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Spotlight On Windows-Powered Gadgets And Gizmos
An anonymous reader writes "WindowsForDevices has published a big article showcasing seventy-three consumer devices that were on display in Microsoft's device expo at the recent Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. Each device runs Windows CE, Windows Mobile (Pocket PC, Smartphone, etc.), or Windows XP Embedded. A photo and brief description are provided for each. Some cool stuff!"
Oh jesus christ on a crutch. Its always Zaurus thism Zaurus that.. When the frack will you Zaurus idiots get a grip?
Yeah like the zaurus, ipaqs that run linux instead of pocket pc. An obscure devices that Linus discovered like Electronic picture frames. It's a little scary to put windows powered devices on display like this.. very brave decision.. Almost every geek has the clip with Bill Gates showing off Windows 98 and have it crash right???? Its not like Microsoft gets too much of the spot light already :P
Good God, What makes you qualified to even suggest linux is better than microsoft?
Heck I use linux daily. But this blind zealotism wont get us anywhere..
How about giving some insightful, informative, or even funny reasons why linux is far superior than windows.
Then I got confronted with WinCE/PocketPC. I never imagined it would get worse. The emulator won't run. Period. Been that way for over a year, no matter what we did. The IDE is a bit better, but whatever gets compiled seems to have memory leaks. Things slowly degrade and destabilize rather than the old PalmOS "kablooie" response, and I'm not sure that's a lot better, since you're forced to hard-reset preemptively since you never know if it's your code or some memory management problem making things act weird. The tools suck, and vary by hardware vendor, so it's a new adventure with every device to figure out why the 802.11 isn't working. iPAQ, Dell, Symbol, Intermec -- everything is different outside of the standard apps, and it often behaves differently in a networked environment.
So we got a pre-market Fujitsu tablet PC to work with, and I hoped that perhaps this was the deliverance I had hoped for. Nope, it was worse -- far worse. We have to pull the battery every 15 minutes because WinXP Tablet PC edition is a total piece of crap that locks up like clockwork. Can't get the pointer to match where the pen is hitting the screen, which is mildly annoying, and setting up network stuff is a royal pain in the arse with about nil control over network configuration.
So I spent my money on a Sharp Zaurus for my own mobile device and have a CF 802.11 card for it with an SD memory slot still available. Works like a charm. Haven't rebooted in over four months. Compile with gcc, java, can write Qt apps for it, and have wlan-ng tools available for network configuration. Can replace the entire stack on the thing with OpenZaurus should I ever feel the need, but since everything is open source and works well, haven't bothered with it.
Palm has gotten a lot better, but still suffers from it's architectural design flaws. WinCE is crap, which should be obvious when they keep changing the name and the PocketPC 2003 is labeled internally as WinCE 4.2 (more confusion, less accountability). Tablet Edition is everything an MS version 1.0 is expected to be. Linux is still good-old-linux, on any device, as capable, solid and easy to work with as on a desktop.
I just wish it was better marketed, so I wouldn't have to put up with this crappy MS garbage.
Choosing Windows CE even after a software failure like that still demonstrates an appauling lack of committment to reliability on the part of BMW. It basically says "we don't care about the reliability of our software."
To demonstrate that they were really serious about making sure such a thing didn't happen again they would have made a more mature decision concerning their choice of future platform.
Ha!!!!