Good looking UI really caters to most people and not funtionality. All you guys have no idea what you're talking about. In reality a windows phone can do a lot more than you're iphones and android phones. Yes the UI is not updated even iphones OS is old it's unix with just a cute UI. Actually the OS is not slow it's just how it was implemented on the phone. I have the same touch diamond 2 phone with windows 6.5 and HTC touch flo 2 hacked ROM and is blazing fast and slick and more functional than you're phones! I have skyfire browser, opera browser,pc remote connect, core player, with windows media you can snatch an internet URL from the web since most of them are in winmo format. PS 1 emulation can be installed on winmobile! try to do this on your phones! All you can do is play games provided, music, photos, and web with no flash just youtube! crippled phones....

Had an 8525 running WM5 and an icon-based home screen menu set up like iPhone, went to iPhone 3G. Both crash, both have ups and downs: miss 3rd party apps, micro SD and keyboard from HTC, love larger screen, better apps and integration and interface on iPhone. Both crash fairly regularly. Would have stayed with HTC and WM had something shaped like the iphone with that size display been available with a carrier subsidy - HTC phones are too thick and not broad enough to actually use with one hand. iPhone is. Also fits in my pocket without looking like I'm smuggling a VW Camper. Also, iPhone is a much better phone for voice calls than my HTC device ever was. And that's really one thing I need a phone for - to use as a phone :) iPhone does 4 things - Phone/texting, Music, Internet, email. That's pretty much it, but it's not trying to be all things to all users as MS often does. But what Apple DOES do is really concentrate on those four things and then nails them to provide a pretty much seamless user experience. And that's where MS's success or failure lies: when/if MS decides to improve end-user experience by eliminating some of the higher-end functionality that most users simply never use nor have any interest in figuring out, MS will have a good consumer device market open up to them. It's just currently too much for most users.

As slow as i expected ...

That's why we run 40 Nokia E71's with MFE ...(i agree, not as fancy as WM, but ....., STABLE LIKE HELL!)

I would wait a little longer for the release of this gadget...Let's say...October 2010? I like the features and options, but the speed of the movement still needs a lot of work. It reminds me of my old non upgraded PC's facing the new century, trying to survive as the HD era comes to stay.

So..i would still wait for the perfect Windows Phone.

Cheers!

So is it still as unintuitive and ugly when not using/looking at the Home screen? Because that's what that looked like to me, a new Home screen. Not that it looked very nice either.

And it still looks as painfully slow as it is today.

For me looks good and tech wise i bet that can have a lot more funcionalities than the iphone.
so u use the iphone for bling and this one to get some work done.
anyway the people in general allways benefit from the competition
so long...

I used to have the iPhone for about 1 week before I returned it and went back to my 1 1/2 year old HTC Kaiser with Winmo 6.1 from a XDA kitchen developer. The reason, I couldn't stand turning on and off applications every time I wanted to do something different. For example, when a GPS app was running and I had to answer a call I lost my signal and had to start all over again and wait another 1-2 minutes before I had a signal??? This made the iPhone completely useless. Until Apple figures out how to run several apps at the same time its a no go for me.

Mine does, scrolls just fine thank you.
thats 6.5 with Touch Flo 3D for the record running on a Touch HD.

The beautie of Windows Mobile is that its custimizable, if you dont like the UI, change it to any number of different interfaces.

Infact there is very little i cant change on it

Has any phone except the iphone done this right?

exclusive, the INQ covers a dead product. Extra extra..
Microsoft lost venues, the INQ is the only nerd site to cover this none event. Extra Extra!
The INQ may delete this post. Extra Extra

I'm with the guy who's scoffing a bit at the 'exclusive' tag, not only due to the development emulator but because you've been able to run 6.5 on rather a lot of phones for months already. Going all the way back to the Titan, a couple of generations old now.

I'm running it on my original Touch Diamond. Gave the Microsoft interface approximately half an hour before deciding it was crap, and enabled Manila (TouchFlo) 3D instead. Much nicer. Good thing HTC will be carrying on using that on all their phones, instead of the MS interface. The improvements in 6.5 are worth having, nothing mindblowing though.

I'm not sure how I feel about including Flash after watching those painful last 30 seconds.

Sure... you support flash fully, look at us. But really, when the browsing experience is THAT SLOW, is it worth having flash??? Here's to hoping Adobe gets smart or the new HTML 5 stuff takes over!

And yes, drivers are everything.. but this demo puts more in my mind of picking up an iPhone. Atleast I know when I get the phone, it's going to work perfectly as designed... just wait till a few more handsets are made with this on it.. some will be better than others and who knows what you'll get stuck with!

err, actually you have that a bit wrong....kinda,

The iphone copied the basic UI from Windows Mobile third party Apps, just because they have taken something and made it better for that market doesnt mean its "new" and everything there after is coping them.

The basic Windows Mobile UI is just that, its basic, it is in serious need of an overhall, and 6.5 is nothing but a stop gap at making something slightly better, im more intrested in windows mobile 7 as i believe this will be a change in direction.

