I live in Hungary and I have fiber and IPTV from Deutsche Telekom. You can choose between 2 set top boxes, an older model with Windows CE and the newer one with Android. The technician said they much more problems with Android. The system itself has more features but WinCE is just more robust. Anecdotal story I know but at least it's still in use in some areas of the world.
My Android TV box doesn't even let me pick a keyboard layout. Useless crap. Most apps barely have functioning navigation with a remote. Play a game of guess which button is the highlighted one.
I bought an MPx200 from eBay when I was a freshman in college (2005). I remember _running_ after a FedEx truck after they missed our house hoping that they'd still have it. They, fortunately, did. I was so happy.
That phone was buggy as shit, but was so badass.
It had real speakers (for listening to MP3s with), Internet Explorer (for surfing the WAP internet...slowly) and Windows Phone 2003 (which is based on CE). Battery life was awful. I didn't care. Loved every minute of it until I bricked it trying to flash a hacked WP ROM.
Thanks for great memories, Windows CE. I'll now go back to the modern Internet with ads and accidental subscriptions on every corner!
I read almost all of the Lord of the Rings trilogy on a Windows Mobile phone in the 2000s. They were a great tool for the time, and I much preferred them to the Blackberrys that were more popular with many of my coworkers.
I also had a Windows Mobile 6 based pre-smartphone. Very Windows XP'ish especially regarding the permissions. The new smartphones with their framework and managed access were a huge thing. Windows UAC allowed to control administrator privileges but the framework allowed to prevent access to APIs like the camera. A huge win for security and privacy!
I've watched movies and series in 320x240 on my 1.4 inch mp3 player before I got my 2.4 inch pocket pc. Wild times but I loved how the operating system and apps were designed to display more information than modern apps. Everything was so tiny but it was what I wanted.
It was quite something at the time, I remember it too and this was way before the era of smartphones, touch screens and all that. I remember messing with a palm pilot in the late 90s and that too felt like magic.
My first eBook was Dracula on a Compaq iPAQ 3630. At the time, it blew my mind both that I could read a full book on it, and that the book was free!
It occurs to me that, though I've read Dracula a few times, to this day I've never done so in a "normal" manner. Right now we're nearing the end of "Dracula Daily", so the tradition continues.
CE's cousin, WinMo was my phone favorite. WinMo6 was the right direction for software to go; it was fairly inviting to developers and a diverse, healthy ecosystem had sprung up around it.
But MS wanted Apple's level of control more than anything - certainly more than they wanted success. They poisoned their loyal userbase with Phone 7 and every good (mobile) thing they had died in that grave.
Moving to the closed app store ecosystem, and breaking app compatibility twice with the move from 6 -> 7 -> 8 definitely killed all developer momentum for their platform.
But the Metro UI on Window Phone 7 and the Zune HD was handsdown the best and smoothest smartphone UI I've used yet. It's a shame it was killed with the Windows 8 blunder.
The Nokia Lumia phones had some amazing hardware for the era too. Head to head with Apple and leagues better than the chintzy Android phones of the era.
Neither Apple nor Google have come close to replicating something as intuitive.
>the Metro UI on Window Phone 7 and the Zune HD was handsdown the best and smoothest smartphone UI I've used yet.
In the face of no cut/copy/paste, no multitasking, no sdcard support and only MS store apps allowed - you could have made do with wallpaper of the Phone7 GUI for all the functionality you got out of it.
Zune on the other hand was absolutely as good as you say. Maybe the mistake was trying to make that perfect Zune OS work on a smartphone.
Not twice, then there was the 8 -> 8.1 -> 10 -> back to Win32.
The incredible part is how on the developer community sessions on YouTube or Github issues, they talk about rewriting as if that wasn't a big development cost.
Naturally the Windows developer community that invested into the Win32 => WinRT evolution, no longer wants to hear about WinUI 3.0/WinAppSDK, unless they have a sunken cost into products that they somehow still want to sell and depend on WinRT related technologies to avoid closing shop.
WinRT was my favourite development stack from all mobile platforms. And XNA/Silverlight before it.
