Quote:
Originally Posted by
Tallest Skil 
Hey, same here! Except I'm… still using the phone I got in 2004. 
You wouldn't happen to remember the interfaces or how the touchscreens worked on those, would you?
I spent about 8 years with Windows Mobile, so I must have enjoyed the experience. The OS had more than it's fair share of bugs, some minor and some pretty annoying, but hey, who ever heard of a bug free OS. Being a windows user I found the drill down menu very easy to use. The apps that I used most frequently were saved to the home screen as shortcut icons. i had a home screen button if I wanted to access them instantly Other programs that I used less frequently were stored in their own respective directories, eg network scanning tools/packet sniffers.
The out of the box the experience was far from perfect,by that i mean that the phone was usable but the OS never felt polished, it was very much a wok in progress. MicroSoft took a very hands off approach and allowed the cooking of custom roms. Often these roms allowed one to trade off between speed and relliability. Don't forget that arm processors and the cost of ram in the "olden days" were very different to today. MS didn't seem to mind that owners were upgrading to the latest OS for free, perhaps this is because the user base was relatively small. The only time that problems arose were when custom roms for a samsung (for example) included HTC IP; TruFlo, Sense etc. Other than that we were allowed to do what ever we wanted, we had root control over our handsets (long before google entered the game).
In the early days apps were fully fledged programs that were resource hungry, not surprising when you consider that internet speeds on mobile networks were so pitiful. The advantage of this was that you didn't have a paper weight when ever you were out of range of a decent signal, ie you could still work. The downside was that you didn't have the kind of apps that I find useful now, such as "real time" London Transport info, to be fair, London Tansport didn't even offer that info via the web in those days.
With regard to the use of the touch screen, it had initially been optimised for small screens and thus phones were supplied with a stylus, that said, navigating with your finger on a screen 3.5 inches or larger was quite easy and later updates such as HTCs truFlo had the ability to distinguish between a stylus and finger. Being resistive, the screens were far from perfect for showing high quality video but I had already been through the whole "omigod I can watch video on my mp3 player" years before ipods were able to and decided that it was little more than a novelty.
There was no pinch to zoom but when reading text on sites such as this, a double tap would allow one to optimally fill the screen with the text that was relevant. The only WM phone that I owned with a "small screen" had a click ipod B&O dial that zoomed in and out and had the advantage of only needing one finger.
I have no doubt that some of the members here will dismiss my experience because I was a long time owner of an OS that was at best a niche product, Frankly I don't care what phone people have and don't need to see lots of other people buying the same thing to affirm that i have the best phone..
The (main) problem with WM was that it years ahead of its time. It was flawed but without it we might not have the incarnations of IOs that currently exist and without iOS WP7 might not exist.. Bash MS if you must but remember that apple owe them much and equally they owe apple much .
