Windows Mobile 6.5 Rushed

Horror of horrors – Senior Project Manager Loke Uei Tan of Microsoft has admitted that Windows Mobile’s 6.5′s user interface extremely rushed, and it is no surprise that the thing is far from finished. Here’s what the US-based Malaysian has to say about it:

The reason why we couldn’t complete the interface on Windows Mobile 6.5 is because of time. We only spend what, eight months, nine months, to build 6.5 from ground up and it’s actually an amazing engineering feat. But, in order to do that, we had to do some prioritization and we had to cut certain features. Eventually, we will make sure that the UI capabilities are carried out throughout the whole platform. It’s a revealing, slightly embarrassing mea culpa, and an honest one. Wherever new interface features have been implemented in 6.5, they work fairly well, but massive parts of the OS still looks and operate like they did in 6.1, such that 6.5 feels more like an interface add-on than an actual OS upgrade.

Could Windows Mobile 6.5 be the Vista of the smartphone world?