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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.
PC's in any form will not be replaced by anything that cannot beat it in gaming quality. Until my palm can play a Quake, a Half Life, or a Freelancer BETTER than my pc, I'm not unplugging.
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There will always be a use for wired PCs. This is exactly why Desknotes were made: It's a laptop computer and makes the employees happy because they have a cool little toy, but they still can't leave the desk because there is not battery on the unit, thus forcing you to be (1) tethered to a wall, presumeably in the office while doing work, or (2) carry a small power generator with you.
Handheld devices are great and all, but people want something that they can do everything on, all at once. When we see a handheld device that runs at 2Ghz (or equivalent speeds at a different frequency) and has a 17" screen on it, then it will be post-pc era. Tablet PCs have come close, and Laptops are there, but none of them are handheld.
The article talks about market share of embedded vs. oem distributions of operating systems, but I just don't see how the embedded market will span from the business users to the home BF1942 players and Kazaa users.
Work sucked, until it became unemployment, when it became slightly more tolerable. -Tet
5 years is optimistic, but I would love to see it happen, the biggest hurdle for PDAs and portable computers is the battery life, power to the machines!
Posting useless rant since 2003.
Just the thought of having a handheld be my primary pc makes me WinCE
Epoc seems to be powering quite a lot more phones these days then anything else. With the phone market so much bigger in terms of numbers then the pc market, let alone the handheld market, is epoc not poised to beat Windows CE?
Not that such anecdotal evidence would count but I've personally bought more handhelds than desktops already in the last two years or so.
This technology is moving faster, so there's more incentive to upgrade. And quite many of my coworkers are showing off their new Pocket PCs as well.
When men used to be men
One guess as to who funded this study. These "studies for hire" places are almost always questionable.
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!)
Don't you know the post-pc era happened 7 years ago? Isn't everyone running java thin client machines? Heck, I do all of my office work through my web browser using Corel Java Office.
It will be much much easier on everyone when there is essentially no upgradability from machine to machine and we buy a new machine every 3 years.
While I personally have had very few blue screens using w2k for a couple years, I know that some versions of windows are blue screen prone. I'm curious what the average blue screen rate is for a hand held device. Anyone have an idea on this?
I think it would annoy me more if my hand held crashed than if my desktop did.
"Not knowing when the dawn will come, I open every door." - Emily Dickinson
I was not touched there by an angel.
What does "post-pc" mean? I cannot tell from the articles linked what the original author intended. It would be very easy to interpret these articles as implying that handhelds will dominate the consumer's future over PCs. But this is not what the market data shows. It shows that handheld sales will dominate.
And what is the difference? The difference is this: I own a PC or two already. They work just fine for me, have plenty of power, and will be that way two years from now (assuming I don't want Longhorn or some other future bloated software). So I won't need to buy a PC. But I don't have a handheld, so I might choose to buy one. So might my wife. Or we might get a notebook. But the PC would still be our dominant mode of computing.
Perhaps this is obvious to everyone already. But the article is poorly written on this score and could easily lead to confusion, a confusion which then plays itself out in non-geeks running around thinking that geeks are saying PCs are dead. Then when we're still using PCs in a few years, they'll point and laugh at us for our silly predictions. Its happened before...
Will be around for a while longer... What I see in the future is the letting go of legacy and the refinement of the beige box into a hub of sorts. The embedded segment still has poor input devices and no matter how small and useful they could be until headway is made in the usability arena specifically regarding input then they are pretty tough and difficult to use for any long period of time.
The first manufacturer to start pumping out non-legacy machines that are smaller more aesthetic and can hold current media yet allow for new functionality that is found in stuff like MythTv, Freevo, Tivo, Windows Media OS etc etc etc with ease will be the next big computer manufacturer.. That is till the guys/gals over at the mit media lab find out a way to get better input devices for smaller devices. Whether it be voice operated or whatever etc etc etc.. you get the idea.
It's going to be great fun watching the marketing guys build their PowerPoint presentations on their cell phones.
PalmOs has almost no following outside the pda market. The pda market is rather small compared to the overall embedded market. PalmOs based smart phones have failed to take off.
