Back in February, Microsoft announced that its latest handheld OS, Windows Mobile 6.5, would be appearing devices later this year. I was given an exclusive hands on first look at this latest portable OS to come from Redmond by Rick Anderson, a mobile solution specialist from Microsoft Australia.

On the face of it, Windows Mobile 6.5 is more evolutionary than revolutionary. The guts of the OS haven't changed much with the development effort firmly focussed on improving the entire user experience.

One of the criticisms leveled at Windows Mobile, particularly since the release of the iPhone, is that getting things done was a two-handed operation; one to hold the device and the other to hunt and peck with a stylus. In response, Microsoft has made many of the menus and buttons substantially larger. As a result, many operations can be completed singlehandedly.

In one of the more creative moves, Windows Mobile 6.5 eschews the typical grid arrangement we're all used to with screens of icons. Instead, icons are arranged in a honeycomb pattern with larger "active zones" for each icon. As a result, it's almost impossible for even the most sausage-fingered user to accidentally hit the icon adjacent to the target. While this means there are fewer icons on the screen, scrolling up and down doesn't use scroll bars with iPhone-like finger flicks used for moving around.

Working with Melbourne company, Point UI (www.pointui.com), Microsoft is working with carrier and OEM partners to create customised interfaces. As you'd expect, carriers are rapt as access to their premium services is made very easy for customers. However, the introduction of widgets, small applets that run on the Today screen, offers both opportunities for developers and great productivity boosts.

For example, we saw a widget that brought a consolidated inbox, for SMS, email and other messaging services, to an easy to access module. Using a finger swipe to the left or right flicked us through different installed widgets. Like Palm, Android and Apple, Microsoft is jumping on the application store bandwagon with MarketPlace - a place to buy new programs and widgets directly from your handheld.

One of the weakest points of previous iterations of Windows Mobile was web browsing. Simply put, Pocket Internet Explorer was rubbish. Microsoft is putting that aside and now delivers a full version of Internet Explorer 6 althoughbthye're dubbing it Interent Explorer Mobile. We really liked the way it was easy to zoom in and out of sections of a page with reasonably complex rendering by simply double tapping the region we wanted to focus on.

In the past, Microsoft has confused its market by offering multiple versions of the Windows Mobile. For Windows Mobile 6 there will be one version called Windows Phone. If only the boffins in Redmond will do the same with their desktop OS.

As far as performance goes, we were looking at Windows Mobile 6.5 on a HTC Touch Pro. Performance wasn't great but as we were looking at beta code on hardware that wasn't optimised for the OS we wouldn't worry terribly. By the time devices are brought to market we'd expect to see far snappier response times.

In an official sense, Windows Mobile 6.5 has been released as it's in the hands of licensed OEMs. However, it's up to individual manufacturers to implement it. Some may choose to offer it as an update to existing Windows Mobile 6.1 devices while others may hold it back, making it available only on brand new hardware.