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Windows Mobile is the Frankenstein’s monster of mobile phone
operating systems — hideously
misshapen, yet powerfully intelligent, it spends its time outrunning the fiery
torches of disgruntled users and mobile phone reviewers. It doesn’t have the
cachet of the iPhone, the ubiquity of Symbian or the geek chic of Android, and
it’s the calling card of suits who wear pleated trousers and mobile phone holsters
— it’s so square it makes BlackBerrys look cool.
The problem with Windows Mobile is that it tries to bring
the wonder of your Windows desktop — your Windows 95 desktop, that is — to the tiny
screen of your phone. And if you think Windows is complicated and
incomprehensible on your PC, try controlling it with a stylus the size of a
matchstick.
But there is one advantage to WinMo’s attempt to recreate
your PC in your pocket — it’s the greatest mobile app platform on the planet. You
thought Apple invented the app for a little baby called the iPhone? Forget it. Compared
to the iPhone OS or even open-source Android, WinMo is the king, because it’s dead easy to
develop for, and you can stick almost any program on it.
Windows Mobile app attack
This may come as a surprise to the Apple fanboys and girls
who think the sun shines out of their MacBook‘s apple logo, but most of
the world’s programmers are Windows programmers. And since they already know
how to use Visual Studio and the rest of the development-suite gubbins, which
are too boring to mention here, they’re pretty much ready to dive into making
phone programs. Voila — bust out those classes and start emulating, haxx0rs.
That means apps that have barely made it on to the
iPhone — such as sat-navs — roll out on Windows Mobile before any other
phone. TomTom, the sat-nav star of the iPhone 3GS
launch, has been doing sat-nav for Windows Mobile since phones were carved from
a single, magic block of wood. It’s not cheap, though — the current version, Navigator
7, costs £90.
In fact, Windows Mobile phones are the home of some of the
greatest apps you’ve never heard of. There are untold thousands of Twitter apps,
photo editors
and games,
but delve a little deeper and the bottomless pit of apps is revealed.
From the suit-soaked horror of SalesForce to the geeky depths of hacking
your phone’s registry, there’s nothing that somebody, in some basement, with
the help of some energy drink, hasn’t coded up for your consumption. You can
even make
your WinMo phone look good, or, in a move similar to Hannibal Lecter
wearing the face of a hapless bystander, look
like an iPhone.
And it’s not just software apps. Thanks to the fact WinMo welcomes developers with a warm robe, a hug and a glass of cognac,
hardware designers can get their gear up and running fast. Much of the good
stuff we hear about on Crave comes out first on WinMo — the WildCharge
wireless charging mat springs to mind.
Where did it all go wrong?
So why did the ‘app’ word only enter our vocabulary with the
iPhone? The answer is simple: iTunes.
Before Apple grafted applications on to its music shop and
called it the App Store, there were already thousands of apps out there for
Windows Mobile, but they’re harder to find than an icicle in Satan’s summer
home.
First, you have to figure out your version — is it Pocket PC,
also called PPC or Windows Mobile Classic? Or maybe Windows CE, Windows Mobile
2003 or Windows Phone — or is it just running the latest version of who the heck
cares?
Sites such as Handango
and GetJar have tried to make it easier by
letting you search by the type of phone you’ve got, but with handsets
proliferating like bunnies on Viagra, these lists are often out of date.
Then you have to find what you want, but there’s no official
place that lists everything that’s out there — so you can Google around for
stuff, but there’s no easy way to search right from your phone.
Once you’ve found the app you want, you have to get the darn
thing installed. It’s not brain surgery, but it requires a USB cable, a PC and
ActiveSync software, and it’s complicated enough that most people couldn’t be
bothered.
In a one-click world, Microsoft’s own instructions
highlight the hesitant procedure for installing a WinMo app: “The phone
will repeatedly display ‘Are you sure?’ during this process. Be sure to respond ‘yes’ each time.”
Enter the Marketplace
Even Microsoft knows it’s no use bemoaning Apple’s
usurping of its King-of-Apps crown. Before iPod, there were heaps of MP3 players
about, but Apple managed to make a product so easy to use that it took over the
whole category. With the iPhone and the App Store, it did it again — so
thoroughly that many of us don’t know you can even get an app for a
non-iPhone.
With the recent release of Windows Mobile 6.5, Microsoft has
launched the Windows Marketplace
— which is basically the Apple App Store for WinMo. Instead of finding
applications online, WinMo 6.5 users can click an icon on the phone, browse and
buy apps, and then install them without touching a PC.
But Windows Marketplace has a massive amount of catching up to do. Its
shelves are still almost bare, and there’s no way to browse or buy apps online
or on your PC. You can’t yet back up or restore your apps along with your other
data using the new My Phone service, either.
Meanwhile, the other app stores have been filling up with
the more complicated apps that we used to only see on WinMo. There are SAP
apps for the iPhone and FTP for Android, and
it leaves us wondering what’s the point of floundering around with WinMo’s user-interface problems. Microsoft has its work cut out for it — and a huge new
release of Windows Mobile 7 — if it wants us to put down our torches and
pitchforks and let Frankenstein into our pockets.