People get way too caught up in "what's going to replace what" these days. Desktop computers will always be around, they will merely be complimented (not replaced) by handhelds. Think of the desktop pc as your house. It's big, takes a lot of space, and expensive, but when you're in and stationary that's what you want. Now your handheld is your car. It's mobile, has lots of things similiar to things in the house (seats you could take a nap in while pulled off. trunk to keep things in. mini stereo system. etc). The car's mobility is a wonderful thing and allows us to live and work in a completely different way, but no time soon are people going to ditch their houses and start living out of their car.
;).
Laptops are like camper trailers. Bulky and tedious to carry around, but in a pinch they serve quite well as a below average house
These devices aren't taking over an old PC market, they are novel devices filling new niches. PDA? Replaced the paper Franklins. Cell phone? Replaces hard-wired (or even supplements it.) MP3 player -- walkman etc.
Just because sales of embedded devices are increasing and potentially overtaking PC's, does not mean they're replacing them...
And taking a different tack...
What do you think all the people working on all of the embedded devices are going to be working on? Tablets? Handhelds? I don't think so.
They're going to be doing the same thing they are now, sitting in front of a PC (or unix box, or whatever) and banging out requirements, design, and code...
Most work will still be done in the same way, 'cause a lot of the time a PDA/handheld/tablet just won't cut it...
So? Does this mean the CE based devices will be performing the same tasks the PCs were?
Almost certainly not.
Further, in five years Linux based PCs "may outsell" Windows based PCs. For that matter Macs "may outsell" Windows based PCs in five years. The point being, most pundits crystal balls have been pretty cloudy over the years.
For myself, I'm pretty sure I'll be buying new PCs at about the same rate I buy new PDAs - every two years or so as the new technology becomes too compelling to pass up. ;-)
The one trend I think will continue is the intrusion of "desknotes" onto the scene. These will be notebook machines that are powerful enough to completely replace desktops for 99% of computer users. I hope they'll plug into a (Hypertransport?) connection that'll allow external AGP and PCI devices in the docking station, providing upgradeable graphics at least when used in the desktop role. One hopes the processors won't run hot enough to really endanger the users though... ;-)
Galileo: "The Earth revolves around the Sun!"
Score: -1 100% Flamebait
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.
In my mind, the only things that make people upgrade their PCs at all are games. Most people use their computers for chatting, browsing, email, games, and a -little- word processing - probably in that order. The game, hardware, and OS industry knows this.
As a result, all three industries work together to an extent. OSes need upgrades when new hardware comes out, new hardware needs new OSes, and games need both. Thus, they end up making colateral income for each other, as one component advances, all the others must. Otherwise, each industry would probably have stagnated without the other.
Now, portables, however, don't really do the 'game' thing. They're really just fancy web appliances with word processors. For most people, a WinCE device with a couple hundred megs of storage and a decent display/keyboard would be more than sufficient for all that they do (legally): just include solitaire, IE, and a couple chat programs with your basic loadout. I see this working for a large extent, especially with the convention of WiFi. I'm thinking a family of 5 (with, say, 3 internet addicts) would much rather spend 1k$ on 3 portable devices than 1 large desktop device that only one person can use at a time.
Price would have to be quite competitive, of course, since most people want gaming, too. Personally, I see embedded WinXP (or whatever equivilant product MS comes out with next) being more common than WinCE. WinCE is for low-end stuff.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
I bought a computer this year. I didn't buy it with Windows. Is this a case of me not buying a PC?
If I buy a PDA that doesn't have WinCE, will I not be buying a PDA?
This might be a useful comparison (Windows vs WinCE) within one company's market, but ignores a two things going on in the market as a whole. Now, maybe my PC purchase and purchases like it are small enough to be written off as statistical noise, but are those PDAs? I rather doubt it.
I don't subscribe to RMS's GNUtopian vision.
Look into the company...it seems to be a one-man shop. If I remember the area its in correctly that's a residential address, I will drive by today to verify. This release is from a conshop.
