{"id":215,"date":"2007-12-04T19:06:10","date_gmt":"2007-12-04T19:06:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/dalelane.co.uk\/blog\/?p=215"},"modified":"2007-12-04T20:02:37","modified_gmt":"2007-12-04T20:02:37","slug":"upgrading-the-t-mobile-ameo-to-windows-mobile-6","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dalelane.co.uk\/blog\/?p=215","title":{"rendered":"Upgrading T-Mobile Ameo to Windows Mobile 6"},"content":{"rendered":"

Wow. I really didn’t see this coming: T-Mobile offering upgrades for Windows Mobile phones<\/a>. <\/p>\n

After months and months of “no”<\/a>, “we can’t do that”, “we won’t be doing that”, and “no, that’s not a good idea”, they started making Windows Mobile 6 upgrades available! Either they sneaked this out quietly, or I just completely missed the lead-up to it (to be honest, entirely possible<\/em>). First I heard was when Jason Langridge blogged about it<\/a> yesterday. <\/p>\n

I upgraded my HTC Advantage last night, and have been playing with Windows Mobile 6 for a day now. <\/p>\n

It’s very sweet. <\/p>\n

The good (I’ve not seen for myself – it’s still too soon)<\/strong><\/p>\n

Better battery life <\/p>\n

More reliable – a bunch of fixes for bugs in WM5<\/p>\n

The cool<\/strong><\/p>\n

Outlook can display HTML emails now. Okay, so HTML emails suck, but people still use them, and it’s nice to be able to read them.<\/p>\n

Windows Update means you get future updates without relying on T-Mobile to decide to provide them<\/p>\n

Calendar app now includes a nice scrolling-ribbon thing that lets you visualise your day<\/p>\n

Native support for encrypting files on removable storage<\/p>\n

Without exception, my Windows Mobile 5 apps all work just as before. (Phew). Even the ones that I wrote. (Double-phew).<\/p>\n

The nice<\/strong><\/p>\n

It’s prettier. <\/p>\n

The default system sounds are much better. <\/p>\n

Small touches – so many that I can’t list them all, but lots of fixes for little niggles that bugged me in WM5. Using the Start Menu doesn’t make a really loud click\/snap noise that you can’t disable (hurrah!). The Soft-Key action button for email and SMS messages is now ‘Delete’ instead of ‘Reply’ (this saves time – I delete far more emails than I reply to!). <\/p>\n

The weird<\/strong><\/p>\n

There seems to be a pause when you press the Power button before it actually turns on\/off. <\/p>\n

Is it smaller than WM5? I seem to have more storage than I used to…?<\/p>\n

The slightly annoying<\/strong><\/p>\n

Office creates files in the new Office 2007 docx\/xlsx file formats by default, and the setting to save files in standard doc\/xls formats is fairly well hidden (It is there… it just took me a while to find it. Possibly it’s not well hidden, and I’m just a cretin<\/em>). I send Word documents written on my phone to people nearly every week, and if I started sending docx files to them that’d be pretty much useless. (I know you can download and install a file converter for Office 2003, but that’s a fairly scary prospect for non-techies<\/em>) <\/p>\n

Outlook deletes downloaded emails from POP servers by default. My phone is my place for triaging email, not the final resting home for it – so I was annoyed to lose a bunch of emails that way today. You can change this in Settings though – a new setting, as in WM5 ‘leave emails on the server’ was the only possible behaviour.<\/p>\n

The ugly<\/strong><\/p>\n

What happened to ‘Recognize’? The Notes app in WM5 included a handwriting recognition feature, which didn’t do too bad with my scrawl. It seems to have vanished in WM6. <\/p>\n

The T-Mobile colour-branding. Eurgh… why do they think I want pink everywhere? Even on dialogs and controls I can’t change the colour for, like the Connections Manager.<\/p>\n

I like<\/strong><\/p>\n

In short, I’m liking the upgrade. I know a lot of people knocked WM6 for not having anything earth-shattering in it, but to be honest, if all it offered over WM5 was being more reliable and with a better battery life, that’d be enough for me. Everything else is a bonus. \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Wow. I really didn’t see this coming: T-Mobile offering upgrades for Windows Mobile phones. After months and months of “no”, “we can’t do that”, “we won’t be doing that”, and “no, that’s not a good idea”, they started making Windows Mobile 6 upgrades available! Either they sneaked this out quietly, or I just completely missed […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[38,46,42,47,43,44,45],"class_list":["post-215","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-tech","tag-microsoft","tag-mobile","tag-t-mobile","tag-upgrade","tag-windowsmobile","tag-windowsmobile6","tag-wm6"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dalelane.co.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/215","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dalelane.co.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dalelane.co.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dalelane.co.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dalelane.co.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=215"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dalelane.co.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/215\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dalelane.co.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=215"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dalelane.co.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=215"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dalelane.co.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=215"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}