Microsoft has pulled back the thin veil that was covering Windows Mobile 6.5 and launched its next generation operating system for mobile phones. And it's pretty much exactly what you would expect based on all the information that's been coming out over the past year or so. That's to say, it appears to be a minor, mostly cosmetic update to Windows Mobile 6.1.

A number of tech news sites have published detailed reviews of Windows Mobile 6.5. And here's what they generally have in common: Microsoft has tweaked the home screen to make it more attractive and more user friendly. The program launcher has also received a minor cosmetic update that makes it easier to navigate with a finger and no stylus. But there's no good way to sort programs or arrange them the way you like them. And when you actually launch the applications you're often greeted with programs that haven't changed much since Windows Mobile was called Pocket PC 2002. For instance, the calendar is as ugly and feature-free as it was 7 years ago.

The web browser is actually a pretty major improvement. It's based on Internet Explorer 6, which may be incredibly out of date when it comes to desktop browsers. But for a mobile web browser, it's pretty good at rendering most of the web content you'll encounter. It also has improved navigation buttons that don't take up as much on-screen real estate. Those buttons disappear when you're not using them. The browser supports Flash, and you can zoom in and out of web pages to see the full page or just the text area you want to read.

• Windows Mobile 6.5 review - Engadget says not much has really changed
  
• Windows Mobile 6.5 1st Look - Mobility Site has what is probably the most extensive walkthrough of the bunch
  
• Windows Mobile 6.5 Review: There's No Excuse for This - Gizmodo has lots of pictures, lots of complaints
  
• IE 6 for Windows phones: Interface improved - CNET suggests that Internet Explorer 6, at least, is a welcome update
  
• Windows Mobile 6.5 disappoints; no Start customizations and stylus still required - ZDNet decides Windows Mobile 6.5 fails to live up to even relatively low expectations

The long and short of it? If you're leaning toward getting a Windows Mobile phone anyway, Windows Mobile 6.5 has a few features that you might like. But it's hardly a home-run hit that will help Microsoft compete with Apple, Palm, Google, Symbian, and other mobile platforms. We'll have to wait for Windows Mobile 7 to see any major changes in the platform.

Invitations to Brizzly, a new web-based Twitter client, have been flying around all over the place in the past few days, and I finally got a chance to try it out. Brizzly offers a lot that the standard Twitter website doesn't, but it also introduces a couple of annoyances that ultimately led me to stick with Twitter.com.

On the plus side, Brizzly allows you to save drafts of tweets, a feature I wish Twitter.com would incorporate. Its threaded interface for direct messages is also nice, and looks a bit like a Google Talk window. If you DM a lot, Brizzly will definitely make it easier to follow your conversations. Brizzly also tells you when there are new tweets in your stream, so you're not fruitlessly hitting refresh to read Twitter. Keyboard shortcuts are handy, too: The j and k keys scroll up and down, which Gmail and Google Reader users will be familiar with. On top of that, photos and videos are displayed inline, instead of making you click through.

Brizzly's not all great, though. It's unfortunately just not a very pretty website, and I don't think I can look at it every day. I'm not saying we're in Fugly Friday territory, but the design is weak, especially the prominent trending topics box. I also miss having my follower/following numbers and my friends' icons in the sidebar, the way Twitter.com does it. Some people might find that useless, but I would say the same about trending topics. It's all a matter of taste, so if Brizzly's array of features fits your needs, and you don't mind its appearance, you should definitely give it a shot.

The wait for an official CNN app on your iPhone is over, and it looks like it was worth your patience. Available on the iTunes store soon -- Download here -- CNN's new app represents a serious investment in mobile news delivery, a 55 million user market according to Neilsen, and adds a few game changing features which may leave rivals MSNBC and Fox News scrambling to catch up.

I spoke with CNN's Louis Gump, VP, Mobile today by phone. CNN's iPhone app takes advantage of 3.0 SDK features and is an attempt to "reinvent news applications on the iPhone". Integrating a huge library of video clips -- as well a live stream during breaking news -- directly into the app, the focus is obvious, taking CNN's global news brand and putting it just that much closer to your fingertips.

The most compelling feature, from by brieding and screen shots -- I wasn't allowed early access to the app itself -- is what Gump called, "Coverflow for news." A feature which lets users swipe through pictures and bullet points, looking for points of interest in the days popular headlines.

Positioned as a premium app, you'll have to fork over $1.99 for the goods, and tolerate just a wee bit of advertising mixed with your content. From what was relayed to me -- and I pressed -- none of the advertising sounds particularly intrusive, with a total lack of preroll video advertising, and sponsor adds appearing inline with, but visually separated from, the textual content.

