Would WinMo even be relevant without HTC?

[austin420]

thats cool. down here every one i know had palms and sidekicks last year.they were always hella jealous of mine. now theyre all gettin droids and the whatnot and im a lil jealous. one of the only things my tp2 has on them now is the fat price tags. its kinda a status symbol.

[exmeaguy]

I agree with the OP, the well-designed HTC phones are breathing more life into the Winmo platform.

[bkrodgers]

Originally Posted by austin420

for phones. and i know this is a phone site, but like i said, theyve got the non phone pda market on lock.

True, but that's a rapidly shrinking market.

They've got a strong presence in non-PDA markets, such as the Symbol type devices that a lot of inventory and POS systems use. Even Apple used those WM devices up until recently! But that's a niche market. I'm not even sure if they can retain that without a strong phone presence. Even the iPhone is becoming a somewhat "corporate approved" device because it's captured the hearts and minds of the public.

It will be interesting to see what happens with WM7. It sounds like they're finally focused on delivering a strong "stock" experience. In fact there are rumors they're even going to prevent HTC from customizing the UI very much, at least in the "media" version. If true, I wonder how HTC feels about basically being told "thanks for keeping us on life support the last few years. We've got it from here."

[MrGoodCat]

if it wasn't for sites like ppcgeeks and xda, and the people (cmonex) that unlock our phones...well, i sure as hell wouldn't be on winmo. thanks to the community's with all the great skinners, themers, programmers and so on, winmo, in my book, is still a great phone os to use...just not stock

so props to all here and on teh internets for making winmo enjoyable!

[grant516]

HTC manufactured the Palm Treo Pros.

HTC manufactured in the past all HP WinMo Phones- as well as anything branded with like Audiovox, UT Starcomm, XDA.... and quite a few more.

I'd say 75% of the phone devices out there use an HTC piece of hardware, and they have built up software to make the experience as good as one can possibly imagine for an Operating System that's main core is about 8 years old.

Since they are a fairly talented group I am sure they will do wonders and push forth the highest quality of Android Phones, and eventually- when they do pull support- will leave Windows Mobile in the dust.

[MordyT]

Simple answer - yes.

A while back there was a article on pocketnow? which talk about how many different uses winmo currently filled. from the ups man wqho has you sign (device powered by winmo) to the price scanner at the market, many things are powered by winmo. HTC has made it a common device. However, I had winmo back when it was an "elitist" device (about 7 years or more ago) and support was nill. And that is how winmo was designed - not to be used as a general user device. And this is most likely why is is now called windows phone - to separate it from winmo.

my .02

[moc426]

I got the tp2 because of the phone itself. I didn't think much of win mobile or not. For whatever reason games are lacking on win mobile and iphone has a lot. prices on winmobile are more in general as well, games and apps. For example peggle on win mobile is 5.99 and its 2.99 on iphone.

I think win mobile needs to get the games and apps going more. Windows has games on desktops, apple doesn't, not sure how microsoft didn't get the mobile gaming going right at least not yet. Android is getting apps and games fast I believe, so it may be the one that grabs the most users in the end.

[nosmohtac]

I had a Moto Q and I think it was one of the best smartphones I ever had. Moto will most likely be back in the winmo game after windows phone 7 is released. The stereo speakers on the Q were incredible for ringtones and notifications. I've had 4 HTC phones and every one of them have had speakers/drivers that you have to hack to get decent sound out of them.

I will give HTC credit for having several extremely successful winmo phones, but if Moto comes out with some great hardware with windows phone 7 on it, I'll be all over it.

[mstevens]

Originally Posted by austin420

or every other palm phone before the pre?

Even the ones that ran PalmOS instead of Windows Mobile?

[vesty16277]

HTC is great but when markets and profits to be made come calling someone will snag up the project. Some failures some successes. They did help growing the interest of the smartphone market by releasing so many in the last few years plus with the advertising rather than your dinky free phones to get you into the carriers stores.

I use android daily for the last few months but I still have a need for winmo in many many cases. Eventually I think Android will catch up but they still are behind in functionality until developers start matching many of the programs offered for years on winmo. It would be quite costly to revamp systems to handle other types of OS's.

Microsoft is finally seeing that they are missing out on a whole other market now that everything is so portable. I doubt Windows Phone 7 will be the answer but should improve things.

IMO these phones should be made to max out the multimedia experience in both, video, web, and audio.......if you have enough power and spec to generate good results in those you could use almost any application or function for the business user with much ease.