Quickly select if you want to check your voicemail, read your e-mail or text message first. Hitting the Windows flag now takes you to the new Start screen, characterized by a honeycomb interface designed for use with your fingers to accurately select the application, folder, game or setting quickly and easily. Touch capabilities are expanded in Windows Mobile 6. To provide feedback, each gesture has an associated set of animations to help you get to where you are going on the phone.

The browser allows you to search in the address bar of the browser and now has auto-complete suggestions, helping to make it quicker to get to the sites you are looking for. Leave your phone in a cab? Add a few pixels of menu spacing here, some plasticky highlight graphics there, and BOOM.

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Let's go to lunch. The terrible Windows Media Player app looks the same, the photo albums are helped only by smoother scrolling and support of basic swipe gestures, and the text, email, notes and settings pages are jarringly old-looking, and seriously hostile to pointing devices any larger than a pen. Especially fleshy ones. Come to think of it, after using 6.

The official Windows Mobile fact sheet - MSPoweruser

Windows Mobile finally, finally has an app store —quick, look around, is there anyone left who doesn't? You can find apps though a sensible system of categories, or by searching, and downloading and installing is as easy as pressing a button, though you'll occasionally be met with prompts from the app installer.

Don't get me wrong, the Marketplace is a good thing, in that it'll drive prices down and make finding apps much easier, but it remains to be seen if developers will take to it like they did on the iPhone App Store, or just kinda ignore it like they did with the BlackBerry App World. In any case, this isn't even a 6.

A victory for Windows Mobile, sure, but not one that 6. A few more notes on the Marketplace:.

Navigation menu

Seems a little lenient, but hey, thanks! Another touted feature of 6.

We've seen most of it before, but today there are a few new features in top of the super-simple backup service that Jason went so far as to call " fancy :". The free user experience will be a lot like the beta, which is to say basic, but useful for backing up contacts, photos, and other basics on a daily, weekly or monthly basis. The web interface is nice, too—more on that here. Get that? This is to say it's a massive upgrade, but like IE7, which added tabs and popup blocking about two years after everyone else had it, Mobile IE6 is at least a generation behind its competitors.

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For what it's worth, it adds smooth panning and scrolling, intelligent zooming and full er support for CSS and Javascript pages that MIE5 used to choke on spectacularly. Rendering is good, but not WebKit good, and the browser has a tendency to reflow text in an odd way, formatting columns of text more narrowly than it should. And even though rendering is vastly improved—though inexplicably, not to the point of the Zune HD's browser —the experience is still glitchy. Page loading is slow even on a fast Wi-Fi connection, and there's often a pretty wide gap between when a page looks like it's done and when the browser actually becomes responsive enough to interact with.

In short, you're going to want to install Opera or Skyfire, the former for faster rendering and easier navigation, and the latter for better Flash support IE6 includes Flash Lite, which is better than nothing, but can't stack up to Skyfire's compressed full-Flash trickery.

And hell, one of the two will probably come with your phone anyway, because whoever sells it to you probably wants you to like it. Of course, you won't be able to completely abandon IE, since Microsoft is planning on using it for a new Windows Mobile widget platform.

This sounds like a bigger deal that it is—these are just web apps, not desktop widgets or anything like that, but they'll rendered using IE6's engine, and be available in the Marketplace, mixed in with the other apps. In other words, its guts are oooold. In practice, this means that cold app launches are quick enough, but not noticeably faster than 6. A Touch Diamond2 for 6. For Windows mobile, the perception of slowness has always been more of a problem than actual slowness, since flashy animations are sparse, and the manner in which apps load, close and minimize can look a bit clunky.

The smooth scrolling and easier navigation at least give the impression the 6. That said, I don't see why not , since ROM cookers the world over have been squeezing impressive speed out of Windows Mobile for years now, and have even done some admirable work on 6. It was too expensive to recommend, but its software was a pleasant surprise. Contextual menus had been skinned with larger, finger-friendly buttons; there was a panel-based app launcher; the supplied browser was pretty good; certain version had a replacement for the start menu; and hey, there was even inertial scrolling across all apps.

The catch, though, was that this was a Windows Mobile 6. HTC had replicated almost every feature of 6. All before 6. Install My Phone and Marketplace for Mobile on there, and you'd be hard-pressed to find a single reason to upgrade to 6.

To put it another way, handset manufacturers have done more in the last two years to improve Windows Mobile than Microsoft has, which borders on pathetic. In the time since Windows Mobile 6. Palm has created the Pre, with its totally new webOS. Android has come into being, and grown into something wonderful. For these companies, the world has changed. And Microsoft? They eked out some performance enhancements and a new homescreen in 6. This is what they've done to Windows Mobile. What's amazing is that in the time it took Windows Mobile 6. One problem! It's wasn't a handset.

It was a Zune. I understand the the two platforms aren't directly comparable, and as is, Zune OS wouldn't work very well for a smartphone, but it's a taste of something great.