Have you ever tried to effectively work off a WinCe device? They're great for processes where you do the same task over and over, but actually trying to do any real work (translation: work that actually requires thinking in addition to just typing or clicking) is almost painful. The WinCe 2.0 OS is still chock full of bugs. I regularly have to reset my iPAQ because the OS has a memory leak (at least as far as I can tell; no apps running and the memory used count just goes higher and higher...). Don't even get me started on missing functionality in applications. Maybe embedded devices work better, but if the consumer version of the OS is anything like the embedded version, no thanks! Give me a realllly old copy of the embedded version of OS/2 any day, or Linux, or anything else...
Sure there a few commodity hardware vendors that ship pretty much the same WinCE devices as eachother: HP, Dell, Toshiba, Samsung.
But the market is much larger that that: Palm, Sony, Handspring, Ericsson, Nokia, Motorola, Samsung, Sharp, IBM, Apple,Sendo, etc that ship innovative produces based on the best OS for their needs: Symbian, Linux, Palm, Homegrown.
Thes vendors innovative devices keeps filling in the crack in the maeketplace - while the WinCE market is limited to Palm IIIC wanabees and friken-huce 'cell phones' that bing you back to the Motorola 'Brick' days.
Want a ruged computing device: Telelogix
Want a server in your pocket: Sharp/IBM
Want tunes: iPod
Want the web on you cellphone: Ericsoon 800
Choic, Choice Choice!
Where's the WinCE version of these deviced: don't exit.
Moneyed corporations, non-working 'poor' and criminal prisoners are turning productive citizens into tax-slaves.
Sure, handheld/embedded devices will outsell PC's over time. That falls into the Bleeding Obvious category of statistic. Duh.
What the key question here turns out to be is this: What is a PC? If, by "PC", you mean monolithic desktop/laptop systems that use X86-compatible processors and run Microsoft Windows, well, then it's a no-brainer. That means Linux desktops will chip away at that, MacOS will chip at that, every Palm sold hits that figure - not to mention the WinCE devices. If a PC is defined as any sort of desktop/laptop general computing device - well, that takes the plot line out a lot farther.
The other thing to consider is that palmtop operating systems (CE, Palm, etc.) are penetrating ever-farther into the realm of consumer devices. So it's not an outrageous concept - but I don't think CE as an OS will ever pass Windows by itself. No friggin' way.
Will the combined sales of organizers, MP3 players, cellphones, DVR's, and other devices that can get and benefit from a useful embedded OS pass the sales of traditional X86 "PC's"? I'm sure of it.
But by the time this comes to pass, your MP3 player may well have more computing firepower than your desktop does today. And then PC's would likely be the niche devices.
-- Josh Turiel
"2. Do not eat iPod Shuffle."
I just threw out my punch card reader last week.
Jason
ProfQuotes
The article talks about handheld, consumer and embedded applications tied to WindowsCE. Of COURSE it'll outsell PCs, a PC is a single device whereas handheld and consumer devices cover a huge spectrum of goods. And when they quote a 250% increase in sales of hand held computers, notice they fail to tell you the exact number of sales to date.
Does it spell the death of the PC? No, wishful thinking at best, preemptive marketing at worst. This piece is spouting someone's paid marketing drivel, and it wouldn't surprise me if the path leads to Redmond.
Even if that is the case, it again shows that the people in Redmond learned from big old bad tobacco. Diversify! They knew long ago the gravy train from personal computers couldn't go on forever, and they also knew that consumer electronics would be thristy for more powerful embedded operating systems.
WindowsCE isn't all that bad, but certainly Microsoft is fooling itself if it thinks it's a one-stop-shop for an OS for embedded devices.
Um... what about Symbian? Or Palm? Or even Pixo, for that matter?
And let us never forget the ever-popular Pom Pilot...
My favorite idea for the replacement for the PC in the home would be something along the lines of networking-plus. There would be a bunch of modules connected by . One module would be for data storage. One for data archiving. One for audio/video output. One for video recording. One for video game playing. And possibly normal computer tacked on for general use (oh yeah, one more module for web-browsing). Kinda like a component TiVo that could syncronize all your radios and televisions. I think Sony is working on this already. Probably some other people are as well.
