What features do you most hope make it into Photon (probably aka WinMo 7)

[Guest Kchrpm]

I know we all want more stability and more efficient use of battery and processing power, but feature-wise, what do you hope for most from the next installment of Windows Mobile? The way things are going, the competition coming from so many different angles (shrinking UMPCs with SIM slots, feature/fashion phones with increasing capabilities) is so strong that relying on limited Office compatibility will not be enough to drive sales growth 2-3 years in the future.

- Flexible browsing, with IE able to replicate the experience you get now from IE7 (including tabs, dynamic pages, Flash movies, etc) on Vista/XP all the way down to an Opera Mini-like optimization-based experience, with just a few quick option selections. Opera Mobile is close but not perfect on both spectrums.

- More fleshed out Office Mobile that's designed to never lose data/formatting just because it doesn't understand it, and for goodness sake bring back Outline view in Word! As Office files get ever more complicated and PCs able to run them get ever smaller, not fully supporting everything MS encourages people to do with their documents will be a major liability.

- Flexible and customizable UI. I understand that the big bucks are to be made in the corporate world, but there's a real potential out there to combine the power of Windows Mobile devices with the encouraged UI customization in some feature phones nowadays (I'll spend whole evenings just messing with different picture and color combos for the menus and popups on my Sony Ericsson phone). Leave the same staid basic look you have now as the default, but have consumer friendly themes so close to the surface that no one is scared to try them and then invite them to make it their own (as opposed to Apple's big padlocks on everything). Custom backgrounds, menus, shortcuts, even icons for the really adventurous; different layout styles optimized for thumb, stylus or hardware button use, all supported from the outset. Let the user decide how far they want to lean in either the tablet PC or "just a phone" direction.

To me the key is flexibility and adaptability, two things Windows Mobile is already great it with the help of third parties. MS needs to take the lessons learned from all the sales of programs like SpB Shell, Opera Mobile, and incorporate it into the core OS.

PS And would HD video recording be too much to ask? ;)