Windows Mobile Marketplace is dead, long live Windows Mobile

It is ironic that the demise of Windows Mobile Marketplace — part of the slow death of Windows Mobile — is creating such a stir, when the lack of a centralized application store is one of the many things which helped mortally wound it. Bloggers now write as if the iPhone was the first smartphone, or the first piece of magic you could hold in the palm of your hand, or the first device that made you feel like one of the officers on the starship Enterprise — ready to take on the world.

Except it wasn’t. Windows Mobile, even in its early version, Windows CE, wasn’t either. But when I traded my black and white PalmPilot in for a colorful and amazingly speedy Dell Axim x51 in early 2006, it sure felt like it. By comparison it was a productivity monster, allowing me not just to read email from the palm of my hand like my previous US Robotics device or my text-only BlackBerry did, but also read and even work on my Office documents. With the addition of a WiFi or GPS card, it had many of the trappings of a modern smartphone, allowing me to download applications and even get turn-by-turn directions anywhere in North America using the then-revolutionary TomTom software for Windows Mobile.

The Axim, and similar early Compaq PDAs based around Windows CE and Windows Mobile, still hold something of a record for physical connectivity. Featuring both a CompactFlash card slot and an SD slot, users could trick them out with all sorts of additional capabilities. Because the OS used a cut-down version of Microsoft’s own .NET framework, developers could quickly fire up Visual Studio and crank out applications using familiar programming models and user interface metaphors. Unfortunately, that simple mapping from desktop to palmtop forced the need for a stylus to navigate the small checkboxes and menus, leaving the door open for Apple to innovate with the truly touch-based iPhone interface. Ironically, the stylus is making a comeback, both in the many creative applications for tablets, and in the trendy new Galaxy Note family of products from Samsung. Much too late for Windows Mobile, however.

Once it was possible to integrate a phone with a PDA, the smartphone was born, and I was excited to upgrade to the then-new AT&T Tilt from HTC, which featured not just a better version of Windows Mobile, but a relatively useable keyboard and tilt-up screen, along with its state of the art phone hardware. It was years later, and after the invention of Swype, before anyone could convince me that it was possible to type on a modern smartphone touchscreen anywhere near as fast as I could on my Tilt’s chimp-friendly keyboard. The Tilt, like most Windows Mobile phones, also had a handy set of hardware buttons for phone functions. As much as they robbed real estate from the screen and cluttered up the physical design of the phone, I still wistfully think of them when I squint to see the softkeys on my fancy new Android phone or can’t figure out where to press to answer a phone call on my huge touchscreen.

Powering up my old Axim and Tilt to photograph them for this story did bring me back to reality a bit. Their tiny, low-resolution screens and pathetic networking speeds would never last in today’s superphone environment of 4G, HD, and accelerometers. Microsoft’s Voice Command, though, is still a respectable precursor to the voice operated interfaces of today. Windows Phone 7 doesn’t borrow much directly from Windows CE and Windows Mobile, reinventing the user experience and programming model in a way more in line with the iPhone, but their heritage lives on in showing the way for millions of early adopters to free themselves up from their desktops and laptops with a few ounces of magic we could fit in our pockets.

Windows Mobile Marketplace is dead, long live Windows Mobile