CNET said that? Wow, I think that's pretty unprofessional and dumb.

People have a point though - WinMo (or Windows Mobile) works fine for the most part, but that's about it. All the other competition seem to have much more compelling devices and operating systems. If someone asked how is WinMo better than the iPhone? Android? etc. It'd be difficult for me to come up with any reasons, except that there's tons of software out there that you can put on your phone. That's about it.

Here's where I think WinMo falls short:

- the UI is outdated. It may be ok, but people would love something aesthetically pleasing, icons more richer than simple ugly ones, very slick, sleek and swift.

- media playing experience is lacking - WMP 10 is pretty old by now, and if it could support more codecs and play faster, it wouldn't be so bad. But the player is really ugly and it's just not a nice experience, than say a Zune would be.

- web browser - It's not a competition here. In this day and age, PIE is the worst mobile browser there is. I'm quite surprised how long it's taken to update it. Even if the new mobile IE will be based on the IE6 engine, it will be no match for the other mobile browsers out there.

- Useful tools built-in - You can't depend on 3rd party developers for everything. It'd be nice if tools were built into the OS. Like speech recognition/voice commands, GPS, screen capture, etc.

- Lack of stringent hardware requirements - In the past, I found a lot of WinMo phone sorely lacking in hardware features. Stuff like Bluetooth, Wifi, GPS, high speed processor, GPU, etc. should be mandatory. It'd also make 3rd party developing a lot easier so they can actually make apps for all WinMo phones, not just specific ones.

-Etc.

I could go on and on, but point is, is that WinMo isn't really going anywhere on the consumer level. Maybe on the enterprise level, but not really much for consumers. At least not hype-worthy. It's just lucky there are nice companies like HTC, and good phones like the T-mobile Shadow, that keep consumers buying WinMo phones.

Having just read Andrew Orlowski’s article over on The Register , it chimes exactly with a belief I’ve