Mobile Mania

When Windows Mobile 6.5 was officially revealed last month at the Mobile World Congress (MWC) 2009 in Barcelona, it sported the honeycomb Start screen that users couldn't quite agree on, even when early screenshots began to leak. Apparently, soon after Microsoft started dogfooding Windows Mobile 6.5 and related services internally last week, feedback coming from its employees started coming in, and it wasn't very positive. This was apparently the final blow, because at MIX09 this week, it has come to light that Microsoft has acted on the negative comments and tweaked the honeycomb interface.

While the layout remains the same and the icons are in the exact same place, they have been enlarged and the actual honeycomb outline (hexagons around each icon) is gone. Furthermore, scrolling up or down no longer means going all the way to the top or all the way to the bottom: the second the finger leaves the screen, scrolling will stop.

The rather blurry screenshot above is actually two screencaps of a video which is filming Loke Uei Tan, Senior Technical Product Manager of the Mobile and Embedded Devices Group in Microsoft, as he uses the new interface during one of the 129 sessions at MIX09. This one was entitled "Windows Mobile 6.5 Overview," and before showing off the changes, Tan says in the video: "The middle screen is what we call the honeycomb interface. Well, this screenshot is a little bit old. We've got some feedback from the users that says 'Hey, wait a minute, this honeycomb UI doesn't work very well. Let's change it a little bit.' So I'll show you what the new one looks like." I've embedded the full video of the session below (Silverlight required, honeycomb changes start at 6:50).

It's not the first time Microsoft has altered a key UI element during the beta development phase, but it's still very interesting because there must have been quite an uproar if the company made the changes even after having publicly unveiled the new operating system. That said, while the tweaks are notable, the fact that the honeycomb layout remains demonstrates that the changes are an evolution, not a revolution.