Earlier this week I upgraded my AT&T 8525 phone from Windows Mobile 5 to Windows Mobile 6. It was a fairly painless process to do the upgrade. I was looking forward to it since I had heard lots of good things about the latest version of Windows Mobile but hadn't really had a chance to play with it.

My first impressions were good. Setting up my e-mail and the partnership with the computer was easy to do. My only complaint in this area is that the new Pocket Outlook (or something on the phone) is smart enough to realize that my HotMail account is not normally accessible through Pocket Outlook and it redirects me to Pocket IE to go to the HotMail site. This is a minor inconvenience since I was able to read HotMail in the old version of Pocket Outlook.
One thing I really like is the ability to look up e-mail addresses in the "company directory" a.k.a. Global Address List from Exchange. This is great because I don't have to add everyone I might want to send an e-mail to into my contacts list. I can just add the ones I am going to send e-mail to a lot and the others I can look up as I need to.

I really like the larger screen for typing in my PIN to unlock the device. Before I had to use the keyboard which meant either sliding out the device to get to the built in keyboard or using the stylus. The new buttons are big enough that I can use my finger. This is useful when all I want to do is make a call.

The alarms started working again. I don't know what I did before but the alarm sound only chimed when I was turning the phone on. That meant I got a lot of alarms every time I landed at a new destination and turned the phone on. It was kind of embarrassing to have the phone beeping at me in the plane. It also meant that the phone couldn't work as a backup alarm clock when I was traveling.

I haven't had a lot of time to add new applications to the phone but the ones that I have added seem to work just fine.