A Deeper Look at the Windows Mobile Device Center
June 23rd, 2006 Jason Dunn
Kris Kumar over at Smartphone Thoughts has put together a super-detailed screen-by-screen overview of the new Vista Windows Mobile Device Center. How detailed? We’re talkin’ five pages long, and 36 (!) screen shots covering every step in the process.
What I found quite interesting is the effort that has gone into creating a system by which content flows from the device to the computer. Previously, ActiveSync was 100% focused on getting media content from the PC to the device. If there was media on your Windows Mobile device (say, photos you had taken with it) and you wanted it put on your computer, you’d have to open up ActiveSync, click Explore, then drill down into the folder structure on the device to find the media. And it wasn’t always simple, because each OEM/developer would have different ideas about where the best place to put your media was. Microsoft has also added a step where you can specify the folder you want to put the imported photos in, or it can create a folder for you based on the date the images were imported (I think it should be the date the images were taken) and a custom tag that you can assign.
Overall, this looks like a good first step - but when you get right down to is, this is most of the same basic functionality we’ve had in ActiveSync for years (or less if you consider WiFi sync is still missing) with a candy-coated shell on top. I know that re-working the GUI and plugging it all into Vista takes time though, so I’m hoping that in future revisions we’ll see more in the way of new features. What kind of features would you like to see? Myself, I’d like to see more fine-tuned control over video importing (Windows Media Player 10 isn’t very flexible in this regard) and the ability to schedule polling of a network resource for conversion - I have Windows Media Center Edition 2005 installed on a PC different from the one that I use for day to day work and synching my Windows Mobile devices with. So that makes it difficult to have media ready to go, and in the right format, for when I need it.