Windows Mobile 6.1 Standard & Professional

WINDOWS MOBILE PRO

    The big thing in Internet Explorer is the "Zoom Out" command. It's located at the top of the menu in the right soft key so you only have two button presses to activate it (Right soft key, action).  This new feature is very comparable to the mini-map view in the Nokia Browser (as seen in my N95 review). While Nokia's browser only shows the mini-map if you hold down a directional button for a long time during scrolling, Internet Explorer's zoomed out mini-map can be activated at any time through the menu commands. I much prefer this interface since it feels like I have more control over what I want it to do.  Internet Explorer's interface for zooming is also superior to the iPhone's Safari browser in that its zooming capabilities are instantly user-discoverable just by reading the text-labeled buttons.  If you disagree with this statement, please respond in the discussion with a screenshot of the Safari browser showing a "Zoom In" or "Zoom Out" button that is readable in English. 

    Another great thing about Internet Explorer's zooming interface is that it's easily hardware-key accessible.  Compare this to Opera 9.5 Beta and SkyFire, which require the inefficient use of a touch screen and ignore the 2nd golden rule of human computer interaction design.  Double tapping on the browser screen does not activate the zoom in command, by the way. This is probably because tapping on the browser screen is supposed to activate hyperlinks and Microsoft rightly did not want to interfere with that standard user interface convention.

    The "Zoom Out" command isn't available until the page finishes loading and that could be a while since Internet Explorer's rendering engine has not been updated. If some one could put the Opera rendering engine inside this Internet Explorer interface, you would have the perfect mobile browser.

    With "Fit to Screen" turned on, you can see how Internet Explorer reformats pages when zoomed out.  Also not in the Zoomed out mode, the left soft key is now assigned to Zoom In, and the right is assigned to Cancel.  You also see a rectangular box in the window that you can move around with the directional buttons.  Alternatively you can tap anywhere in the web page to zoom in.

    In the "Desktop" view mode, Internet Explorer does a pretty good job of rendering the page as intended. You can see this better when zoomed out. However, it's not very useful like this since the text is impossible to read while zoomed out and you'll have lots of side-scrolling to do while zoomed in.

Switching to the "One Column" view and zooming out is actually usable. You can read most of the content this way.

The "Text Size" menu has been replaced with a "Zoom Level" menu. This will resize both pictures and text now.

    There is now a native "Task Manager" application and it works quite well. Notice how "End Task" is assigned to the left softkey. This makes it very easy to close applications using hardware buttons (which was not so easy at all in Windows Mobile 6.0). The Task Manager can also be assigned to a hardware key so that you can easily bring it up whenever you need it.

You can also view all of the processes running on the device.

There's a new Domain Enrollment icon in the Settings>Connections tab. I wasn't able to get this to work on Windows Server 2003 R2.

Just as in Windows Mobile 6.1 Standard, the "Managed Programs" control panel lists applications that have been installed remotely by your system administrator via Mobile Device Manager 2008. 

    The Calendar still has the useless greyed-out "Reply" command in BOTH of the most prominent user interface locations.  The left soft key is where the "Edit" command used to be, which made editing appointments quite easy.  The second easiest to access menu location is the default selected command under the "Menu" softkey. This happens to also be the predominantly useless "Reply" command.  If we can't get the "Edit" command back where it should be, at least put it at the top of the Menu where it would be easier to access; 2 steps (Menu + Action) instead of 4 steps (Menu + Down + Down + Action.)

    Instead of just a blank screen, when you go to an empty messaging account, you see a message saying, "To create a new message, tap Menu, then tap New."  This is to help people find the "New" command which has been buried since it was replaced by the "Delete" command in the left soft key.

    SMS text messages now show up as conversations.  I think it's kind of weird that it shows messages from Me in the "Inbox".  While you can't mark messages as unread anymore, you can use Jeyo Mobile Companion 2.0 to mark them as unread via the desktop.  You can also use this program to backup and restore text messages to another device. So say I switch phones on the weekends, I can transfer the text messages from one Windows Mobile phone to the other and the conversations will remain seamlessly intact.  By the way, the left softkey's "Delete" command will now delete entire conversations.

Text message notifications still pop up like normal when you're not in the Messaging application. If you're viewing a conversation, they just show up in the thread like an instant message.

    But replying to text messages brings up a new screen that shows the conversation in an instant-message like window. The "Me" text shows up in a very bright blue color while the other person's name shows up in bright green. These colors are not used anywhere else within the operating system and they really don't belong here. If anything, they should have used the same colors used in Windows Live Messenger (I.E. Not these). Unfortunately, you do not have the option to easily go back to the way it was before, however, threaded SMS can be disabled with a hack.

When you type a message, the character count appears in the title bar next to the Start menu. I'm disappointed that contact photos do not show up anymore and the time only shows up if the message was received today.

You can still copy incoming SMS messages to the SIM card, but not sent messages.

This video takes you through some of the new features in Windows Mobile Pro 6.1, such as Internet Explorer zooming, the Task Manager, and threaded text messaging.