[miamicanes]

Windows Mobile's fundamental architectural problem is the fact that it was designed to be a general-purpose OS running on hardware at least twice as fast as has ever existed at the time each new version was released. Nothing in it is optimized for either its real-world runtime environment or the primary task for which people buy it in the first place.

Comparing WinMo to the iPhone and Android is kind of like comparing the first color Macs to the Amiga. The Mac II bent over backwards to abstract out every aspect of its graphics and hardware... with disastrous results. Their user interface's performance sucked. Mouse clicks weren't acknowledged, windows didn't move when you tried to drag them (except under the most ideal & rare circumstances), and you could watch the screen repaint from top to bottom every time you tried moving a scrollbar. In contrast, the Amiga's UI was designed from the word "go" to be fast and responsive on a 7MHz m68k. In fact, it was so good at it, Amiga owners endlessly complained about the fact that apps would crash & you couldn't tell, because the window, menu, and icon gadgets were totally independent of the app itself. The UI was literally oblivious to the state of the apps running within it.

Unfortunately, when Microsoft designed Windows, they listened to the Djikstras of the world and made the UI subservient to the apps, because it was the "right" way to do it. And as a result, every flavor of Windows -- desktop, mobile, 16, 32, or 64-bit -- has always felt sluggish compared to a 20 year old operating system running on hardware with less raw computing power than a modern $9.95 universal remote sold in blister packs by the cash registers at Wal Mart.

That's the biggest single reason why the iPhone and Android feel so much faster than WM. Apple learned from their mistakes, inhaled some of Palm's forgotten Zen, and made sure that even when the system is nearly halted, windows will still smoothly animate open and closed. Ditto for Android... it might have a general-purpose Linux kernel as its soul, but abstracted X pretending to run over a virtual network in client-server fashion is most certainly not the foundation of its UI. Google wrote a lean, mean UI and baked it into the kernel to make sure it ran smoothly, regardless of what was happening at the app-level.

Another big design failure of Windows Mobile -- the fact that it doesn't give nearly as much importance to phone calls as it really NEEDS to. It treats them like an unimportant afterthought. For god's sake, the first WinCE phones couldn't even place an outgoing call without using the stylus and drilling down through dropdown menus. PalmOS phones were sluggish when it came to running apps, but when the phone rang, whatever was running in the foreground got frozen mid-heartbeat, and the phone UI was instantly there, ready to respond the moment you pressed a key. It didn't stand around and pick its butt for 3 or 4 rings trying to make up its mind about how the call should be handled. Palm & Handspring made lots of mistakes, but at least they fundamentally understood that a phone is first and foremost a phone. If it sucks at making and receiving calls, everything else is almost irrelevant.

Of course, HTC deserves a few healthy servings of blame, too. Like their idiotic decision to omit the two REQUIRED hardkeys on the Touch/Vogue and simulate them with screen touches... the root of at least half the misery experienced by its owners. Microsoft deserves a healthy heaping portion of blame, too, though, for letting HTC get away with it. If Microsoft had the balls to enforce a Windows Mobile equivalent to their logo requirements (telling HTC, "put those two hardkeys back", requiring proper WHQL-certified accelerated graphics drivers, etc), HTC's worst abuses would have been avoided.

In the end, all any of us can do is cheer for Android, and hope Microsoft takes the threat seriously enough to blow us all away and win back our love with WM7. From the looks of it, there's no shortage of disillusioned, unrequited love around here. I'd personally love to see them do it, but I'm not holding my breath.

To really compete on equal terms with the iPhone and Android, Microsoft is going to have to tear WinCE all the way down to the microkernel level, and rebuild its entire UI, i/o, networking, and scheduler layers from scratch. More importantly, they have to forget EVERYTHING they know about desktop applications, and redesign it all to work equally well with one hand (in portrait mode) and with a stylus (in landscape mode). If Windows Mobile 7 has anything resembling a start menu or taskbar, doesn't even start to make noise until the third or fourth ring, can't abort an outgoing call EVEN IF you press the "end" button IMMEDIATELY after pressing "send" (vs leaving you swearing helplessly for 5-10 seconds as it completes the call regardless of how hard or often you try to press the "end" key), or makes you pull out the stylus or slog through a half-dozen gestures just to find out who called and left a voicemail message while you were away from the phone, Microsoft might as well not even bother with it, because Windows Mobile will be worse than dead... it'll be irrelevant.