Typical Slashdot FUD. I've been using WM6 with my Dash for a few months now and think it is great. I can do pretty much anything including monitoring my house through wireless cameras while I'm away and play a ton of bittorrent content I've downloaded. The Voice commander is just awesome as well.

..from [pcworld.com] "decent [pcmag.com]" sources [gizmodo.com], and still the submission with a CoolTechZone review makes it to the front page. CoolTechZone sucks, leave it out of here, even if the occasional Microsoft-bashing does go on there..

My guess is that it's just underpowered for Windows Mobile 6. Hmm, it takes a while to find information - HTC Atlas:

Microprocessor
CPU: 32bit Texas Instruments OMAP 850
CPU Clock: 201 MHz
Memory, Storage capacity
ROM capacity: 128 MB (accessible: 41.42MB)
RAM capacity: 64 MB (accessible: 43.8MB)
Hard Disk capacity: Not supported
Display
Display Type: color transflective TFT , 65536 scales
Display Resolution: 240 x 320
Display Diagonal: 2.8 "

That doesn't seem particularily powerful or have a great memory capacity. In fact I had a HTC Blue Angel (in its Orange MPV2000 guise) that was more powerful than that two years ago. I'm sure Windows Mobile adheres to Moore's Law in the same way as every other version of Windows does so it is going to be disappointing.

Blaming the Operating System for the speed on this is off base. The specs on this 200MHz TI processor, 2-megapixel camera, 64MB of internal RAM, 128MB of ROM Show that this is a step back down from other HTC machines, the Old HTC Blue Angel had a nominal clock speed of 400 MHz. The other things is all of the junk that T-Mobile loads up on the machine, with a 200 MHz Clock, and a limited 64 MB of ram, you really don't want to fill up the available RAM with all sorts of junk like all of the standard carrier roms do. But heck, blame WM6. I know that WM5 was slower in some ways than WM2003SE, but it had data persistence that was missing in WM2003 & WM2003SE. WM6 is faster in my experience than WM5 on the same hardware, other than that I don't see a big difference. The Bluetooth stack is said to be more stable, but I still use wired headsets, so I can't comment on that.

Exactly. I'm running WM6 on an HTC Hermes, and it's extremely fast and responsive. There are several improvements 'under the hood' such as Office Mobile 2007, updated Pocket Internet Explorer, HTML email, improved internet sharing, Windows Live integration, better bluetooth, better battery life, windows update, etc. There aren't any blazingly new features over WM5, just a lot of tweaks to the software. I'm guessing that's why MS has offered free WM6 upgrades to the carriers.

Of course the carriers will load down their roms with a ton of crap, so to get the most out of it you'll have to cook your own rom to get rid of it...but they should be blaming their carriers for that one.

from TFA, right out of the gate "After the success of T-Mobile's Sidekick series..."

I owned a sidekick3, 2 of them to be exact, and both of them met a violent demise. One took a trip off the 4th floor into a concrete wash, the other, stomped into oblivion in the parking lot after work.

Before the upgrade (which it nagged you ever 5 mins of the day to do with no option to opt out) I had ZERO problems... first day into the upgrade, that son of a bitch would freeze up in the middle of summer on the equator(A Christmas Story quote...)

The sales might have been a success, but after that bastard locking to the point of pulling the battery and it wiping ALL of my saved emails, pics, texts contacts, etc(like wtf is the goddamn miniSD and SIM card for!?!)... Id call the product itself a total failure.

Other than that, when it did work, it was a kickass device

I dont know if this post would be considered a rant or informative?

Contacts --> Press and hold on contact --> Select Send Contact --> Text message from the context menu.

Tick the items of contact info you want to send.

Select recipient of text message in the usual way.

No editing or pasting.

But I suppose it is more fun to hate on Microsoft.

I have one, so let me give you an idea. First, it is about on par with most smartphones I have used. I am talking real ones that have full touchscreen and QWERTY keyboard. None of these lame ripoff phones like the Q (from Motorola) or Blackjack (from Samsung). Features wise it is pretty complete, except for 3G, but then again, T-Mobile doesn't have a 3G network yet, so you have to live with EDGE. But you can get T-mobile hotspot plans and it does have 802.11 support. The one problem I have is the program memory is bordering on insufficient. Unlike a normal PDA (and maybe some smartphones), I cannot find away to adjust more storage to program memory, since I can always gain more storage using the microSD.

If you want to know about large documents, you'll have to give me time to hunt one down to load onto here. I believe it handles it pretty well. Overall, the device is a pretty well built HTC device. I hardly consider the "blue" exterior something "hip". I actually prefer it to all the fake metal colored plastic. BTW, the slide mechanism on this is the smoothest I've ever had in a phone. The battery life is also rather impressive. I spent nearly two days without charging it. Two days that including heavy talk time (probably close to 2 hrs) and large amounts of data usage with both EDGE and 802.11. I would give it a pretty good ranking overall and have to say it is a good replacement for an MDA. The Sidekick is not in the same league, since the Sidekick was obviously made for texting, this is designed to be a heck of a lot more.

For a fair comparison of WM5 to WM6, I would really need to review both systems on the SAME device. It seems to me you would have a hard time comparing WM5 to WM6 in terms of performance across two different platforms.

of course there are zillions of alternate ROMS available for most of the WM devices at places like www.xda-developers.com

Not any more, there aren't.

Microsoft insisted that all ROMs be removed as of February this year. They're all gone now.

If a companies embedded OS cant work on that speed of a processor then they need to simply give up and stop.

Yeah, at the speeds processors were running nine years ago. I had a Phillips Nino with over 200mHz processing speed in 1998. Seriously, the hardware is gimp, that's the problem.

That's not going to happen as long as XPe only runs on x86-based platforms. Any phone running on an OMAP or Qualcomm chipset needs an OS that runs on ARM. XP was designed as a series of components and XPe is one product of that.