I really was happy with my Nokia 1020 and Dell Venue phones. I ended up going back to Android after the death of Windows Phone till I got frustrated with the lack of support of even former flagship devices and switched to Apple. I've gotten used to Apple, but I really still miss how intuitive and customizable Windows Phone was.
My son had a Nokia Phone8 in high school and loved the thing to death. Doubly so because he had the only one around. He couldn't do a lot with it but he really enjoyed the UI.
They also did very un-Microsofty thing where the software will need to be rewritten and rebuilt for every new version (Windows CE -> Windows 7 -> Windows 8). They ditched backwards compatibility.
Perhaps they expected they will see so much adoption that the existing ecosystem will be dwarfed. Guess who got dwarfed for good.
The really great thing about Windows CE was that it was largely "just" Windows. Most of the API bits one would care about were all there. The development tools were all the same tools we were already using to write desktop software. And unlike modern mobile OSes that look at you sideways for even running your own code on your own device, there weren't any hoops to jump through to deploy your apps to anyone.
It made for a nearly zero learning curve in terms of transitioning from desktop to mobile. I had written several programs in C# that leveraged code I had collected I've years of web and desktop development.
Nowadays, the closest thing is web apps. In some ways it's better because the devices are so much more capable than they were back then. In others, it's worse because you're not really writing to one platform, you're writing to at least 6 (Chrome/Firefox/Safari cross Desktop/Mobile).
It's really hard to see how that would work. Most non trivial systems unwrapping the licensing etc. alone would be a huge job, let along disentangling from codebase used for other things, etc.
It's actually very easy to see: repeal copyright. It does nothing but impose artificial scarcity to make the landlords rich, at the expense of progress that cannot be made due to licensing restrictions.
DRM is enabled by copyright law. DRM only works because talking about how to break it, and collaborating on tools that enable breaking it, is illegal - because of copyright law. DRM relies on giving people the ciphertext, and the decoder, the decryption key, and a way to use those to recover the plaintext, and trying to prevent them from figuring out the decryption key for themselves. Without copyright law backing it up, it's toothless. Get rid of copyright, get rid of DRM.
Also, EULAs are only enforceable due to the fiction that running software without accepting one is a breach of copyright. Without copyright, EULAs are pointless, and anyone can write and distribute tiny programs to patch out EULA acceptance screens or license key verifiers, because copyright law won't prevent them from doing so. Get rid of copyright, get rid of EULAs.
I actually don't think DRM should be illegal. I think that when we are no longer encumbered by copyright, moving past systems that kneecap themselves with DRM will be much easier, so long as the existence of DRM does not hold any legal value either, a la DMCA.
A lot of Windows CE licensees had access to quite a lot of the source code, or at least most of the parts that would be interesting for "maintanenace" anyway.
Even though in paper Windows CE's and Android/Linux licensing could not be more different, they are in practice more similar than one would think. You'd get the source, you'd make your modifications, and you'd (not be allowed to|get away with) not redistribute the source.
Windows CE Platform Builder did come with large part of sources, including entire kernel. Notable omissions were GWES (windowing subsystem) and filesystem drivers.
Is cross licensing really a big issue with closed source software?
At least where I work, my software is basically 100% backed by open-source software. If the company wanted to, some of our larger and more complex systems would be trivial to open source as the only proprietary software they use is our own.
For an OS, I could see there being issues around drivers. However, it seems like the actual core of the OS would be pretty trivial to open source.
> Is cross licensing really a big issue with closed source software?
Sure is. Microsoft works with thousands of vendors every year. There are lots of different terms under which they license software. It would not be that unusual for a game or utility or promotional item to be licensed for a version or so, and nothing after that. Very often these vendors vanish into the ether, and cannot be tracked down for any purpose at all, much less asking them to open source their software. Then, if you tried to ask them to open source, they might mistakenly see dollar signs and try to get money out of Microsoft when none is forthcoming.
> Microsoft works with thousands of vendors every year. There are lots of different terms under which they license software.
This is a cart before the horse thing. How MS licenses software in the past has no bearing on adding a new open source license.