For the office, I think the tablet PC or alternatively, flat-screens with built in interface devices linked to stationary computers via wireless, would be the mid-to-near future. This way a single device could be carried around from station to station instead of having multiple devices, instead of requiring multiple stationary PCs. And they can display much more than pocket PCs.
In both markets I don't think that WinCE will dominate since it will cost money for the developer. Instead, manufacturers (especially those who MS cannot extort) will opt for a lower cost alternative (GNU/Linux).
Galium Arsenide is the material of the future, and always will be.
I keep hearing about this "Dawn of the PC era", but the simple truth still stands. Handheld devices are great at a few simple tasks, calendaring, scheduling and other everyday/office tasks. They are also very good at communication, but they suck as a platform. The advantage the PC has is its multi-purpose orientation. It is possible to do virtually anything with a PC. The functions that a PC can do can be completely different from each other, unlike handheld devices which have very narrow use/ability. (Also, for handhelds to be truly functional, more needs to be displayed to the user, and that is hard with small screens.) Until the handheld platform becomes as diverse as the PC platform, the sun will shine in this era.
Free speech is getting expensive...
The things that they hope will be missing in these new non-desktop devices are:
Sorry. We don't want our dumb terminals back, and we don't want little gameboy like devices that tether us to the Man's information network.
Yeah, well also according to some other recent statistics I've heard: Drug use is on the decline and will be non-existant in 5 years, the green party will overtake the republican party in popularity in 10 years, and scientology will overtake christianity in the next 10 years as the most popular religion in the western hemisphere. *(source reuters). I wouldn't believe all the statistics you hear, (except these ones of course).
How many times have we seen this "post-PC" bullshit come and go? I've been around long enough to have seen it come and go several times.
Do you remember during the Microsoft anti-trust trial when journalists were saying the trial was irrelevant because new technologies were already making PC irrelevant and would soon put Microsoft out of business? Internet appliances, handheld devices, etc.
Just ignore it. It's crap.
I know this device isn't quite a PDA, but it's closer to it than the gameboy is - the nokia n-gage is getting closer to uniting a mobile, PDA and portable gaming console (http://www.n-gage.com/n-gage/home.html). But imo the two will exist side by side, just as gamers often have both a console and a gba (for example.
From reading the computer press, one might assume that *all* computer users are gamers. I wonder what the percentage really is. Practically none of my close friends or colleagues have anything to do with games.
Courtesy of snpp:
"Did you know that disco record sales were up 400% for the year ending 1976? If these trends continues... AAY!"
This post was generated by a Cadre of Uber Monkeys for Monkey-Man2000 (603495).
We don't need bloated hardware and software to design fast portable computers which run circles around Transmeta in speed and power consumption. We don't need commonly used bloated embedded operating systems either (yes this includes embedded forms of Unix, too). We just use a different approach. It has been demonstrated to work very well, and perhaps even offend a few people :).
And has been for decades. The personal automobile outsells them by quite a large margin.
Well, unless, of course, you need a tractor instead of a BMW M5.
Oddly enough they are not interchangable. Go figure.
Come to think of it sporks outsell handheld devices, so replace your PDA with a spork.
The article is silly.
KFG
For me, the "post PC era" is when people stop treating thier computers as computers, and start viewing them as appliances. SFF PCs are a gateway into it where the PC becomes a set top box much like a DVD player or VCR. The xBox has the potential to be a major gap bridger, as the people that have modded it have found out. A subset of this would be a decline in "PC" sales as people start using the various "appliances" for tasks that they would have otherwise used a PC for.
Another definition would be an end to the trend of continued growth in the PC market and a return to predominantly just using appliances.
If you think education is expensive, you should try ignorance -- Derek Bok, president of Harvard
Call me crazy (again), but I can't wait until a PDA can replace my desktop/notebook. It got pretty close with the Newton, and could've within a generation or two (at most) of Newton technology.
Current PDAs suck, though. Very much so a step backwards. Even so, there are some good things, like the HP Jornada 72x and the Sharp Zaurii. Give me a Sharp Zaurus with a touch-typable keyboard around the size of the Jornada 720's (not just a big thumboard like the C700), a ~600 MHz XScale, some means of using a larger monitor and a larger res, and I'd be happy with all other features being the same with something like the current Zaurus SL-C700- 640x480 screen, 64 MB RAM, 32 MB Flash ROM, SD + CF slots. I'd sell my iBook in a minute if I could get one of those.
