Seems that I am not the only one who finds Windows Mobile to be unbearable to use. Martin Varsavsky of FON also finds that Windows Mobile devices are below par. He summarises the three top phone platforms with this statement:

The way I see things Nokia helps me play, Blackberry helps me work, but Windows Mobile just slows me down.

I’ve given up on using my T-Mobile SDA as my regular phone several times now. And, as Martin says, it is not the hardware. The SDA is not that bad at all. I would have scrapped the media player buttons in favour of making the numeric keypad a little larger perhaps, but that’s the only hardware change I can think of.

The software though is abysmal. It doesn’t crash often, but it is much harder to use than it should be, and it is very slow. The problem, I believe, is that somebody at MS can’t think past the Windows desktop. That was a poor interface on a PC; it is an abysmal one for a phone. I am hoping that the iPhone will have a user interface that doesn’t try to be a Mac desktop, but knows from the outset that it’s a phone first, and everything else second.