Back in the days of Pocket PC 2000, it was very easy and intuitive to work with Calendar appointments in Pocket Outlook. You would tap an appointment to open it, and then tap the appointment on the screen in order to edit it. This was perfectly usable. Then with Pocket PC 2002, Microsoft removed that capability and added an “Edit” button in the lower left. Tapping the open calendar item no longer let you edit it, you had to tap the specific “Edit” button now. To be fair, with this method, you could easily read the “Edit” button but you couldn’t jump to a specific field right away by tapping it on the intitial view screen. Then in Windows Mobile 5.0, the “Edit” button became assigned to the left softkey retaining the simplicity of being able to edit calendar items and adding a hardware button to it.
Now what happened in Windows Mobile 6 Professional? The “Edit” button has been removed and buried within the menu assigned to the right softkey only to be replaced by a grayed-out non-functional “Reply” button assigned to the left softkey. Why would I use a reply function on an appointment in my calendar that I created for myself? Well that’s why it’s grayed out. Windows Mobile 5.0 didn’t even have a reply function in the Calendar. The reply function is only available if you open a Calendar item that has other attendees assigned to it, and inviting other attendees to an appointment only works if they use Outlook or Entourage, and replying to that appointment sends a message to the person who created it even if that’s you. It won’t work with any of the free email systems like Gmail or Windows Live Mail. I haven’t even heard of anyone who would ever use an appointment reply function on a mobile device. Even Outlook 2007 does not have any kind of “Reply” function in its calendar appointments, so that makes even less sense for Pocket Outlook to have it.
What’s worse is that the “Reply” command is ALSO in the “Menu” on the right softkey, and it’s the first choice, making for completely unnecessary redundancy for a function nobody uses. That means you have to scroll down two more commands to get to the Edit command. So that’s a whole 4 extra steps to get to the Appointment edit screen than Windows Mobile 5.0.
I know none of that really constitutes as a bug because it’s by design, but I just invited a couple people to a test appointment in Outlook/Exchange, and now my Windows Mobile 6 Professional device (T-Mobile Wing) won’t sync with Exchange. So how’s that for a bug?
Which do you do more often? Edit your appointments, or reply to them?
Why should something so rarely used get such a prominent place?
Originally published on Pocketnow on May 31, 2007. More Thought articles from the Pocketnow archive.