Windows Mobile: Not Pretty...

Before, I said that I did not understand why people did not like WinMo.  That is not entirely true…

Today, at work, one of my co-workers was hard at work tweaking the life out of his HTC touch.  He has been at it for weeks now and the silly thing looks like an iPhone now.  I also have an HTC Touch but am plenty happy with just the SPB Mobile Shell installed.  It was at that point that I really accepted what it is that people so dislike…  People really do not like the idea of being forced to use their phone like it is a desktop version of Windows.

Now, the reality is that with a couple of tweaks, the vast majority of interfacing issues disappear.  As I noted in an earlier post, with just a few enhancements from SPB, your winMo phone/PDA can be impressively enhanced to the point of rarely needing to take the stylus out of the slide.

One upside to things on the WinMo front is that HTC is constantly developing its own frontend for their devices.

The BIG downside is that it seems that no one wants to take the time to write apps that also follow the usability displayed by SPB Mobile Shell.  My latest example is that I installed ceTwit and it looks like a desktop Windows app.  It works all fine but it looks stale and is operated far too much like you have a mouse in your hand.  I can do most things without my stylus but it requires using the D-pad a lot.

And as much as I would like to belive that function is fine on its own, I have to remind myself that after installing SageTV, the first thing I did was install a full skin replacement for it called SageMC.  Why did I install it?  Because it was far prettier and a lot easier to use.

To this, I guess it is best to say that form should be the culmination of function and aesthetics.