Not so long ago, digging in a drawer in search of a triangular key, I was surprised to find that I was storing three rather ancient smartphones.
Nostalgia got the better and lo! Two rarities turned on, and for the third, the hardworking citizens of the People's Republic of China still produced batteries and could also be reanimated. Having ceased to "let a tear" on the 5-year-old SMS, I thought that I simply had to remind you what the operating system for Microsoft smartphones looked like more than 10 years ago.
This time I have very little free time and I’m just afraid that if I don’t write now, I’ll never write again, so unlike my
articles on Habré , this note will be short and there will not be much more text in it than photos .
If you decide together with me in honor of the cleaning day to wipe the dusty "Mobile Windows", you are welcome under the cat.
As I wrote above, I don’t have much time, so I ask readers to forgive me, my unprofessional approach. The fact is that I don’t want to install ActiveSync and search for screenshots for all three phones, but I don’t really know how to do it with standard tools. Therefore, I will take pictures.
This is what the article is about:
Part I: WM 2003 SE: I-mate SP3IPart II: WM 6.1: ASUS P750Part III: WM 6.5: Garmin-Asus M10There are many articles on the Internet describing these smartphones, so I will not waste time analyzing the characteristics and so on, but simply share with you my subjective memories.
WM 2003 SE I-mate SP3IWe start with I-mate SP3I. It was my first smartphone. In those days, handhelds such as PALM or Pocket PC seemed to me to be unrealistically cool, especially after the unkillable Nokia 3310 or more than once thrown into the wall (for terrible work) Motorola C350. As a result, after watching the Qtek 2020i communicator, which was a friend of mine, I also wanted a smartphone with Windows.
And I must say that at that time
I-mate SP3i was not the worst phone, only it had one drawback - the lack of a stylus.
What awaits us when you turn on the phone? Well, for a start, at least a minute of anxious waiting, during which we are shown the manufacturer’s logo and the Windows Mobile logo
Then we meet the desktop of the smartphone. Batyushki! Yes, there is everything that an office employee needs: a calendar, access to mail and SMS, IE mobile browser, and of course Klondike Solitaire.
In fact, the top line reflects the most recently opened applications, so that it changes depending on user activity.
The list of settings and applications is not very rich, but everything is there. Also, applications could be downloaded as a .cab archive and installed on a smartphone, but I apparently erased everything and left only the factory applications.
By the way, I did not find the MS Office package in the basic set of applications, but I think that it is not needed on a phone without a stylus.
But there are already two whole games, "kerchief" and "balls". This concludes with I-mate because during the test, his keyboard finally broke.
WM 6.1: ASUS P750Let us turn to the more technically successful solutions, namely Windows Mobile 6.0.
It was with her, if my memory serves me correctly: ASUS P750, but from that moment, I managed to upgrade to WM. 6.1, so all the screenshots will be for this version (however, the versions are not very different).
As in the past case, when loading, we get the manufacturer's logo and the WM logo.
And here it is the start screen.
It should be noted that in those old times, the
ASUS P750 and the WM 6 itself were a very successful combination.
Perhaps, out of three phones on WM, that I had this - the best combination.
Unlike the previous smartphone, in this case, we still have a stylus.
Perhaps one of the shortcomings of communicators of those times is a small screen, I remember that I constantly missed the keyboard characters with a stylus (fortunately, there was also a mechanical keyboard)
By the way, the screen could be rotated.
Since the phone was positioned as a model for successful and business people, of course MS Office was installed in it, which rescued me both during my studies and on kebabs with a guitar.
For this version of Windows, it was possible to "pump up" a whole bunch of applications. What I actually did. The truth is, over the years, the slot for the memory card has broken, so almost all third-party applications (which were then easily installed on the memory card) fell off and only the factory ones remained.
By the way, about the factory applications, guess what games are installed by default?
That's right, "balls" and "kerchief" :)
True to play them has become much more convenient.
Well, some more photos. On the left, we see mobile IE and rare 2011 ya.ru.
On the right is performance information.
WM 6.5: Garmin-Asus M10Impressed by the phone’s past, I decided to purchase another, based on the next generation of Windows Mobile 6.5 - the
Garmin-Asus M10 .
In my personal opinion, it was a mistake comparable only with the investment in the
MMM pyramid.
On the one hand, the device itself turned out to be unsuccessful in my opinion. He was weak as a smartphone and terribly buggy as a navigator. On the other hand, the choice of operating system was also not the wisest.
It should be noted that already in those days I had the choice to buy a phone on WM 6.5 or Garmin-Asus A10 with the second version of Android.
“Android is something temporary, it will soon be bent, and Microsoft is a big serious corporation, WM has great development prospects, a long support cycle ...” - I thought something like that in those years (and so it was wrong).
It is especially nice that literally two months after I bought a smartphone on WM 6.5, Microsoft happily announced that it would no longer develop it and would concentrate on the incompatible Windows Phone. My joy then was no limit, because I was left with a buggy piece of junk, which I didn’t plan to update and for which I immediately stopped writing customized programs.
But one way or another, it cannot be said that WM 6.5 was a completely incompetent operating system, many things we were used to in it could be met, it’s just that these ideas were not refined to an acceptable implementation (in my opinion).
So, turn on the phone.
We see the lock screen familiar to many modern users, several desktops with the ability to edit icons, a cascading view of open applications, and the usual menu of settings and applications.
There was certainly a pre-installed office version 2010.
But the toys in this miracle technology greedy, as you can see "balls" apparently decided not to shame and refused to enter the factory kit. Only Klondike remained.
You could use the phone with a stylus or with a finger poking at the screen.
True, the screen did not support multi-touch, so it was clearly inconvenient to scale.
I must say that after this phone, I was so disappointed with Microsoft’s “mobile” products that I didn’t buy a single phone on Windows Phone, so my personal history of mobile OS from Microsoft ends there.
Thanks to everyone who was nostalgic with me.