winmo and android

6.1 and cupcake. Winmo has been around as far as I could remember. The PDA era, rivals of the PocketPC and Palm armies. But I couldn't care less; I never had either. Because a device without network, it's nothing more than a paperless notepad: it only has things you wrote on it. Nothing more or less.

"Over the past 5, no, almost a decade, technology has grown, but winmo has evolved little." Looking at my Omnia2, I first thought of it. On 2nd thought, I wish the store accepted returns.
The 1st platform was released in April 2000, conveniently named Pocket PC 2000. So, on average, it incremented 1.5 versions of the platform per year. On Android, for the 11 months of the first release of G1 to Donut to Eclair, achievement was incredible and the SDK was well received from developers. App store is, IMO, not a new concept, but it was iphone and android made it popular. The rest appeared like a rushed afterthought.

Winmo6.5 is buggy, slow and very user unfriendly. An average user is not gonna care how much memory a task takes or use a task manager to kill an misbehaved app. It should just work. The platform and app framework should manage the memory usage and guard against misbehaved apps.

Any UI (Samsung's) builds on top of a buggy platform just makes things easily worse. For starters, it can't add a new number to an existing contact. It's not like it told you it can't add it. It said it added but it didn't. Last time I checked it was called lying. I ended up disabling all the addon UI to stop the annoyance.

The only thing I like of my Samsung OmniaII over Galaxy was that the speed of the handwriting. The time that it takes to recognize I made a stroke on the screen and draws it on the screen was close to instantaneous. On the Galaxy, users have to slow down and it doesn't even do half a decent job.

Android. When we first met, the kernel was run on a bulk, green PCB board on an engineer desk. Nothing eye pleasing. IMO, despite of its tremendous accomplishment for the year, it still has a lot of challenges ahead. User friendliness is a big part of it. It's where we pick up from winmo.

Contact list was my biggest complaint. As of Donut, a user has to add the phone number to the Contacts (Gmail) and they will get pulled to the device. So I (and others) had to spend a day to go through and added phone numbers to my Gmail contacts. My argument is that it's more natural for the user to add emails to the email address book than phone numbers. Most of us (before the advent of Android and Gmail) already have a phone contains all contacts of which do not necessarily have email addresses (1800 numbers, banks, plumbing services, etc). Creating arbitrary entires in Gmail isn't even a natural path for non email contacts. What I'd suggest is at the start of the Android phone, it should be able to accept a contact list from another phone via bluetooth. And instead of download from Gmail contacts, it uploads these contacts to it. Then the next time when the user uses Gmail and type in the contact in the TO box, he/she can see the phone contact and email contact, and add/merge them appropriately. Spending a day of pain to go through possibly thousands of entries in Gmail and add the phone numbers to it isn't acceptable, esp for Google.

For the past 10 years, I have seen winmo and palm's platform battle over networkless PDAs. Now we have Android, Symbian, Blackberry, 2 WebOSes and others. It's the Warring States Period of mobile platforms and history teaches us they soon will be combined and consolidated. And I do look forward to Android sticking its place at the top.