I've been setting up a new smartphone with Windows Mobile 6 over the past few days, and it's made me think about the initial user experience compared to Maemo on my N800.

I'm far from a novice with Windows Mobile - I have an earlier smartphone running WM2003, a PDA running WM5, and a couple of portable GPS units hacked to run generic WinCE apps. I've installed a lot of apps, and even written a few custom ones of my own for WinCE. I have to say that the overall user experience with WM6 is very poor, and it's getting worse from one version to the next. Some things just leave me shaking my head - like WM6 for Smartphones still has no way to cut and paste text because MS hasn't gotten around to implementing that yet in 6 years (it's promised for WM6.1). And the only way to communicate with desktop/notebook Windows PCs is Microsoft's custom ActiveSync program over USB - WiFi no longer works since ActiveSync version 4. MS removed the WiFi sync capability for everyone except those with corporate MS Exchange servers - too bad if you had a unit with WiFi and you updated before you realized that!

Compared to that the out-of-box experience with the N800 is excellent, even for those not familiar with Linux at all. I read a lot of complaints here about Nokia's support for Maemo, but for the most part the N800's software suite stands up pretty well against Microsoft's mobile offering. The apps are easy to use, fairly intuitive, and relatively free of serious bugs.

And when it comes to adding new apps, Maemo really shines - there's a lot of choice, most of it is free, and it's usually pretty easy to install (minor problems with repositories aside). Compare that with WM6: very little is included, a lot of it doesn't work very well, and most add-ons cost $$$ and often don't install or won't work on your particular version of Windows Mobile.

Just my 2 cents worth.