I read an interesting article over at PCMag.com yesterday about the general mood at the CTIA, wireless and entertainment show 2007.

“The one thing that brought many of the new handsets and much of the new software I saw at the show together was a love of Windows Mobile.”

Its an interesting article but it made me think about Windows Mobile and the sort of people that use it. I’m an avid Windows Mobile fan, I think it’s a fantastic platform and one I have loved and used for almost six years now. The problem with this is I am not an every day user, I am knowledgeable geek and as such I push the boundaries of usage with my smartphone. Give my phone to a normal user and what is the reaction? Are they able to use the device like they do a normal mobile phone? The answer in my opinion is no.

A good example of this happened to me last night, I was driving and my wife wanted to stop off at a supermarket but we were not sure of the opening hours. I passed my smartphone to my wife and told her to crank up Windows Live Search (WLS), to find the supermarket and call them and ask if they are still open. Simple? To me and you probably but my wife struggled, she managed to get into the start menu and find WLS, she managed to type the name of the supermarket into the search box but then couldn’t figure out how to navigate to the location box. I told her how and she then typed in the area we were in and waited, after 30 seconds nothing happened, she hadn’t pressed the search soft key, expecting the device to do this automatically. By this time you can tell she was getting agitated and rapidly loosing patience by her inability to work with the smartphone  straight away and this is what I think the problem is.

Until Microsoft produce Windows Mobile with a more intuitive interface I don’t think the average user will even try it, they expect to be able to pick up the device and operate it within seconds and if this isn’t achievable then the device goes down in the users opinion before he or she has even given it a chance. This is were the likes of Nokia, Sony Ericsson and Motorola have the advantage, you pick up one of their phones and instantly know how the navigation works, an area I think Microsoft should work on.

Have your partners ever tried to use your Windows Mobile device without success? I’d love to hear your stories.