If you are familiar with Chris Tacke one thing you know about him is he's quite honest about what he thinks and doesn't tend to soften or sugar coat his words. One of his last post, "Why Windows Mobile Sucks" is no exception. To keep things in perspective given any mobile operating system one can write a "Why xxxxx sucks." So I don't so much look at his article as rating Windows Mobile as inferior but instead as point out where the OS has room for improvement (and it looks like that improvement will show with Windows Phone 7).
Despite Windows Mobile being an adaptive and flexible operating system the point that Chris hits on is something that any one that has tried targeting a number of devices has encountered. In addition to Windows Mobile being adapted to several hardware configurations there are also APIs within Windows Mobile that are OEM dependent; the OEM can choose whether or not to implement certain APIs and for some of those optional APIs when they do implement them there are variances in how they will behave from one OEM to another (or even on the same device from one firmware version to another). Chris ran into this with the power management APIs. The methods he planned to use were there but calling them had no impact on the device. In trying to help him out I made use of the same APIs on a TyTn II and was able to get some of them to work as needed.
Chris decided to leave the task alone. Trying to get the code to work reliably across a range of Windows Mobile devices was going to be too difficult. I remember encountering something like this when dealing with a graphics related problem. With the problem I encountered I found that on some devices OpenGL 1.x was the better API to use. On another OpenGL 2.0, on another DirectX and still some other devices simply were not computationally capable of performing the operations needed. I ended up deciding to abandon that project because there was too much risk in the number of different experiences that some one would have had with the program.
With Windows Phone 7 I don't expect to run into problems like this. Microsoft is taking control of the user experience is has higher requirements on the capabilities of the devices and the operating system image on the device.
Tags: Windows Phone, Windows Mobile