Palm has changed the look of the underlying Microsoft operating system significantly in an attempt to make it easier to use(screenshots of WM6 for Smartphone are available in the ipaq 514 review). The images below are intended to give a quick ‘overview’ of the changes:
At first glance, one immediately sees that Palm has completely overhauled the main menu and phone screen of the Palm Treo 500v. The phone screen now is similar to the Treo 600’s - you can enter numbers of characters, ant the 500v analyzes its address book on the fly, presenting you the ‘best’ matches:
Hitting the home button should pop up a list of applications - on the Treo, it instead gives you a rather clumsy menu allowing you to access last-used applications, a few panels for settings like ring tones and bluetooth, and a variety of other stuff:
While this is great for light users, a heavy user will not be satisfied with the difficulty of reaching third party applications…BTW, getting back to the usual menus is not possible.
Here’s a small video demonstrating the ribbon interface in action:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-643186891885846593&hl=en
Once you wish to access one of the many options not provided in the ribbon interface, the standard, clumsy Windows Mobile smartphone UI with its insanely-long lists is right in front of you again(this time in widescreen, with the shortcut keys arranged in alphabetical order(!!!)) - Palm didn’t change anything here:
In the end, however, Palm’s changes and modifications are nothing except a drop of water on a very, very hot stone. WM Smartphone needs to be overhauled - and no matter of carrier/manufacturer investment(short of a complete OS rewrite) can fix that…
What do you think?
