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Do you need a START button on Windows Mobile?

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Windows Mobile 6.1 is just released and it has some nice interface tweaks and supposed to be more stable and faster than windows mobile 6. Its a great mobile OS due to its familiarity and compatibility with Windows for desktop. However Microsoft has never given much thought to user experience I guess.

I understand that windows mobile resembles windows in many ways and that probably makes adaptation easier but it probably goes too far with windows resemblance that it ends up being a non-userfriendly mobile OS.

I fully agree with Kevin Hoffman that Windows Mobile is a shrunken and crippled version of windows. I don’t see any value of a Start button on a Mobile OS. I have a few suggestions for Windows Mobile User-Experience team:

  1. Please remove the Start Button, its not needed.
  2. Show big, finger-friendly icons for various applications right on Home screen.
  3. Reduce number of screens and taps required to do various things.
  4. Please do away with tiny text labels and other little user interface elements wherever possible.

I think MS can borrow ideas from Palm, Symbian and other mobile OS. All of them seem to adhere to more or less same user-interface concepts.

Has Microsoft got it’s Mobile strategy wrong???

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We are a Microsoft shop primarily and we do mobile applications targeting Windows Mobile OS, and we may continue to be a Microsoft technologies company in future too owing to mass popularity Microsoft manages to acquire due to various reasons.

However I simply hate the fact that MS keeps adding layers and layers of complication to all its products, making softwares bloated, complicated, frustrating and slow. There has been enough bashing of Windows Vista as well as Windows Mobile 6. I have read them and been silent all this while, however when I read about Side-Show making its way to windows mobile, I simply could not resist writing this post.

Mobiles are meant to start immediately on press of power button, while desktops are not, so I don’t think side-show is a requirement on mobiles at all. You can just push the power-on button on mobile and press a pre-assigned key to start your favourite application. Why you need an always on and smaller display for it???

I think MS has got its strategy wrong here. Its again trying to make mobiles do whatever a desktop can, which I think is not a clever idea.

Also I guess that in future MS will use Sideshow as an excuse for slow windows mobile powered phones. With all the features it is putting in windows mobile, its going to gradually become slower and slower even with faster processors, so MS will say — use Side-show for features which you want to perform immediately 😉

I think Side-show adds another layer to complicated user-interface and makes users much more confused. In my opinion its a very bad idea.

IMHO MS should instead try to make windows mobile interface simpler, faster and easier to use. I still love the simplicity and performance of Palm OS. I know Palm OS is loosing its ground to Windows Mobile but we need to give the credit for what it offers.