Slashdot Mirror
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!"
My wife has a Samsung SPH-i700 wireless phone from Verizon Wireless (motto: I am your father, Luke), and while it is a great tool to retrieve email remotely, it is an absolute JOKE as a wireless phone. To make a call, you must tap the start menu, then select "Phone" from the menu. My wife, a relatively small woman, finds the handset clunky and impossible to hold for more than a few minutes, so she uses speakerphone for almost every single conversation. The thing also loves to be tethered to an electrical outlet at every opportunity, battery life is dismal.
People who want to create features for wireless phones need to realize that ringtones in the workplace or in the presence of anyone over 14 make the owner of a ringing phone look asinine, camera phones are for perverts, and that anything that chews batteries generally makes my phone less useful.
Give me a phone that is lightweight, gets decent talk time off a single charge (I'd LOVE to be able to carry my phone an entire work week without charging), and that has features I'll actually use, and I'll be a customer for life.
Give me a PDA with a sorry excuse for a phone built-in, and I'll go find another vendor.
Blogging Weight Loss, Distance Education, and more at verlin.com
Some products (eg the XPDA-9) must be real sincve they appear on the list more than once.
Many of these are more development/experimental devices than real products. Quite a few, eg. Cerfcube run WinCE or Linux.
What is most interesting with WinCE is to see the number of "design losses", rather than design wins. Many products went first generation on WinCE and then were redone on Linux. I have not heard of the reverse, but I expect there might be a few cases.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
One of the contributors over at The Register uses (or did) a Psion. He did an upgrade which required a reboot. Even though he'd had the device for years, and is tech savvy, he did not even know about the little recessed reset switch.
I recently spoke with someone doing fieldwork using an ipaq. They were working in streams etc so decided to use one of those waterproof pods to protect the device. Whenever the unit crashed they'd need to pop the ipaq out of the case to reboot it. Eventually this became such a chore that they tossed the waterproof pod and just took their chances with splashes etc.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
It would be OK. You could SSH into the Linux based billboard, export the display to your Linux laptop and have a field day with it. You could put all kinds of funny text up there. The possibilities are endless! Imagine a gimp made image of your principal with some Brittany Spears nude shots. Man, what I would give to be back in High School. I graduated in 1991, back then we had crap for computers.
If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land,
it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy. -James Madison
Anythign that Can Run Windows CE can Run Linux... I am pretty sure You would be pretty hard pressed to find a Platform that Runs Windows CE that allready doesn't have a good working port of linux.
Who needs WiFi when we can have Packet Over Sheep! http://datacomm.org/PoS-InternetDraft.txt
Great so on the embedded version instead of giving you the blue screen (a pretty much constant occurance on XP, according to Bill G. most of their users experience OS crashes 2-3 times a day). The device reboots, even when the error was possibly recoverable. Great.
That means less pictures of blue screens, but the same number of problems, in fact since rebooting at best accomplishes that same as a blue screen the goes away and at worst causes more damage, that means MORE problems.
If the system is in a state where the code that makes it reboot executes properly it's pretty much guaranteed NOT to be in a state where it should be shut down. That would cause severe problems with things like ATM transactions.
Wouldn't be a Compaq (Comcrap) would it? They're the new Packard Bell you know. Crappy shitty bug ridden machines, the company I work for blows through them like toilet paper on a diahrea day.
Seriously though I build machines on a fairly regular basis, I have 4 in use almost constantly in my home and I run support for all the machines I build.
The last time that I, myself, had a BSOD was 4 months ago when I tested a piece of software a customer wanted on their PC (bad shareware - real bad). If my wife or son saw a BSOD they'd freeze in place until someone fixed it. So I'm going on 1 BSOD in the last six months for 10 machines (mine, my 2 work machines, and 4 others I support). So that's well around 99.9999% uptime.
Of course they're getting boring. No knowledgeable Windows user actually gets BSOD's on a regular basis anymore. What you need to understand is that trolls such as those posting these comments are not worth wasting your time on. Just add them to your list of foes and move on.
It's a fact that 99% (possibly more) of BSOD's in modern day Windows operating systems are caused by bad hardware or bad drivers. Third party drivers. Now, the zealots would no doubt argue that a faulty driver shouldn't be able to bring the whole operating system down. Well, this is not a characteristic unique to Windows. Linux cries like a stuck pig over bad drivers, too. At least for Windows, I can find drivers for _all_ my hardware. For that, I'm willing to stand having to dodge a few BSOD's, just like most Linux users have nothing against spending hours tweaking text-based config files getting their systems running properly.
I've never received an unfair metamod for modding down an anti-MS troll, btw, so most Slashdotters (the ones dedicated enough to metamod, anyway) probably agree that BSOD jokes no longer have a place here.
Quality, performance, value; you get only two, and you don't always get to pick.