WinCE64 – Windows CE 2.11 for N64(github.com) |
WinCE64 – Windows CE 2.11 for N64(github.com) |
This was the only useful thing on those CE consumer devices. All the other stuff was mostly useless. :D
Don't get me wrong by the way. For their time, the early PDAs were expensive, bleeding edge tech and the limited things that could be done with them was still unprecedented. They crawled so future smartphones could run.
Regular people didn't need to carry around a pocket calendar or phone book. And most of the people who did -- carried paper ones that were easier to use didn't need charging.
Smartphones didn't get any traction until email started to take off, and Blackberry and Windows Mobile solved a problem by bringing email to handheld phones. And then they remained email devices for people who needed email on the go (business and tech-forward people)
Feature phones at the this time were catering to the two things people did want on the go: music and text messaging. Apple then started the smartphone consumer market by making a music-phone out of an iPod, and the rest is history.
A decade or so ago, my partner's cell phone provider was bought by AT&T and the old network was to be disconnected. AT&T's network was incompatible with their existing phone so they were required to get a new one.
The only smartphone they could get for free was a Nokia device running Windows Phone 8, so they picked that.
Their level of technical sophistication was not very high and this was to be their first pocket computer.
It had a fraction of the CPU grunt of my Galaxy S5 so I expected it to be slow and for them to hate it. I also expected to be asked to solve problems with it and help them along with some aspect of it or another.
But there was none of that. It just worked. They never had any questions. Like many people with a pocket computer, they came to use it all the time for things.
I poked at it myself a few times and found the user interface to be very different from Android and IOS, but it flowed well and was always instantly responsive. It was a neat little machine that seemed to perform extraordinarily well.
And despite finding a way to get this kind of positivity from me, a former OS/2 zealot and long-time user of free operating systems, they still managed to completely fuck up the entire operation. It remains the only example of a Windows Phone device that I'm aware of ever having seen someone use in the wild.
CE wasn't too bad. It was nice having mostly the same API as desktop windows, so you can easily cross-test.
I think what really held them back was that Wi-Fi was only starting to roll out, and outside a hotspot area, the universe of things you might do with one was necessarily quite self-contained. It limited what “killer apps” could be developed, as anything designed for the platform probably needs to be fully offline most of the time.
Too bad the tooling around it was so bad. I should do a writeup of why, it is an interesting case study in how poor extendability of tooling can hurt an entire company.
That said, LLMs have gotten extremely good at this kind of thing and you'd be shocked what you can do with this kind of low level work.
— Yes.
May I see it?
— No.
I support this. Make Screenshots of your work and put it in the README.md
either you have seen it and seeing it again is pointless, or you do not know what CE is, and the headline means nothing to you
Weird how HN upvotes projects like these but seemed to hate the Bun Rust swap done with Claude.
https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20080501-01/?p=22...
Don't miss that link in the above!
The only thing those Windows Mobile 2003 era devices were good for: Playing Age of Empires. There was a full featured port of Age of Empires I, and it was really awesome! It worked really well with the pen input.
Indeed. I've ranted on this a bunch, but tldr; all they had to do was keep making cheap phones that worked surprisingly well and building the install base; but they wanted to focus at the top of market and wm10 was a disaster.
> It remains the only example of a Windows Phone device that I'm aware of ever having seen someone use in the wild.
They had some placement in Scandal or House of Cards, I think. Was pretty weird for me as a WP user to hear the ringtones and see the UI on the shows I was watching. Not a whole lot of market penetration in the US, but pretty decent in lower income countries where something that was very inexpensive and worked enough had legs.
As a lower income country citizen who had a Lumia 635, that's exactly how they got me. It was something like 150-160 U$S and at the time, in my country that would've bought me a Galaxy J2 or some other bottom of the barrel phone with a laggy Android UI. In contrast the Lumia 635 was just as compute/memory-starved but Windows Phone could handle it way, way better. My dad even used it into 2019 after I upgraded because it was just there and worked better than any cheap Android phone.
The developer experience of the platform was weird. As someone with (a bit of) C# experience I found XAML+C# way easier to get into than Android's kludgy layout system, but as expected the ecosystem of libraries was just not there, and while it was easy to get a free developer account as a student it was a bit pretentious of Microsoft to expect normal people to pay 25(?) USD for the privilege of publishing in a marketplace of between 0 and 5 users.
I now have another iPAQ with a stylus and touchscreen, and I’m grateful back then I did not have it nor the mobile version of Age of Empires… it’s addictive stuff and a crazy good port. I don’t remember anything so good on PalmOS 5 (we had a Garmin iQue 3600, with integrated GPS and navigation… also very futuristic).
We did see Windows Mobile 2G and 3G smartphones a year or two pre-iPhone, though, so maybe I'm full of it and that platform somehow didn't have something else the mass market wanted.
In the end, though, it was better than Mobile, but hindsight is 20/20.
Windows Mobile 5 was tremendously popular with over 100 phones from various manufacturers. But that was also around the time iPhone was released and by the time Windows Mobile 6 rolled out, the iPhone 3G/3GS was taking the world by storm. Windows Mobile 6.5 had a partially revamped UI but not enough to be competitive. From there we go to Windows Phone 7, 8, and 10 and that story is well known.
We all dumped Windows CE for Windows Mobile. It was a lot of work and in the end it was an inferior product for pretty much every use case imaginable. The certification was not difficult but costly. Porting practically every application was a huge waste of time and money when they already worked well enough on WinCE.
Windows Mobile, built on WinCE, effectively cannibalized itself. We had Microsoft PMs and engineers tell us WinCE was a dead end. I moved onto to greener pastures before WinCE 6 but my understanding is that it triggered a crisis of faith within at least a few engineering organizations.
There were a number of things Windows Mobile excelled at compared to its predecessor but in particular it excelled at wasting corporate resources.
WP would've had a better chance if the windows org hadn't murdered CE to move everything over to the Windows Kernel.
This was needed because VS didn't have the extensibility needed to do this without source access.
The fork got more and more out of date and it is hard to justify spending resources on an internal tool like that. WinCE was incredible but what was shipped to customers was a tiny sliver of what the OS could really do.
WinCE was also source available, which let it sneak into some really cool places, but the license didn't allow a community to be built up around it. MIT licensed WinCE would have easily gone toe to toe with embedded Linux.
Building applications for WinCE 6 was also only supported with Visual Studio 2005 or 2008, which put a hard cap on available language features and development OS support. I had the thankless job of trying to port C++ code from Linux to WinCE 6 in 2014, and even then VS2008 felt way behind.
I remember at the CE shop we had to copy around a WinXP VM to do the building in, because Platform builder wouldn't install on Win10 or something.
Kernel is the only part that seems written with any sort of care, everything else is barely holding together with duct tape.