Windows Phone Thoughts: What I don't like about Pocket PCs

In a rare burst of emotion, infoSync founder Jørgen Sundgot goes on a rant about the things he doesn't like about the Pocket PC OS. But, in typical infoSync fashion, it's calm and well-measured. I find it hard to disagree with most of his points (although there is a battery status icon Jørgen - click the time in the upper right corner). I suppose the good news here is that some of the things that Jørgen brings up are going to be fixed in the next version of the OS from what I hear. No, I can't tell you which things. :wink: Jørgen seems to indicate that this is part of a series of rants, so I'm interested in seeing what he has to say about the Palm and Symbian platforms...

"While handhelds are continously improving in all sorts of ways too numerous mention, I still have gripes with most of them. Of course, no product can be perfect, and there's always the matter of taste and preference - but some issues should be disposed of sooner rather than later in my opinion, and today I'll focus on the Pocket PC platform.

Let's start with Landscape mode. Even though it's fully possible both in theory and practice to have applications that, just like those on a standard PC operating system of your choice, dynamically resize depending on the orientation of their window, the Pocket PC platform is - for now - restricted to a portrait layout. Why? Apart from making things simpler for developers, I have no idea - and there are already multiple applications that enable users to rotate the display 90 degrees to improve usability when for instance browsing web sites or working with Excel documents. In fact, properly written applications handle rotation nicely, and just in case you didn't know, some of Microsoft's own applications do - while others (ahem) don't."