Also on tap, breaking news alerts for interests you've defined, the ability to store news for later (airplane mode) and of course, social sharing on Facebook, Twitter and via email. And, when you get sick of reading the news, you can make the news -- via iReport -- with mobile uploads of video and images. "People in the field really do have access to the most compelling content, whether that be photo or video", which will be vetted as the current web version of iReport is, both by user filtering and "a small percentage" by human editors at CNN for airing on the network, or publishing on the main CNN site.

CNN was a bit coy about future plans, but said in uncertain terms, "This is not a hobby for us." Adding, "As happy as we are with this app, and we worked really hard, there is a lot more where this came from."

Asked about a possible Android or Blackberry version, "We will definitely be rolling out premium apps in the future", although Gump declined to talk specifics. "We're experimenting" said Gump, sounding like a proud father, "we're putting a lot more resources into mobile."

Update : I wasn't positive at publish time, but yes -- Push updates! More screenshots coming, now that I have my hands on the app!

Update 2: The gallery above is shots provided by CNN. The gallery below contains our first screenshots of the app in action. Take a look for more detail on how the app works and looks.

Lunch.com, a review site that launched earlier this year, has introduced "micro reviews." These are reviews with a 140-character limit that makes them them ideal for sharing to Twitter and Facebook. Lunch's founder, J.R. Johnson, who's self-funding the site, sees micro reviews as a gateway to contributing longer reviews to the site. "Once they're hooked on the rewarding cycle of getting and giving quality content, they'll have fun and progress to the next level of contribution," he said, in a press release.

The premise of Lunch, that it's a community where users can review and discuss anything, seems too broad to succeed. Niche review sites work by establishing themselves as the default place to look for info about a specific category of goods and services. For example, folks looking for info on a restaurant will check Yelp or Urbanspoon, and you might turn to Rotten Tomatoes when you want opinions on a movie. If you're a site for everything, you can't be the go-to site for anything. Maybe micro reviews will attract the kind of community that Lunch needs for success, but I'm not sure they'll help it find its place in the extremely crowded review market.

[via Techcrunch]

One of the great things about shopping on Amazon is that you can read through dozens, if not hundreds of user reviews. While expert and editorial reviews can give you a sense of whether an item is worth the sale price, user reviews will let you know whether you should expect it to fall apart the moment you unpack the box.

But who has time to sift through hundreds of reviews when you just want someone to tell you whether you should buy this digital camera or that one? That's where Pluribo comes in. This Firefox add-on will read through the user reviews in certain product categories and present you with a concise summary.

The plugin uses some artificial intelligence so you don't wind up with short, choppy, and unreadable reviews. Don't expect Shakespeare, but Pluribo will give you enough information that you might not need to read the individual reviews.

Right now, Pluribo doesn't work with products in every category. For example, digitial cameras seem to be covered, but video cameras aren't.

[via Digital Inspiration]

BooRah searches the web for mentions of restaurants in blogs and websites and analyzes the languages in the post to determine whether the reviewer was giving the restaurant a thumbs down (boo) or a thumbs up (Rah). The amount of Boo's and Rah's a restaurant gets are tallied up on the site and then the restaurant is given an overall score. BooRah users can add their own tags to a particular restaurants page, and can weigh in by giving a particular place a Boo or Rah directly on the site.

Currently the service is limited to just 20 large metro areas, with more expected to be rolled out later on. If you're fortunate enough to live in one of those areas you can search for restaurants by your particular neighborhood, and sign up for an RSS feed for your area so you always know about the latest place in town.

[via EmilyChang]

Yelp lets customers write reviews of restaurants, shops, and all sorts of other businesses in communities throughout the country. And that's the sort of service that makes the site both incredibly useful and incredibly dangerous for business owners.

Now Yelp is giving business owners tools that let them keep a closer eye on the reviews their establishment is receiving. If you sign up for a Business Owner Account, you can track how many people view your business page, update your business profile, and send messages to people who have reviewed your business. In order to get a business owner account, you'll obviously need to verify that you actually run the business in question.

Of course, there's no guaranty that you'll be able to prevent people from writing that your food tastes stale or that your bathrooms are smelly unless you actual improve your food and clean your bathrooms. You know, unless those folks on the internet are lying. But that never happens.

[via TechCrunch]

Have you ever been so impressed with the coffee/beer/waitstaff somewhere that you wanted to tell the world? PlaceShout is a website designed to allow you to give your favorite places a little Internet shout out and help you find new places in your area that are worth a visit.

Traditional review sites that have lengthy reviews of establishments. But PlaceShout is all about brevity, with a maximum review length of 100 characters. You can navigate the site by searching for a particular item: For instance: "Coffee in San Francisco" or you can view areas by map and look for reputable establishments near you.

