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Window Mobile 6.5 is not a radical change from 6.1, but there are quite a few changes that puts Windows Mobile a little closer to where they need to be to be competitive in the consumer market. Let’s take a look at what is new in Windows Mobile 6.5.

The Lock screen – The lock screen is new in Windows Mobile 6.5. The Lock screen shows the date, time, and next calendar appointment. You can receive and answer calls when the phone is locked and you can even access calendar and e-mail messages during a call while the phone is locked. Microsoft made sure you could get more done without having to unlock the phone with these changes.

The Home screen -  The home screen in Windows Mobile 6.5, which is covered up on HTC Phones running TouchFlo 3D, is radically different from previous WinMo home screens. It is more finger friendly and offers a ton of info in left to right scrolling, widget like menu items. I looks very much like the Zune software too. The Home screen is focused on touch and gestures such as tap, flick, and pan.

The Home screen features a standard set of plug-ins that include the clock, calendar, getting started, music, photos, and more. Each plug-in is associated with an application.  Slide the plug-in to the highlight bar that is located in the middle of the screen to see more. Tap the bar to access the full experience.

The Start screen – The new Home screen in Windows Mobile 6.5 is more like the iPhone now. The drop down menu that Microsoft thought Windows users loved so much because of it’s familiarity is gone now. To get around on the Start screen, pan up and down with the finger to scroll through items or flick up or down to quickly scroll through items. You can move items items to the top of the start screen by holding down on it and selecting “move to the top”.

Internet Explorer Mobile 6 – IE mobile 6 is a revamp from the “PIE” many of us are used to. It’s more like Opera now than ever. It’s the full internet pages now. Here are some of the enhancements:

• Full compliance with the HTML 4.01 standard
• Full fidelity desktop rendering
• Adobe Flash Lite support
• Performance improvements
• User interface enhancements that include the following:
• Scroll bars were removed to maximize the viewable content area
• Mini map to provide orientation when scrolling
• Progress bar and search functionality integrated with address bar
• Favorites support Web site favicons
• Web site title is displayed in the title bar
• Exit command is available on the soft key menu
• Multiple zoom levels
• Zoom bar can be set to the left side or right side of the screen
• Switch between mobile view and desktop view
• Finger and touch accessibility changes include the following:
• Address bar has touch-friendly auto-completion
• Touch-friendly access to favorites
• Pan and flick gestures to navigate wireless markup language (WML) pages
• Bounce animation at document extremes
• Pan and flick in the HTML viewer with pan locking

Windows Marketplace for Mobile – More on this later. The Marketplace is opening up and makes it really easy to get software over the air or at your PC.

MyPhone – There are a ton of enhancements to this service. We’ll discuss those in detail later as well.

There is more to Windows Mobile 6.5 than what I have shared, but these are just the main highlights. I think this is a good start towards getting competitive in the consumer space once again.