Windows Mobile 6.5 "an Amazing Engineering Feat," All Right…

Windows Mobile 6.5 might be a necessary stopgap on the path to 7.0, if not exactly an elegant one. But what can you expect from an OS with such a hurried path to launch? Not much, according to Microsoft (MSFT) developers who admit that the incremental update was a rush job that suffers from all of the problems attendant thereto. “The reason why we couldn’t complete the interface on Windows Mobile 6.5 is because of time,” Loke Uei Tan, senior product manager on the Windows Mobile Team, explained at Microsoft’s TechEd 2009 event. “We only spend what, eight months, nine months, to build 6.5 from ground up and it’s actually an amazing engineering feat. But, in order to do that, we had to do some prioritization and we had to cut certain features. Eventually, we will make sure that the UI capabilities are carried out throughout the whole platform.”

Sure, we’ll improve Windows Mobile to better compete with Apple’s (AAPL) iPhone–eventually. Sounds quite a bit like Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer’s “we’re doing our best” remarks about Windows Mobile back in March.

As I noted at the time, “it’s all well and good that Microsoft is accelerating Windows Mobile development to better meet its competition. But that competition isn’t exactly standing still waiting for Microsoft to bring itself to parity. It lapped Microsoft two years ago, and if the software behemoth continues at its present pace, the competition will lap it again. Perhaps it already has.”