The iphone has its place, as does the Windows mobile devices, its two very different markets, there are pros and cons on either side, the video does not show a true an accurate account of Microsofts work, think of it like installing windows 7 on an old P2 350...with VGA drivers, it'll work, just not very well.

the text always looks thrown at the interface in windows mobile, no care is taken on presentation and it still looks unresponsive. I mean really, what's the point? You have to install Opera to get a good browsing experience and I see the interface is still far from smooth. Why would anyone pay for this?
I used to own Windows Mobile smartphones but there's no way I'm going back now. I may hate iTunes but the iPhone is so well engineered. Windows Mobile irritates me whenever I want to do something as it seems it's up to me the user to make shortcuts, wait for the phone to catch up, and I don't see that this has changed.
Now can we please have a decent well-maintained Linux phone OS? Perhaps from Ubuntu?

Everybody seems to be copying from the iPhone, from UI to App Store, iTunes...

enough said... all of them are playing catch up... boring.

Everything MS, or any phone mfg are doing - have been seen and done.. nothing new ....

Unlike the first time the iPhone was revealed.

Users may defend their choice but obviously one one by one phone mfg are imitating some part of iPhone UI and its innovations it brought into mobile phones.

It is laughable considering how short Apple been in the mobile phone business .. 3 years ?

Window Mobile version 6.5 ? keep promising a killer every version. What ? 7, 8, 9 ?

I had many mobile phone & PDA's before... but the iPhone is hard to let go... show me a mind blowing product - I changed.

Warhawk is based on the same hardware as the Touch Diamond / Pro / HD id stay clear of it, it will undoubtably suffer the same driver issues.

However we are on the edge of a new generation of hardware based on the snapdragon chipset, as long as Qualcom doesnt shaft us and HTC pays up we will once again have a stunning piece of hardware comparable to none.

HTC Warhawk is looking to be released in September with the new OS installed..

http://pdadb.net/index.php?m=specs&id=1912&c=htc_warhawk

I have always dreamt about having Windows on my phone.

This has been the best and most exciting news of the year!

go Microsoft go!! go softies go!!

Apple fans have a rigth to rejoice, after all, even if the iPhone has inferior hardware it indeed runs *much* better than WinMo.

And you can blame this on all three companies. Qualcomm for being greedy as hell and charging extra for the whole platform kit. HTC for partially giving aways and buying the basic part of the platform but charging full price; not to mention not giving the competition a change (Nvidia). Finally, MS gets the bigger one for deciding to let their OS showcase on crippled hardware. They should have put some pressure on HTC to either get the full kit or design a whole new Nvidia-based phone platform.

So please, Apple fans, jeer and boo all you can, maybe then someone will listen. Users of HTC phones have tried to get their attention and it has been all for naught. :p

It seems to have worked for 7, maybe it can work for mobile too.

How can it be an "Exclusive" when Microsoft has had a development emulator for to for MONTHS???

Don't break your arm patting yourselves on the back.

im telling you drivers are everything, XDA developers have had access to WM 6.5 for months and there is also another group that are doing the best they can with drivers availible, even these drivers dont harness the true potential of the GPU but at the very least the UI is smooth, no sluggish behavour, no slow downs, it only has issues with high quality movies and some games.

You know what, keep your blinkers on, you say im buying MS BS? well thats funny because i have it running on my Touch HD that is sitting in front of me, my observations are my own and not influenced by Anti Microsoft puppets or MS PR.

It works, its here, and if the GPU had the drivers it would equal or out perform the Iphone 3G in graphics ability. Note im not saying the 3G S, that is a new generation of device with a significant bump in power.

Benchmarks have shown that if i stuck my HD in the same resolution as the iphone 3G, id almost double my results, that is without the propper drivers.

i stand by my original statement, stick the most powerful graphics card in your PC and use the default VGA drivers, it will suck i promise you, UI and all.

* How are you supposed to know to drag the text message icon to the right?

* Why do the messages appear, then the keyboard appears after a second, then it disappears, etc.?

* The selected item in the main menu isn't necessarily anywhere near the user's finger. How can this be intuitive to use?

* The selected item changes from its name to some kind of more detailed view which causes lag and is confusing. If you want to have the weather app, make a weather app that's fast and easy to access... jesus, don't make a half-assed one-off weather thing that slows down the rest of the UI when the user is trying to access something else.

* The main menu uses the same confusing-as-s*** up-down left-right menu system as the XBox, Media Center, and Zune. When will Microsoft learn that this isn't intuitive at all. What's wrong with a hierarchy of simple up-down menus like almost any other piece of consumer electronics.

Also, to whoever's complaining that it's slow because of bad drivers, whatever. It's clearly slow because e.g. the UI is trying to load the weather when you scroll past the weather item. No drivers in the world will fix that brain-dead design decision.

