Regarding the Omnia usability, I turned off the widget-based UI for a couple of reasons.

First, there was no "Edit" mode allowing you to add, reposition or remove widgets from the screen -- those actions were always active. This meant that I was constantly accidentally moving my widgets thanks to having a touch screen.

Second, all of the widgets had to fit on one screen. I prefer the standard Today interface which lets me have more than one screen of plug-ins. (Maybe something like the sliding Home screen plug-ins on Windows Mobile Standard would be even better, but I don't know.)

Third, widgets were mostly all fixed sizes. I'd like to be able to resize them to display more or less information.

Those problems are all fixable, of course. Providing a means to lock the widgets in place and allowing you to position them on a virtual desktop would solve the first two issues.

Steve

From experience I’ve known WinMo to be a very versatile mobile operating system, but because the user can have so much access and ability to customize the OS, many things can eventually go wrong.

Only a few things can really go wrong. Let's look at some of the software ones.

* You could replace a system component with another one which causes programs to fail.
* Uninstalling a program may not remove all components properly.
* Poorly designed programs (compute-intensive for no good reason) could affect the speed of multi-tasking (possibly even locking the device up).
* A program could crash and take down the OS if it crashed in the wrong spot.
* Installing lots of programs could use lots of registry spaces and storage space, possibly slowing down the system.
* Multi-tasking lots of programs could slow down the system (although well-designed programs usually aren't using much CPU while waiting for user input).

None of those are really the fault of Windows Mobile. Of course, Windows Mobile, like any other complex piece of software, also has bugs, but so will every other phone OS out there.

There are possibilities where the OS itself can actually slow things down, of course. Things like:

* File system fragmentation
* The multi-tasking scheduling algorithm
* Virtual memory handling
* etc.

can all affect the speed of the OS, but those are inherent in the design. You can provide a defrag utility, but there's not much users can do about the rest.

Somehow I feel like just skinning the same old WinMo 6.1 instead of streamlining it could bog down the whole handset’s processes, but then again newer phones like the OmniaPRO have the ability to gauge RAM and CPU footprints in addition to running processes.

What does that mean exactly? Custom UIs are usually implemented as Today screen plug-ins. So instead of multiple plug-ins, you'll usually only have one (which could bog things down less depending on what the plug-in attempts to do).

Custom UIs may also include versions of the standard applications to match their user interface, often using the components of the standard programs to handle some taks. So again there shouldn't be much extra bogging down going on.

As for gauging RAM and CPU use, these aren't new things. Windows CE has (if I recall correctly) always been able to show you how much RAM was in use. Also, processors at least as far back as XScale (Pocket PC 2002 days) were supposed to scale down their speed at low demand to conserve power, only speeding up when the tasks required it to.

Maybe there isn’t an accurate way to gauge the effect of an OS’ wear-and-tear over time, especially after installing and uninstalling WinMo apps and TouchWiz widgets[...]

Without know what the programs are, I don't think you can judge those things. I mentioned some effects you could have above, but there are also hardware effects (which aren't really putting wear-and-tear on an OS), such as flash memory burn out (flash memory has a fairly limited number of write cycles, something in the hundreds of thousands, I think).

Steve

Thanks for the link... great review of my next phone!

(By the way, there was a recent 'what will be your next phone' mobilitysite poll, but the Omnia Pro was not an option, and going to the comments crashed IE)

Personally, I can't wait to finally jump the HTC ship! I feel like there will be so many great little usability features that Samsung includes that won't show up in a review.... Or bugs and usability hangups that the Touch Pro 2 will have, that won't be realized until you've used one for a month or two.