to download a specific message.

Another great improvement is the capability of the mobile client to set the out-of-office assistant of the exchange server. You can now go on holliday without having to touch your desktop/laptop.

Internet Explorer

Internet explorer now supports high resolution viewing of websites. This is a major improvement on VGA devices, where you always had the feeling that a lot more information could be read if the pictures were a lot smaller. The new high resolution view solves that: it rescales pictures to a more appropriate size, allowing you to get more information on the same screen. Underneath you see the difference between the low-resolution version of our site (left) and the high resolution version (right):

System Management

A new OS is great, but for the people that work in a business environment, the manageability of an OS is of vital importance as well: devices should be up-to-date and safe. In this area the most important changes have been made: automatic updates and the device security are huge improvements over Windows Mobile 5, making the device a lot more stable and manageable in the field.

Windows Automatic Update

In the past, many people have complained about the lack of speed of device manufacturers when it comes to updates to the OS. Some vendors took ages to roll out an update, others didn't even seem to care to do this at all. This has resulted in a huge lag in problems identified in the field and the fixes that were available for them. The most obvious problems simply took months before they were fixed by an update simply because hardware manufacturers had to test it and release it to the brands, which in their turn had to provide it to their customers. Customers which had to watch their vendors website like a hawk just to make sure they did not miss any vital update.

Once there was an update and you found out about it, you had to install it. Installing is something you do not want to do too often: effectively you give the device a hard reset by updating it, which basically puts you out of business for a day. You also ran the risk that the update failed and the device had to return to the manufacturer. This has proven to be a major obstacle for users to update their device. In fact most of the devices in the field were never updated once released by their support organization.

With Windows Update, like Windows XP and Windows Vista, the device automatically checks for updates of parts of the OS. It will do so every night or when you do a manual check for updates. Great feature is that it an be told to skip the automatic check when you are only using GPRS or UMTS, to cut down costs. You also have the possibility to skip updates if you do not see them as vital (at that moment).

During our tests we had major OS updates which were simply transferred using the update mechanism. Huge improvement is that updates do not require a hard reset any more: an update will give your device a soft reset and during the update your device will become unavailable for just a couple of minutes. There is no need to install all applications any more. It does not mean that the update is installed automatically: this could block your phone functionality if the SIM-password protection is active. Instead you get a pop-up dialog asking you to start the update and you can start it when you see it appropriate.

Security

Security is always a concern when it comes to business devices. Many companies are occupied with device security. The security already got a major overhaul with Windows Mobile 5, which introduced the "Remote Wipe" functionality as well as policies obliging users to use an on-power/on-idle password (see our security section for more details about that). With Windows Mobile 6 we see the perfection of theses concepts, as well as the introduction of some other improvements.

Better power-on protection

Traditionally devices were protected by 4 digit PIN-codes. Although extremely effective one should ask if this is not too short for certain applications. Windows Mobile 6 introduces the possibility of longer alphanumeric passwords. The minimal length of the PIN, as well as making it obligated, can be set through a policy from Exchange. With this new version also obvious PINs like "0000", or "1234" are now blocked. In combination with a policy of wiping the device after a number of failed attempts you get a rather good out-of-the-box security level for devices, with tha baility to push it down the line when people connect to the Exchange server.

There is a disadvantage of this improvement. Because the length of the password is now a variable as well, introducing the need for a confirmation button. This button is placed on a softkey, which is hard to operate when you are wearing gloves. So making calls in the cold has become a bit more complicated.

Closing the memory card gap

For a long time, the optional memorycard has been the achilisheel of the PocketPC. While the device itself is well-protected by a password and remote wipe, the memory card was completely unprotected. It could easily be taken out of the device and read on a laptop. And that is a shame since, due to the limited memory on the device itself, most people used the memory card to store their data. That same memory card can easily be stolen or read after the device itself is stolen.

First change is that the (remote) wipe also includes the memory card. When the card is inserted in the device, a wipe will also remove all data on the memory cards. Unfortunatly, due to its removable nature, this simply can be bypassed by removing the memory card directly after theft. So this feature is more a piece of mind thing when you lose your device than it is protection against directed theft of data. Since the later is extremely rare, it is a solution, but not for all your problems.

To protect against theft of information Windows Mobile 6 brings build-in AES 128 bit encryption of the memory card, replacing third party file encryption applications. After turning it on, either by the owner or the IT department through a policy, the encryption application automatically encrypts any new information stored on the external memory card. It does not encrypt any data already stored on the memory card. So retrospective encryption will not take place, introducing the need for some attention when enabling this feature: people might assume all their data is safe on a removable medium, but actually is unprotected.

A major hurdle in encryption of the external card is the accesstime to the SD card and the handling of the decryption of large files. This sounds like a theoretical/technical detail but navigation applications handle huge files and generally expect a rather quick response from the memory card. Although we could not discover any problems during our own tests, we do expect them to show up when using larger countries.

Another risk is that the rightfull owner is not capable of decrypting the data. The decryption keys associated with the memory cards can not be exported but are lost after a hard reset. This means that when a device gets a (spontanous) hard reset, you can't read your own memory card. Also, devices do get demolished in the field and sometimes replacing a device does need to happen. In such a case it also can mean that encryption implies that you lose access to your own data.

Less dependency on your helpdesk in critical moments

Probably most of us do not have a support desk helping us 24x7. But sometimes you wish you had: you might be in another timezone or your device might get stolen at night while you are in a restaurant or theatre (and those are the most common places where devices are lost). Dealing with such problems should be possible even when the helpdesk is not there to rescue you. With Windows Mobile 6 and Exchange 2007 you can now help yourself through the Outlook Web Access (OWA) interface of your exchange server:

• you can initiate the remote wipe yourself through this interface. By allowing you to wipe the device yourself you can immediate take action to cut your (companies) losses,
• you can set and reset your own PIN, allowing you to set your PIN when you forgot to set it (and your administrator didn't force you to) or reset it if you forgot what it was.

Conclusion

There is the visual appearance which might appeal to a lot of consumers, although it might not be enough to lure them into replacing existing devices. For the business user the communication and security have undergone major improvements. Specifically the e-mail improvements do a lot for the mobile user: disabling polling while roaming and having HTML e-mail out of the box. For the business user the improved security, when used correctly, provides a very decent security level out-of-the-box, providing many roadwarriors and IT-managers a piece of mind.