The UI on the phone is cluttered and looks just like the zune. The screen lags behind on almost every input he makes. Did you see how long just the text messaging came up in. Every iphone that I have had can run circles around this, and on my 3gs, why would I bother with that. The number of excuses he gave for the device is typical MS. "It's still early in dev". It will be the same when it comes out and then what will be the excuse.

Again, this is why I recently gave up on windows. Too much bs'ing and being given the run around.

at first look i WAS CONFUSED !!!
M$ advocate trying to explain that it is manufacturer of a chipset/hardware to blame for not providing the drivers.
Then it took me few minutes to stop laughing.
This excuse patented by Linux advocates and can not be used by you :)
As for the price competition with iPhone, palm pre and others ...
As you M$ advocates love to say, saving 50$ is not enough to live with something crippled.
As for IMHO, it will take a while for M$ to stay with empty (cash), broken pile. But it will happen. Most of the world population is going (already gone) away of that dirty thing. No money = no PR == can't sell == can't exist.
And look around you, Intel, Dell, HP, IBM, Qualcom, Freescale and even AMD like many other will offer you to move away from M$.
Get the facts, do not buy PR B$.

It has its problems as does the iPhone, nothing is perfect and both devices have there advantages in their respected markets, but its a simple fact, HTC didnt buy the drivers from qualcomm, thats nothing to do with Microsoft,

i have an old XDA II which runs very well with WM5, i also have a newer XDA Orbit 2 which runs like a dog on the same OS, hardware support is everything, and HTC have ability to provide those drivers...

Course why provide a driver to make something equal to next gen hardware when you could simply sell them the next gen hardware at an inflated price?

That is the problem,

ill tell you what, you find me a clip of MS new WM OS running with full hardware (GPU) support on any device you can find and if it runs like a three legged dog i will hold my hands high and appolgise for being a idiot.

Good luck with that.

Someone woke up on the wrong side of Mr. Gates palatial bed today! Let me get this straight. It's not MS fault, it's not HTC's fault, it's the CHIPSET makers fault. Only problem I see with that convoluted logic is that MS and HTC have their names on this sub-standard thing. This phone has the capability to run oh-so-wonderfully, and yet they have chosen to show it at it's worst? AWESOME! Seems to me if I were going to launch a smart phone, I'd make sure everything worked correctly BEFORE I showed it. Oh.. Wait. This is Microsoft... sorry. Love when you guys rattle on about Apple fan bois and then go crying when someone trashes MS.

Im assuming its a national leave your brain in bed day because everyone spouting about how crap and slow the device is compared to an Iphone is clearly running with only half their cylinders firing

Lets compare it to a desktop OS to make it real simple

plug your quad SLI 8800GTX cards in to your PC and leave the standard VGA drivers and tell me how smooth it is, or how many FPS you can get on X game/benchmark

bugger all is the answer.

Its the same for the Windows mobile, Microsoft doesnt make the drivers it makes the OS, which is released to a manufacture, which may or may not purchase the hardware drivers.

The hardware built in to the Touch Diamond/Pro/HD etc is actually more capable than the iphones, it has the ability to be smooth, quick and play games/films to an incredable standard.

What it lacks is the drivers, which can only be provided by the chipset maker at great expence

So let me clear this up
the Graphic ability of the OS is NOT Microsofts fault it has nothing to do with it, so please take your "i am an Iphone fan boy and a bit of a nob" comments and pass them on to HTC and Qualcomm.

Ha Ha Ha Ha!!!! What a piece of garbage! I love how he tries to give excuses every time something lags! My 1st gen iPhone could run circles around this turd. It's a pretty device....until you turn it on. Notice how he gets rankled about referring to it as "6.5", and then he starts doing it HIMSELF later on! Seriously Microsoft, don't put something out until it can blow the competition away. You only look like a "me too" company with this clunky UI.

Enough said.

Hello. < 5 FPS display updates are not ok. I mean, they still haven't figured that out from the days of XScale. The XScale LCD controller IS NOT GOOD ENOUGH. Cacheless writes out to the display frame buffer in main memory is retard mode video design. People want smooth interaction, not herky, jerky disorienting display interactions. I guess Microsoft is just too dumb to figure that out. Watching the Internet Explorer demonstration was laughable.

Pretty good! Ideas, graphic design, features...

A handy bit of competition to keep Apple getting better.

Windows Phone OS compared with iPhone OS feels like Windows 95 compared to Apple's OS 9. It wasn't as good for the 10% that used Macs, but good enough for the 90% that used PCs. Less of a threat to Apple than 15 years ago because MS doesn't have the monopoly it had then.

The UI was a bit slow, so as long as that phone costs half of the $99 iPhone, then all could be well.

Remember though that products need to be more than twice as good (user experience, value, features) for entrenched users to switch. If both Windows Phone OS and iPhone were first appearing at the same time, then Apple would have had much more of a battle on their hands.

Go Windows Phone OS!

@alex4d (who's been using Macs since 1984)

They expect to sell this crap when google are giving it away for free