First thoughts on Windows Mobile 6.5 upgrade (HTC Touch Pro2 - OrangeUK)

Well, I bit the bullet yesterday.  For some time I've been hovering over the decision to upgrade the Touch Pro 2 to 6.5, and as it was now clearly on Orange's website I decided (given I was not OOF for a bit) to have a go.

Firstly - backups.

• I have a fully encrypted phone, so I connected in high speed disk mode and copied off the 8GB SD card
• then the contents of My Documents
• all photos and videos that I'd not already moved
• Synced the phone so that calendar, email, contacts, and most importantly OneNote Mobile documents are safe
• Finally a quick sync to Microsoft's MyPhone service to protect texts, IE Favourites, any remaining photos/videos and so on

The download is 166MB and the link Orange give you takes you directly to the HTC site, so that is cause for comfort. Once downloaded, my 64bit Windows 7 machine decided that it could not properly see the phone during the upgrade process and barfed.
[Updated: Actually a link to the Orange page might be useful here :-) Orange HTC Page]

So moving over to the trusty 2004 vintage XP laptop, I re-ran the setup.  It was quick and easy - about the promised 10 minutes or so.  And then the reboot.

All came up well, and first impressions:

• well the extra colour is nice, but doesn't really do anything for me
• The program and settings list are more fat finger friendly
• initial sync to the Exchange Server seemed to take an absolute age and was disappointingly slow.  I left it overnight in the end.
• restore from MyPhone was great!
• the lock function, takes more actinos, but looks better locked, and unlocks are more fat-finger friendly.
• my encrypted SD card just worked - I guess the encryption is handset specific and not OS specific.  That's good
• Re-installing apps is a bit of a bind, but it's a good exercise to make sure you have all source available to you

The most amazing thing though - i get 1 or 2 more bars of signal strength.  Where I live and work the Orange signal fades out, just as it gets to the building walls.  This time, at home in the evening, i was seeing 3 or even 4 bars of signal strength.  Today, in the office, I see 3 instead of 1.  That alone makes it worth it.

The downside - finding things.  I suppose I'll get used to the interface, but changing WiFi network seems to be many more clicks than before.