Kevin Daly

Thoughts on Windows Mobile 2003 Second Edition

For anybody who ever reads any of these posts, you may have guessed by now that I'm quite interested in mobile/device development :-).

For anyone who speaks or reads French, I recommend the item on PocketPCParadise. Lots of details and lots of nifty pictures.

This upgrade does not include many of the improvements that people would have liked (for example the functionality of the office applications has not been addressed, and connecting to the Internet (or anything much) remains a pain), but we all knew that would be the case this time around. The support for different form factors and resolutions is a huge step forward (bearing in mind of course that appropriate hardware will be required for the “non-classic” resolutions) that gives manufacturers much more scope for innovation and product differentiation (witness the Motorola MPx). It's safe to say this development will not be welcomed in the managerial halls of Palmland.

One of the improvements (as opposed to extra things to consider...) from the .NET developer perspective is that .NETCF 1.0 SP2 is now in ROM. I've had it on my old Jornada 565 (I'm soooo underfunded) for a while now and in my opinion it's a definite step forward in performance and reliability, with a few little UI imrpovements thrown in (such as being able to set background colour on buttons, which is nice).

Back when I thought there would be a Windows Mobile 2004 I fretted publicly about the consequences of it being released before .NETCF 2.0, which at that time I still expected to be released this year. So it could be assumed that I'd be disappointed on two fronts now. Yes and no. While it would be nice to see a fully-featured OS revision this year, and even nicer to see Whidbey and the new and from the PDC hints *wonderful* version of .NETCF this year as well, all nicely synchronised, as I said before WM2003SE is a significant upgrade, and it *is* good that the latest upgrade released to the .NETCF will be included: that does address the concern I had about CF updates not being applied, although not in relation to the version I had hoped to see.

So now time for some more wild, unfounded speculation (and let's face it, my record on this to date is pretty crappy): We have reason to believe/hope that we will see a spanking new, improved version of the .NET Compact Framework appearing with Visual Studio 2005. Obviously I'm at a disadvantage here not being at the MDC, so I'll look for more news on that subject. But just to toddle out on a limb...might we also see a Windows Mobile 2005 released at the same time, incorporating .NETCF v 2.0 in ROM (and please MS, if there is to be a WM2005, it *must* have .NETCF v 2.0 in ROM). The managed access to Pocket Outlook-related features demonstrated and discussed at the PDC, which I fervently hope *will* make it into v 2.0, was very interesting and attractive (especially by comparison with POOM). Additionally, it was distinctly reminiscent of the presentations I had been seeing about the integration of Outlook functionality in WinFS for Longhorn. Having a similar programming model across future platforms is a good idea (especially since it's a good model), but I wonder how far that will go with Windows Mobile. Will it be simply a matter of creating managed wrappers around POOM functions, or  will that managed functionality be addressed at the OS level? (perhaps to the extent that POOM becomes a COM wrapper around managed code). In that case (or even if it's less radical than that) we might not only have a Windows Mobile 2005 (which I hope anyway), but if it places more emphasis on managed code it might well be regarded as a first-off-the-block mobile entry in the Longhorn family. Or a sort of “Shorthorn” if you will. Obviously I am only seizing on an isolated example of a vaguely possible feature that *might* be seen as *slightly* Longhorn-ish...which is pretty weak...but there may actually be a coherent design philosphy at work here.

PS. In terms of philosophical consistency with WinFS (how's that for a woolly expression?), it's worth pointing out that the Pocket PC platform has *always* by comparison with the PC placed relatively less emphasis on physical location of data by comparison with function, witness the use of My Documents split between internal memory and a storage card.

Windows Mobile developments and the future of Pocket Office

This one's not directly .NET-related, but hey, indulge me.

There have been two interesting articles on Brighthand recently, one on the subject of whether there will in fact be a Windows Mobile 2004 or whether it will be an update to Windows Mobile 2003 (“Is There Going To Be a Windows Mobile 2004?“), and the other on what Microsoft's options might be for what to do about Pocket Office (“The Future of Pocket Office“).

Since it is expected that whatever it is called, there will be a revision of Windows Mobile 2003 released this year, and that it will include support for landscape mode and higher resolutions, this has in my view implications for Pocket Office that people don't seem to have given much thought to yet.

There is no secret that many people are dissatisfied with Pocket Word and Pocket Excel, both in terms of their er, feature sparseness, and the vexed issue of format stripping when documents are round-tripped (eek, I think I just did serious violence to the English language). What surprises me is that anyone uses them all that much at all, not because of their limitations as applications but because I don't have much use for viewing a tiny window on a spreadsheet, and wouldn't really want to try reading a reasonably complex document on a 240 x 320 portrait mode display either. Reader does surprisingly well for that purpose, but it has design advantages in that area that Word does not. So I leave Pocket Word to brief notes and maybe a shopping list, but that's about it.

The truth is however that many people do manage to make productive use of both applications, and are obviously not put off by the resolution issue. These are the same people who are running up against the problems mentioned earlier, and the ones who are applying the pressure for change.

My point being: once landscape mode and higher resolution become available, the number of people who would find Pocket Word and Pocket Excel useful (all other things being equal) will increase significantly, at which point I fully expect the clamour to improve the products (if nothing has been done about it by that stage) to become somewhat deafening. To put it another way, the fact that there will be a lot more people wanting to use Pocket Word and Pocket Excel means that there will be a lot more people dissatisfied with what happens (and which features are unavailable) when they do.