The only time this would be a problem is distributing 3rd party source code. Which, AFAIK (and this is windows we are talking about) pretty much only happens in the drivers.
Windows CE didn't come bundled with steam or really hardly anything. That was sort of the point of CE is it had almost nothing on it.
My experience has been mostly with software that's either open source, or wholly in-house developed.
But I've gathered from open sourcing discussions, that it's pretty common for closed source software to license libraries and other bits and bobs from other closed source vendors. Especially closed source software from long ago, when there was less to take from open source.
Fair. Yet something as core as an OS should be planned to be OS'ed once you don't want to maintain it. Even just the fact that it's non trivial and large would justify to structure code for new joiners.
Large tech companies all try to pass as green nowadays, yet consider the waste that throwing away code that would likely interest others represents - even after two decades of service.
Pocket PC was a variant of Windows CE. HP iPAQ PDAs ran it along with many other Palm PDA-alikes. It was used in an industrial GPS system controller I worked on because it presented a convenient, stable UI.
The Motorola MPx200 ran Windows Mobile (Windows CE) which replaced Pocket PC.
EMC Clariion CX700 SANs already migrated FLARE to Windows XP Embedded in the early 00's. I recall there was a way to access the UI head of Clariion SANs over the control network (not FC) using some magic commands. Unsure if XPe had some CE crossover.
you could arguably backdate it if you want to fuzz things. Microsoft had a WinPad and Windows for Pen Computing product that started in 1992. There was also the hardware side, the Pulsar project. It wasn't Pegasus (CE), sure, but it was the same vying for a palmtop market that they eventually gave up on.
I wrote a mobile POD system for CE years ago which was still used recently here in the UK. It got replaced with android phones a couple of years ago. RIP.
Windows CE was a bit of a white whale for me... something that I kept hearing about and wanted to see and experience, but I could never find anything actually running it.
I picked up an IBM WorkPad z50[1] in ~2000 at a fire sale price. It felt in many ways like good laptops do today: small, light, quiet (no fan nor spinning disk), instant-on, long battery life, reliable. I can see why people didn't buy them (new, they cost a good chunk of what a "real" laptop would, but couldn't do nearly as much, basically just run a very stripped-down version of Office), but I always had a fondness for that little machine and only realize how much of the user experience was ahead of its time when looking back on it.
FANUC probably sells more industrial robots than anyone else, and their teach pendants (the attached device for operating those big yellow robots) runs Windows CE.
Doesn't have to be internet-accessible though. Even if they need to interact with the "open" internet, they can do so through a gateway - there are many industrial-grade, DIN-form-factor VPN routers that will take an internet feed and some VPN credentials and spit out a "clean" VPN'd port so your vulnerable thing can stay isolated from the open internet.
Symbol barcode scanner PDAs used to run Windows CE also. IIRC, there was a cheaper PDA-like version with a laser scanner usable instead of the bulky industrial pistol-grip ones. I'm sure UPS or FedEx still use WinCE-based devices to do their job.
I'm curious. Does anyone know what model / OS Amazon fulfillment centers use for their field force handheld devices?
While Librettos ran on 95, I got a couple to play around with. There's that coolness to it, the design/tiny body but then you realize it's not useful now... too small to type on, can barely run anything other than what it has already. Make sense but yeah.
I have seen CE in similar style devices it's neat history.
The H/PC market was, in my opinion, doomed in part by refusals of manufacturers to innovate hardware, in particular the displays. At the end makers were shipping devices with 400mhz processors and built in wifi and Bluetooth but they still featured the same dogshit 640x240 DSTN screens.
The first Windows Mobile phones (the XDA etc) were doomed from the start as they didn't haave hardware acceleration, so the screen redraw was dogshit.I loved the idea, but the execution was appalling.
I think the price of devices worked hard against it. A lot of CE fans would only ever have 2nd-hand CE hardware - because they couldn't afford used car prices for the new stuff.
No love lost for Windows CE per se, but the HP Jornada handheld PC that ran it was a great little note taking computer and PDA for its era (2 decades ago).
Genuine all-day battery life when essentially no classic laptop could even come close.