When you pull up a particular location's rap sheet you can see everything that has ever been said about them. Much like comments on Digg, comments on the site can be given a thumbs up or a thumbs down. A particular comments amount of votes determines what order it is seen on a places review sheet. For instance if someone says the grilled cheese at Earls Sandwich shop is the bomb, and you think its the worst thing to ever be put on sliced bread you can give their comment a thumbs down and move it down on the list.

PlaceShout is a relatively new kid on the block, so there's not an overwhelming amount of reviews out there to peruse for a lot of cities, you can currently add reviews however for anywhere. The cities with the most reviews are Ann Arbor, MI at 260 and San Francisco with 234.

If you want to check out reviews of places in your area some good similar sites to check out are JudysBook, InsiderPages, and Yelp.

[via EmilyChang]

Wakoopa is a new social networking site that lets you connect with other users who have the same tastes in... software as you do. We know, you're more likely to bond with someone online because of your love/disdain of Radiohead than because you both happen to like Firefox and hate Internet Explorer. But there are some things that make Wakoopa worth a second look.

Here's how Wakoopa works. You download a program and let it scan your computer for installed software. This lets Wakoopa help create your online profile, but it also means that Wakoopa has a pretty intriguing database of usage stats.

In other words, you could find new software by browsing the user profiles of Wakoopa members who have similar tastes to your own. Or without even signing up you can just click on the site's software tab and see a scrolling banner of recently used software as well as a list of "most used software" with the number of Wakoopa members using each application.

Windows Vista is garnering some interesting reviews, but the latest from Forbes' Stephen Manes probably isn't going to get framed on Steve Ballmer's wall anytime soon (that could simply be due to a lack of space though). Stephen chose a fairly transparent title of "Dim Vista" for his review, setting the stage for a long list of usability gripes and tales of staggering un-wow-edness. Stephen finds problems in everything from the Windows Firewall not recognizing when a 3rd party firewall is active, the Control Panel being needlessly redesigned yet again and even WordPad no longer being able to open .DOC Word files. And that's all before he gets to the bugs, quirks and other broken pieces of this nearly 6-year venture.

While Stephen's review doesn't have a happy ending, it could serve as a cautionary tale for anyone still considering a move to Vista. At the very least, Stephen recommends waiting until Service Pack 1, and with the way things are shaping up, we're tending to agree.

Yesterday blogger Paul Bausch noticed that Amazon has added comments to reviews, meaning one Amazon customer can now leave a comment on a review that another customer wrote. This isn't especially interesting, except that it's almost a complete about-face from the policy Amazon has maintained as long as it's had reviews. Amazon has always actively discouraged reviewers from "replying" to other reviews or making reference to them in their own reviews. As Bausch astutely points out, "If people know that their reviews are "thread starters" rather than isolated posts, you could get more chatty reviews with open-ended questions designed to provoke discussion. You should also get more flame wars, more trolling, all of the standard online discussion problems." It's hard to tell how Amazon is going to deal with the imminent influx of comments, but if they can keep things relatively civil, I think it adds a lot of value for shoppers.

[Via Waxy.org]

Another collaborative ratings site, Filmcrowd (beta), is born. Filmcrowd is, as you might guess from the name, focused on movies. Gibbity, which you can't guess from the title, is more of a games site, but uses the same social aspect. The two sites are from the same folks, in fact. Tags and collaboration are the key here. For instance, you can create a focus group of sorts, with users who find certain movies in common as their likes or dislikes. Keep tabs on the group, and what they're reviewing, and get suggestions. Filmcrowd is young, so there aren't as many reviews as say, Amazon (that's a joke really, Amazon has a wee bit of a head start). My favorite tag has to be crap, which contains such winners as Alone in the Dark and The Postman.

John C. Dvorak's latest column is about Yelp, a new site that combines social networking a la Friendster to restaurant and business reviews a la Epinions. If you're looking for a restaurant you can see what others have recommended and their ratings, plus other places they've rated, what their friends have rated, and so on. As Dvorak says, "If it turns out that a person likes Denny's and hates Le Bec-Fin in Philadelphia, then that person is probably not someone who would be great at suggesting fabulous French restaurants, but he might be good at finding a coffee shop." Apart from restaurants, Yelp also includes categories for "Night Life," "Beauty and Spas,"  "Acitve Life," and more. Refreshingly, Yelp has some modern features like inline Google Maps and RSS feeds. Unfortunately there's not a single Yelp-reviewed restaurant within 100 miles of me, but maybe if Yelp is able to reach critical mass, that will change.