I have actually been using a Jornada 720 with a 206 MHz StrongARM CPU largely as my main machine. Wireless and wired web browsing, writing up reports (with LaTeX), email, SSH, and programming all on the device, never neededing to do anything silly like sync with a desktop. Hell, I probably would have sold my iBook and just used the Jornada 720 as my only machine, but the screen isn't readable at all out of doors- it isn't reflective like the Zaurus or iPAQ screen. Nor is my iBook's, but if I'm going to consolodate all devices into one, I better be able to use it for everything I currently use my PDAs and iBook for.
And I'm definately a special case in the general computer using population, perhaps more or less so with the nerd/programming community. But I want a computer that I can power off of a relatively small solar panel, and I want it now!
Working toward a usable PDA environment in the spirit of Newton OS: Dynapad
As far as I can tell, this esimate assumes following:
1. WinCE will capture a large marketshare in a cell phone market.
This seems very unlikely, since virtually all big and medium (Nokia, Sony/Ericsson, Motorola, Samsung) cell phone manufacturers have chosen a Symbian instead of WinCE.
2. Sales of PDAs will rise very quickly.
According to the other estimate, sales of smartphone will outstip PDA sales in this year. As smartphones will become more advanced, PDAs won't be as attractive as they're today. While many companies will buy PDAs for workers, I doubt that sales will singificantly increase in a consumer market.
After all, the more devices you have the more diffucult it becomes to manage them (carrying around, recharging battery, syncing, etc..). Since many people already have a cell phone, it's more logical for them to buy a smartphone instead of PDA.
In the last year about 400 million of cell phones and 12 million of PDAs were sold. Now if we assume that in 2008 sales of cell phones will rise to 600 million and WinCE captures 5% marketshare (which is a lot since many of those 600 million phones will be very simple and won't need an advanced OS) and PDA sales will triple, we will have about 66 million WinCE devices sold in 2008 (assuming 100% marketshare in the PDAs).
Article estimates that there will be 200-220 million WinCE devices sold in 2008...
The answer is that the "Post-PCs" will be replaced by a brand-name snack cake. This will happen for two simple reasons: 1. WindowsCE devices are easy to throw. 2. While it would be easy to throw a twinkie, they are usually eaten instead.
A pricey Microsoft-certified pile of smashed up plastic, glass and solder, or a tasty treat in your tummy? You decide.
--- What?
Here is why it won't work:
A PDA's screen is terrible for web browsing because of its size.
It is easier to use a full size keyboard to enter any significant amount of data.
If you can't charge it when required it is possible to lose data. (this happened to me once when I forgot the charger on vacation)
Its small size makes it easy to steal and if you don't have a pc you won't have a backup for your data.
A PDA is best used as an extension for your computer, it is not a replacement for your PC.
Looking for a job?
Want your resume written professionally?
DON'T USE TUNAREZ!!!
The main problem is the proprietary CLOSED nature of console games. The BEST longest lasting most played games, read made the MOST $$$'s are PLAYER supported, designed for MODS and player maps. Until the consoles figure a way around that, and I am sure they will, PC gaming is and will continue to be superior. The grand expirement is EQ adventures, and I predict a slow painful death for that game. Without a keyboard and extensive macro ability it is going to be painful at best. Make a console controller that can compete with a mouse+keyboard in a FPS and you might have something also. :)
As to needing new games with more imagnitive gameplay HERE HERE
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
Every year, people (I mean the teaming masses wallowing in their computer ignorance) are getting slowly smarter about their computers. It is now something of joke, but the grandmother who spends her time sending e-mail and playing bridge is a good example. So basically, the basic users are getting smarter, and more demanding, about computers.
So my question is: why, oh why, would they suddenly decide to give up this machine that they can communicate with, do their taxes with, play Heart$ or whatever on, "surf" the internet with, etc. and trade it in on a bunch of over specialized little boxes with way less computing power? Doing so would be going against the trend of increasing knowledge and computer familiarity.
