The Announcement of the Death of Windows Mobile 6.5 is Premature

This year for TechEd, I created a Windows Mobile 6.5 widget to allow attendees to manage their schedule.  After noticing on the third day that there seemed to be a constant stream of downloads, I added some server side instrumentation to detect user agent strings and record what types of devices were downloading the data.  Although this was a Microsoft event I was still somewhat surprised with the results.

• 50.74% (1777) - Windows Mobile 6.5
• 19.85% (695) – iPhone
• 13.91% (487) – Android 2.1
• 11.65% (408) – Sidebar Desktop Gadget
• 3.57% (125) – iPad
• 0.29% (10) – Unknown

Some additional notes:

• Without any real publicity, about 900 people had downloaded the app from Marketplace in the first few days.
• The above metrics were captured after these initial downloads had already taken place from Window Phone Marketplace and before I announced support for other platforms.
• On the second to last night of the conference, I found someone with a Palm Pre, the application also ran on that platform.
• This only runs on Windows 6.5 Professional.  I heard from a number of people they would like to install on Windows 6.1 without Widget support.  A version for the earlier version of Windows Mobile is already underway.
• A few people also told me that they could not find the application on the Verizon version of the Windows Phone marketplace.
• I didn’t hear of anyone having any problems with the Windows Mobile widget.  However I had to scale back the amount of data stored on the iPhone since there is a 5MB limit local storage limitation.  On the Android phones there seemed to be a problem where on some devices, the local storage was not saved after the application exited and on other devices it did.  This required a last minute work around (changed from local storage to local database) to resolve the issue.
• The total number of downloads was approximately 4400, the total number of people registered for TechEd was approximately 8000. 

Summary

Although this was a Microsoft conference, I was surprised that even though the application was available on all of the major platforms, Windows Mobile 6.5 was the most used platform for this application by a wide margin.  I was also very happy to see so many people picking up the application from Marketplace even before I started publicizing and the link was added to the TechEd web site.  If you are under the perception that no one is using Windows Mobile in its current version anymore, you might want to reconsider.  There are a number of great Windows Mobile 6.5 devices out there and apparently there is a silent, yet fairly large number of users that still use these devices, including yours truly.

-twb