Let's get this straight. I'm not biased. I'm really not. With the launch of Windows Mobile 5 last summer, I really thought Bill Gates' new mobile platform was in with a chance of rivalling Symbian OS, at least from a technical point of view. I was prepared to be impressed. Surely 5 versions of Windows CE was enough to get things right?
It's true that Symbian's biggest rival has improved. The latest devices - I've been playing with an i-Mate SP5 - do a lot of things right. This baby is smaller and lighter than most S60 smartphones and yet has Wi-Fi as standard. The music integration with Windows is impressive, as always, and the camera's passable. On the software side, Windows Mobile 5 is now almost adequate under the hood, with a great Today screen (with shortcuts to recently launched applications) and fast multitasking of the standard applications (once you discover the built-in Task Manager utility). But... and there quite a few buts....
But I'm not quite sure where to begin. There's no Notes application. Or any Office viewers/editors of any kind. The phone isn't 3G, a crime in this day and age. The menus continue to be clumsy in many places. And you all know my findings on multimedia, with the current generation of WM5 devices lagging a long way behind the Nokia N70 and N90. Most of all, when you start hammering the OS with real world comms activities, such as trying to beam items to another non-WM5 smartphones while other apps run in the background, you quickly discover that the OS still isn't 100% ready for the prime time, with unresponsive pauses of up to five seconds while processes sort themselves out. It's true that the SP5 (and other WM5 devices of the genre) is going to make someone a really neat phone. But I question whether it's as smart as a S60 smartphone.
No device is perfect, and we could all point to 3 or 4 weaknesses of any single S60 device (the favourite usually being Nokia's refusal to put in PIM categories). But overall, the day to day experience and capabilities of S60 devices like my Nokia 6630 are a clear step ahead of those in the competing world of Windows Mobile. As I say, I really need to be impartial because of the Smartphones Show's remit, but it's sometimes hard. Symbian smartphones outsell Windows Mobile smartphones by between 4 to 1 and 10 to 1, depending on which figures you believe, and based on my own review experiences over the last month or two, I'd say that Symbian is at least a year ahead of Microsoft in the mobile world. And maybe two. Sorry, Bill, your guys and girls in Seattle have still got work to do...