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The Dawn of the Post-PC era?
An anonymous reader writes "The "Post-PC" era may be near at hand, according to the findings of a recently completed market study conducted by eTForecasts. The study projects that Windows CE-based devices may outsell Windows-based PCs within 5 years. According to the report, Microsoft has made "tremendous progress" in positioning its Windows CE and derivative operating systems for use in a broad range of handheld and mobile devices such as PDAs and Smartphones, and only embedded Linux is poised to represent a major long-term across-the-board competitor to Microsoft." The Register has another story about the study.
I'm sorry but 1.5-2 years of data is not enough to forcast five years in the future. Kind like those Funds that promise a 10% growth in two years.
This SIG pulled due to lack of funding. (This damn war is costing too much!)
Let's see... Right now Symbian outsells it's MS-rivals. It has all the biggest mobile-phone manufacturers behind it (Nokia, Motorola, SonyEricsson, Samsung, Siemens. And to add insult to injury: the former MS-Smartphone poster-boy, Sendo!). Now, contrast that to MS-offerings: There is one product using it (The Orange smartphone-thingie), it has only Samsung as a licensee (who also has Symbian-license), it's sales are dwarfed by sales of Symbian... And MS-smartphone is supposed to dominate the industry??? I think not!
Lesbian Nazi Hookers Abducted by UFOs and Forced Into Weight Loss Programs - -all next week on Town Talk.
My palm has crashed twice in the last 4 years... once because the battery died.
Yesterday we were going towards Legacy Free PCs, today we're all going to be toting around PocketPCs. What's on deck for tomorrow?
Someone at work has a WinCE device (this is the flashy looking Compaq iPAQ) The display is excellent, it's backlit and colors are brilliant. However, within 5 minutes of use this device had crashed on me 3 times. Granted, we were attempting to use a wireless network with it, but I think it could recover more gracefully from this.
In contrast, my Plam 7 continues to operate flawlessly. It may not be as flashy, but it effectively provides wireless access, a phone directory and access to my email. IMHO, Microsoft has a long way to go with both the UI and the WinCE PDA platform.
Eric Sarjeant
eric[@]sarjeant.com
I've got a brand new Dell Axim X5 Pocket PC running the latest version of Microsoft's WinCE (really called Pocket PC now, at least for this type of handheld). For normal use (non-network stuff) it works great and rarely if ever crashes or messes up. But insert any type of network (wireless) card, and I have to soft reboot the thing just about ever time I use the device. The networking layer in Pocket PC 2002 sucks a lot...it has huge PPTP compatibility issues (if you don't use WEP on your wireless network). Also, Pocket Internet Explorer is a big piece of garbage. It was so useless that I actually opted to pay $20 for the amazing pocket browser called NetFront3. If a pocket version of Windows can match the functionality (the good, not the bad) of Pocket PC 2002, I won't even hesitate to switch over to it. I cringe at the day that WinCE devices take over. But if you can handle rebooting everytime to use the wireless network, then I say it's pretty neat. I really enjoy having streaming shoutcast music from anywhere in my house or my yard or my university. Like I said, the only thing missing is getting some big bugs out and stability/consistency.
-> Sometimes, you just gotta break free from the shackles of proprietary code.
I tried to get some devt. tools for CE for my IDE of choice - Borland Delphi.
Here's the answer I got:
Borland isn't prioritizing CE, because Microsoft sees it as a product on the way out. They are developing other things that will take its place.
So why not try Kylix and use Linux on the embedded device?
Something does NOT make sense here.
If you got a $100 bill, put your hands up...