This is a dream by the manufacturers that have worked themselves into a corner because PC's have become a commodity. This is also Bill Gates' network refrigerator and talking house dream. Oddly enough, in these schemes, the PC just disappears. I don't see any trends going in this direction. The whole PDA thing took off because you can hook them up to your PC.
But I think this is a marketing argument and not even a consumer argument.
Congratulations! Now we are the Evil Empire
Why would CE devices outselling desktops constitute a 'Post PC' era? They have different uses. If popularity is the only measure, then I could argue that we're already in a Post PC Era because calculator sales dwarf those of PCs.
This story conflicts with this story by the same research company:
http://www.etforecasts.com/pr/pr0402.htm
In 2001 the worldwide number of PCs-in-use topped 600M units. In the next six years this number will nearly double to over 1.15B PCs-in-use by year-end 2007-a compound annual growth of 11.4%.
Trouble with market research firms is that they usually tend to tell the client what they want to hear.
Enjoy,
It's just the normal noises in here.
You have to hand it to MS - they have been *very* good at applying pressure to hardware vendors to get them to support CE, in most cases to the exclusion of anythign else. (Take a look at tiqit.com, the people who used to have the tiny little x86 borads for an example where they're about 75% don with the conversion - CE is clearly the emphasis, although they're not yet getting all the MS marketing dollars they can by removing any reference to competing OSes as some others have. Intrynsic is another example of a vendor in the process of switching to CE.)
Seriously, this is a *real* problem - right now, I'm looking for a very tiny, low-power embedded board that can support either wired Ethernet or 802.11. (Any pointers greatly appreciated!) First, there are far fewer choices than there were a year ago - it's amazing how many hardware platforms have died in this space, many of them casualties of the embedded Linux movement (for instance, Lineo and Metroworks are no longer interested in selling hardware, and their products just died off, leaving a real void.)
I don't want to use CE for this device, but I may, if only because it's *far* easier to get CE support on the new highly capable hardware. No one wants to own Linux or NetBSD drivers and the like, so it's a quagmire - MS, on the other hand is throwing beaucoup dollars at making sure CE runs (and is supported) on everything that matters. As a result, it's getting hard to avoid making the decision to design CE into new embedded products. Yess, it's a stupidly designed environment, but there's no question it's already far better supported than Linux and BSD for quick time-to-market embedded systems development.
I don't like that, but it's reality. And I don't think I see any way for it to change real soon, either. They are quite simply, being very successful at buying this market. This is a real shame, as the ELCPS (Embedded Linux Consortium PLatform Specification) should breathe some life into things, but instead, it appears that the hardware vendors are leaving Linux behind so long as Microsoft is waving dollars at them.
"The future's good and the present is nothing to sneeze at." - Roblimo's last
I never understood the scene in Brazil where the guy is staring at his tiny monitor through a magnifying glass until now. People are obsessed with these things to the extent that they use them in permanently tethered mode even though they have a full sized monitor and keyboard sitting right next to the thing.
That part of the fad will fade I think, along with the eyesight of users. The main thing that will drive computing for the next few years will be PRICE. It's a dismal prospect for Microsoft and I'm sure these studies are designed to give them hope that people will switch from paying $2000 for a full sized PC whose cost of manufacture is $100 to paying $500 for a palmtop which contains $10 worth of parts. They are addicted to these outrageous profit margins and they have absolutely no plan for how to replace the cashflow that they generate.
They better get such a plan and soon however. These PDA/Notepad dreams will never come true in the way MS needs them to. A decent PDA in the near future will cost $50 or less, subsidized by cell phone service agreements if they have that function, and a notpad style PC will go for $300 and both devices will be considered "disposable" since in either case you drop them on concrete and they become useless and unfixable.
High (relative) profit margin items for the next few years will be ordinary notebooks, but people and companies on a budget will keep using what they have for as long as possible. Notebooks are the best compromise... readable displays and normal keyboards... single device for each user with no need to constantly "synch". I think even good notebooks will be available from every brand for under $1000 and the competitive price for these devices will flirt with $500. Read it and weep Microsoft.
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...