A Portugese website claims to have acquired an advance version of Windows Mobile 6.1, a revision of Microsoft's portable operating system due sometime early this year, possibly as soon as the 3GSM conference in Barcelona on February 11th. Version 6.1 is reportedly better optimized than v6.0, resulting in faster menu loading, a common complaint with the OS. The mobile version of Internet Explorer has meanwhile been altered with a new "Zoom" function, which mimics the iPhone in that users fit a page to the screen, and then select a particular area to view.
This mimickry may extend to the new "SMS Chat View" mode, which displays conversations as if they were Windows Live Messenger sessions, much as the iPhone imitates iChat. The mobile version of Office, meanwhile, should now be able to launch Open XML documents, such as the DOCX and XLSX formats. New to the suite is One Note, a program for drawing, voice recording and related tasks.
