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Rollout: Windows Mobile 6.0: Page 4 of 5

Beyond Messaging

One of the biggest differences between the Smartphone and Pocket PC editions of Windows Mobile 5.0 was the inclusion of mobile versions of Microsoft's popular Office suite on the Pocket PC platform. Many operators and device manufacturers put viewer software on Smartphone edition devices, but such software wouldn't let users edit files, nor did they always provide the same richness of formatting as viewing the file in native Office.

Microsoft has brought greater parity between the two platforms in Windows Mobile 6.0 by including versions of mobile Word, Excel and Office on both Windows Mobile 6 Standard and Professional versions. Only Professional users can actually create new documents, but both Standard and Professional users can view and edit documents they receive. We viewed several Word and Excel documents that arrived as e-mail attachments with ease, though the small screen on both the Dash and Wing made us reluctant to do serious document editing.

Microsoft has broadened developer support by including .Net Compact Framework 2.0 and SQL Server 2005 Compact Edition on the device ROM. Although we didn't try to develop any new applications during our tests, the addition of both packages means that developers won't have to redistribute them, and end users will gain performance advantages particularly from the improvements to .Net.

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