Microsoft CEO laughs off Google OS challenge

"Objectivity has absolutely nothing to do with what kind of phone a person has. It has everything to do with what you like and don't like and what you do on a daily basis."

I completely agree. If you like when your phone is unbelievably slow, if you appreciate waiting minutes for the web pages to load or keeping clicking accidentally due to the incredibly unreliable page zooming, if you enjoy having to pull in and out the stylus to click all those amazingly tiny buttons everywhere and if you really can't resist the temptation of having to launch the task manager from the programs menu when you want to switch between the applications or just love savoring the despair of seeing your phone OS slowly dying because every application you close remains open in background eating all the little ram and CPU that the sluggish OS hasn't already eaten then there's no better choice than Windows Mobile. I love suffering and having my phone suffer: I choose Windows Mobile!

P. S. a phone from 2001 with proper task management just called and said "haw-haw!".

"Applications close when I want them to, and stay running in the background when I want them to."

With windows mobile you have no control on which applications can stay open and which can't. If you do it's because your phone has some third party software in it that hacks the X button behavior.

"I can access a list of running applications at any time."

Where "any time" means having to go to the start menu and keep scrolling two-three pages until you reach the bottom where the task manager is and then launch it? On WM 6.5, where the scrolling halts at each page, it's going to be uber-awesome. All of this if your phone hasn't yet another other ugly task management hack done by the phone manufacturer.

"I've never actually had it run out of RAM, so I don't know about that problem you describe."

You don't? Then I wonder why the latest phones models have 256 or more mb of ram. I'm sure the phone manufacturers love investing in useless features.

"I also haven't touched the stylus in months. Wait, that's not right. I used it to scratch a really bad and hard to reach itch in my ear a while back. "

You don't? Then how do you tap all those small notification icons, for example to set the phone volume, or check the battery status, how do you select text properly or how do you use all those tiny scrollbars or the incredibly small on-screen keyboard?

This is the WM default keyboard, can you really tell me you can type on this, with your fingers, on a 3'' or smaller phone screen? If you can then you must have the smallest fingers in the world.

Windows Mobile has an awful UI, if you can manage to do something without pulling out the stylus it's just because your phone manufacturer did tons of ugly hacks and applications replacements to make the UI more usable or you have a ginormous PDA phone with a QVGA screen.

"Oh, look, the DSL is being flakey. Let me set up my phone as a wireless hotspot, aaaand off we go."

Just another third party app included by the phone manufacturer.

"Oh, it would be nice to have a bigger screen and a faster processor, (Although the latest builds of 6.5 are pretty snappy) but I want it to be on my terms, not subject to the whims of some designer somewhere. I really like that it's almost infinitely customizable."

You can try all the faster processors you want: with WM having a nearly inexistent UI acceleration the phone is always going to be laggy.

"I also like a hardware keyboard."

Which keyboard? The Touch Pro keyboard that has no left/right hardware buttons, OK and start menu buttons or the Xperia X1 keyboard that has no directional arrows (unbelievable but true).

"I like being able to access websites with flash, but it would be nice to have an adblock feature."

Flash use is primarily for ads. With flash lite you can view only a subset of flash animations: only those that are designed for flash player 8. Is it really worth having all your page loads slowed by all the websites' ads just to see youtube and some other lame flash animations?

"Although some of your points are valid"

Just some?

"using a screenshot of Windows Mobile 2003 doesn't help your case,"

The on-screen keyboard of WM6 and WM6.5 is the same, it just has some fancy 3d effect but if you believe it's different you can post another screenshot.

"especially since WM5 and WM6.x are considerably more finger friendly than WM2003 (I can do quite a lot without the stylus on my Axim X51v, though not as much as on my iPhone)."

You can do without the stylus because you have a PDA with a very big screen. Try that on a phone screen like the diamond's without all the UI hacks.

"The screen of my Axim and my iPhone are almost exactly the same size."

I didn't know that, since I never saw one next the other. I remember the Axim was quite big but that's probably due to the screen frame, however what is interesting is that your axim has 192 DPIs set as default, twice the standard 96dpi. It's like having a QVGA device the size of a VGA device and if as by your own admission it's not as usable with your fingers as your iphone you could imagine how much it would be usable without that DPI hack on its real resolution.

"The default keyboard is not finger friendly, I'll agree. But then again, neither is the iPhone's keyboard (although it's better). It's mainly the spell checker that makes it work. And there are third party keyboards for WM that are better, as well as many other soft input panels. On the iPhone, you can't use custom input methods."

I used htc keyboard, fingerkeyb, resco keyboard and pocketcm and while all those were far better than the tiny WM keyboard they still couldn't hold a candle against the iphone's keyboard, not just because of the predictive text input but also because of the screen that is far more finger friendly. However if you don't mind jailbreaking your iphone there are quite a few keyboard replacements with some even allowing you to create your own custom keyboards with all the letters you want disposed in the way you want.

"You complain that what makes some WM phones more usable is third party apps, but the way I see it, the fact that WM is that customizable is a good thing."

The two things don't actually conflict. The fact that WM is customizable is good, the fact that phone makers have to hack and customize it in extreme ways to make it usable because it's far below the usability standards set by the other phone OSes is bad.

"What I don't agree with is the difficulty of using the scrollbars without a stylus; they are easy to use by putting your finger against the edge of the screen. The same is true of the of notification icons at the top."

Yes, maybe if you have a sunken screen like in your case you can use the scrollbars and icons more easily because you have the frame in the way that keeps your finger aligned but on newer phones where the screens aren't sunken anymore you can't: you have to keep your finger very still in order to scroll properly or put your finger vertically and use the nail and you have to center the notification icon perfectly with your finger. That's not finger friendly at all.

"Plus I don't like that you can't use a stylus with the iPhone. Writing kanji with your finger (which I have to do with the Chinese handwriting recognition, because the iPhone still doesn't have a real Japanese one) is awkward."

You can use a stylus, just not the standard ones.