PhoneScoop: Windows Mobile 6.5

[0]Hey everybody phonescoop here. We are taking a quick look at the Verizon Imagio made by HTC. This is one of the first Windows Mobile Imagio made by HTC. This is one of the first Windows Mobile 6.5 devices to hit the market. Lets take the hardware for a quick spin before we take a more in depth look at how Windows Mobile 6.5 stacks up. You can see we have got a fairly sizable monoblock display phone here large touchscreen, several buttons at the bottom. You can see we have 5 buttons. Send and end key. Dedicated application key here Microsoft Menu here, and a back key. We have got an area here just below the screen thats used to zoom in and out Nothing along the left side of the phone at all and on the bottom, we can see this still stylus and we have a 3.5mm headset jack as well as miniUSB port. [1]On the right you can see we just have the volume toggle up towards the top The back has been slightly stylized you see theres two different types of materials here. We have got a glossy finish on this side and a soft touch on this side. Of course we can see the camera, the Verizon logo HTC logo and one thing I will show you here. Pop this up This is a little stand so that the phone can rest on a level surface and that stand believe it or not doubles as a antenna for the VCast video services. Definitely one of the more appealing devices I have seen from HTC in recent memory It just looks good, feels good and works good. So thats the hardware One of the first things you will notices about Windows Mobile 6.5 is when you unlock the phone there is this slide key here. Now if the phone had received [2]any messages, any missed calls, any text messages or calendar notifications, while this device was powered off or locked we would see some of them displayed here. We slide and unlocks the phone and you can see the HTC made TouchFlow 3D user interface. You wouldnt notice too many differences. In fact we can slide along here. And you will see all the basic applications and settings as you have on other TouchFlow 3D devices. So thats where you know, the similarities and users were experienced with TouchFlow 3D or feel right at home when they dial in to the Imagio. Here you can see the start menu has been reorganized a bit and is much bigger and much more finger friendly We can scroll through and see all the applications that are here [3]You can also see there is space reserved for users to add their own applications and most of the standard stuff is in here and you can see the home screen. Your Favorites for calling. Your contacts. Calendar settings, the phone itself, marketplace, navigator for Verizon bing search as well as music messaging TV and so on. Plenty of applications are already here There is lots of ways to access content. You can also see the Opera browser, YouTube application, and several others. So what we are going to do now, we are going to turn TouchFlow off so you can see the differences and you can see how Windows Mobile 6.5 is supposed to look. So here is the Imagio with TouchFlow 3D removed from the today screen. And you can see it makes the device pretty boring. We got pretty much nothing on the today screen at all. [4]If we hit the start menu, we get the same home menu. You can see its laid out in the finger friendly style. The honeycomb grid is no longer here but we got all the same applications, all the same stuff. Plenty of things going on Perhaps the most in depth menu is the settings menu. You can see we have got lots of different settings we can control here Going into the system folder we have got a lot of control over different things the phone is doing. And you can see how easy it is to access a lot of these different things systems and applications, they are just simple finger pushes away and its much more user friendly. But you know, we go back out to the main screen and hit contacts, and you will see that its not exactly as friendly as it could be. Little bit easier, we can send text message to global support for [5]Verizon wireless if we want to and once we choose to do that it automatically jumps into the text messaging application, and we can take care of all of our messaging needs from the screen. If we hit the menu button, you can see that we can do lots of different things. And you know, its subtle, but some of the changes you will see here are that these menu items are further apart and by placing them further apart it makes them easier to push with your finger. So we want to insert some text and it looks like they dont have any text So we are not going to insert anything. But on the whole its easier to push these things are got what you need done rather than worrying about pushing really, really tiny tiny things on the screen. So its subtle changes like that that are going to make the daily use of Windows Mobile 6.5 a bit better and same [6]goes for calendar, you know we have got no appointments. And if we want to access the menu you can see that these menu items are easier to interact with with your finger So we just go to today. You can see how easy it is to push any of these buttons and get it to do what you want. So those are the basics. Of course, we have got plenty of applications here. As we mentioned we have got the new Internet explorer which we should definitely take a look at. The new Internet Explorer has been improved. This is IE 6 on Windows Mobile 6.5. And here we are in San Diego which is the EVDO capital of the world and you can see we have got the new Verizon home portal loading here. rather slowly. And again we have got finger friendly icons to jump to different things [7]on the web and on the Verizon's portal, and if we want we will just choose News and we will watch it bring up some news And there is today's news. We have got plenty going on and you can see scan through these headlines really quickly and check things out. We have got a little mini map here in the side which shows us where we are on the page. You can see that sliding around as we interact with the screen. So other applications on here include Visual Voicemail and there is also Opera. Nice of them to have Opera and Internet Explorer on here We have got the Opera Mobile, we have got the VCast mobile TV application here We have got the music application here which integrates with you know, the Windows Media Player, and the VCast music application. [8]So those are a little bit more robust than what we are used to seeing on Verizon's feature phones. We have got an FM radio, we have got a mobile instant messaging, and the marketplace of course. Lets fire up the marketplace and see what Microsoft is offering us here. And here we we go. Here is what users are going to see first when they first launch the marketplace for Windows Mobile. So we have got a Facebook application, Pacman We have got different categories and ways to search So lets check out whats most popular. And turns out we have got some applications here. We can scan through these applications, see whats available. We can see pricing, we can see reviews, and lets look at the Facebook application It will show us a description about the application We can see lots of text there. Has some bulleted highlights. [9]Lists some system requirements and gives us access to all the reviews and some screenshots and you can see that there is a little bit of a good screenshot there. Shows you how the application works and of course we can choose to install it. So we will hit the install button and of course we have to have a Windows Live ID. So for those of you who already have Windows Live ID from here you just sign in. And if the application is free you will be download it without any problems and if it requires a payment there are steps you can take to make such payment and then download the application. So those are the biggest things that are new with Windows Mobile 6.5 and they have been demonstrated here on the HTC Imagio for Verizon wireless.

Channel: phonescoop