Windows Mobile development team has admitted that they lacked time to completely polish the UI of upcoming Windows Mobile 6.5. The developer team sat for a roundtable conference at TechEd 2009 (video above) and talked about various parts of the smartphone OS like Widgets, applications development and lack of Silverlight support.

Loke Uei Tan, Senior Product Manager, Windows Mobile Team said, “The reason why we couldn’t complete the interface on Windows Mobile 6.5 is because of time. We only spend what, eight months, nine months, to build 6.5 from ground up and it’s actually an amazing engineering feat. But, in order to do that, we had to do some prioritization and we had to cut certain features. Eventually, we will make sure that the UI capabilities are carried out throughout the whole platform.”

This confirms the rumor that Microsoft is going to ship a half-baked Windows Mobile 6.5 next month. We think UI is the main reason why Apple’s iPhone has been so successful and why Palm Pre is so eagerly awaited. If UI is one of the features that Microsoft decided to cut, it might prove to be a very big mistake. It looks like we have to wait till Windows Mobile 7 to see some serious improvement in the OS.
[Via SlashGear]