Windows CE's final day
hpcfactor.com
hpcfactor.com
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'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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Perhaps they expected they will see so much adoption that the existing ecosystem will be dwarfed. Guess who got dwarfed for good.
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 sad that such discontinuations don't come with an open-sourcing to allow community based support if need be.
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.
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.
EULAs are obviously bogus though, yeah.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Here's a decent article that gets most things right https://tedium.co/2021/02/10/windows-ce-history/
You can get winpad in some early chicago builds (windows 95) ... it's been extracted and put on archive.org https://archive.org/details/winpad275
There were also actual products such as the Samsung PenMaster that were released with Pen Windows ... here's a video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YkJxWtTPyb0
It's wild how early they were in the race, how long the stayed in, how much money they tossed at it and how they still failed so phenomenally
I still like the platform if I'm honest.
Now that I think about it I do recall encountering a POS system running CE. But I never got to interact with it.
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2023/may/15/we-wi...
Brisbane City Council used to sell tickets with a magnetic strip that would be read and written with how many trips you have can take on the ticket.
I'm curious. Does anyone know what model / OS Amazon fulfillment centers use for their field force handheld devices?
I have seen CE in similar style devices it's neat history.
Genuine all-day battery life when essentially no classic laptop could even come close.
They're still around though - seen plenty of scanners in supermarkets in the UK (for the self checkout thing) that run it. God no.
(When did they stop naming releases after years?)