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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!"
Does it run linux?
The snow doesn't give a soft white damn whom it touches. -- ee cummings
Here ya go: http://www.linuxdevices.com
(humming the tune "Anything You Can Do, I Can Do Better...")
*** *** You're just jealous 'cause the voices talk to me... ***
Now the worlds most hated technology item. can be combined with world's most hated OS!
It already did!
Each device should be spec'ed with its estimate of MTBR (mean time between reboots).
Dunno if this was one of the amazing devices shown, but recently an LCD display was installed outside of a food court at my school. All it seems to do is go through a powerpoint-like slideshow, telling us all of our lovely options in eating. For the past two days, however, all it has displayed is the Windows XP default screen saver.
Oh, I'm glad the money I'm paying for my education is going somewhere useful. Though this Windows-based LCD advertisement probably cost thousands of dollars, it's worth every penny in its ability to cause me to ignore the dining halls and make my own food.
Somehow, an advertisement running Windows seems to enhance my ability to ignore it - I'm ignoring two birds with one stone!
-agent oranje.
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
an actual quote from one of the devices
"They also wanted to reduce the footprint of their OS image to further harden their OS image from viruses & hackers, just another reason they chose Windows XP Embedded for their device. "
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
Has anyone used the Poma Wearable PC ??
/.
Description: The Personal Optical Mobile Assistant (POMA) Wearable PC is a small wearable PC in a headset form factor for browsing the Internet. There is no boot time and gives the wearer the ability to privately view websites and access information...
I would like to see a review of this and any similar device posted on
The X-Box is not in the list, doesn't it run a version of windows too?
(\(\
(^.^)
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*This is the cute bunny virus, please copy this into your sig so it can spread
While everyone (here at least) would rather see *nix running on these devices, I'm none too suprised that Microsoft is pushing embeded Windows.
Their basic strategy from their inception has been to throw money at a problem untill someone finds a fix. Look at the X-Box (the lack of a Japanese market) or any number of their other projects.
Since Microsoft already has strong ties with most of the vendors, and plenty of money to throw at promoting embeded Windows, it only follows that they will continue to grow in that market.
"See you, space cowboy." -Spike
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.
I note that a bunch of these items are not yet shipping, including the Phantom Gaming System that came in 3rd in this years Vaporware Awards
I am about as big a Linux bigot as anyone, but give me a break. Can't you appreciate innovative devices or new ideas for their own sake? There are some cool devices there and for whatever reason windows CE got the design win.
BTW, I'm pretty much pissed at MS for the fact that I'm 3 hours into a cleaning of my employer dictated development platform right now because of MSIE vulnerabilities. But at least I can look at another engineers work and appreciate the appeal of their product without belittling it just because they didn't use my preferred OS.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Intervideo is the company that makes WinDVD, InterVideo Home Theater, and a bunch of others. The story is at New Scientist. Basically it is an "InstantOn" PC with LinDVD (which is developed by InterVideo) that fits on a read-only memory chip. Linux handles TV, DVD, CD, MP3, radio. The twist to this product is that it also has a bootable MS Windows XP OS so you can run any of the MS Windows app that you still want/need.
If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land,
it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy. -James Madison
rofl...
Is that some kind of record? You used the same post twice in the same thread, and scored both a +5 Funny and +5 Insightful out of it.
The difference between a PocketPC Phone Edition and Smartphone is the later is phone first, pda second, the former is pda first, phone second. So do your research and buy the righ tool for the job.
Linux Resources
I just got myself a Treo 600 for Christmas and I think it balances pretty well. True it is a Palm first with a phone built into it, but it works. One of the palm applications buttons is a phone button. Once on the phone screen you can make a call either by using the direction-pad thing to scroll to a contact / favorites list or by dialing on the keyboard. True it has a built-in camera, but I'll probably end up ignoring it. The battery life's great from what I've found so far (couple of days easily). The only downside to it is the keyboard buttons are a little small untill you get used to them.
I wonder why he chose to be anonymous?
For posting news about windows on slashdot. ;)
Okay now mod me up
Python script to convert photos into "artsy" portraits: http://p2pbridge.sf.net/pyPortrait/
Is it just me or are these predictable blue screen comments getting boring? I've been using NT4 > Windows 2000 > Windows XP > Windows 2003 for 6 or 7 years now, and I can recollect 4 or 5 blue screens, most of them on NT4 and in all cases running dodgy software. I don't know anyone who does get regular bluescreens on the NT kernel based windows.
I dual booted and installed Redhat 7.1 a few years back and got 2 kernel dumps in 2 days... sure, I probably did something wrong, but the machine was running windows fine.
Read reviews of shopping cart software
We were looking at using the X86 version of Windows CE for a kiosk application. I tried to explain why this was a bad idea to the less technically inclined with the following metaphor:
Picture a Steam Locomotive. Its big, robust, kind of ugly, but purely functional. It requires a lot of finesse to operate one, and if you are not careful, you can blow yourself up. On the other hand, it has a rugged, simple design, being mostly a network of pipes. As such, anyone with a pipe wrench and a basic understanding of plumbing can repair a steam locomotive. This is what Linux is like.
Now imagine a Diesel Locomotive. The whole thing is controlled by a simple lever. Push the lever forward, it goes forward, pull it back, the locomotive backs up. The diesel can't pull as much as the steam locomotive, and diesel fuel costs more than coal, but anyone can operate the diesel. However, the diesel engine itself and its accompanying systems are very complicated. Most people (even people knowledgeable about trains) cannot fix a diesel locomotive, because they do not have access to the special tools and knowledge needed to fix the diesel engine. That is what Windows NT is like.
Now picture a handcar. You can't see how the handcar works, but you know that when you pump it up and down, it moves down the track. So you can kind of imagine how it works and use it effectively. Anyone can use it, but most people don't have the patience for it anymore. That is DOS.
Now, to understand Windows CE running on an X86 processor, picture a pleasure yacht sitting on the railroad tracks...
We all had a good laugh, but deployed what may be the world's only X86 CE application anyways.
Unknown host pong.
This thread is loaded with flames and trolls, but I have to say that my recent experience has been interesting. When I upgraded mobos, ram and cpu, all my windows crashes dissappeared completely. I still prefer linux for a variety of reasons, but generally speaking, windows has ben much more stable.
I am beginning to think that some of the trouble is not just windows, but also tied to poor hardware. All said, I am glad that my machine is more stable.
"We don't know what we are doing, but we are doing it very carefully,..." Wherry, R.J. Personnel Psychology (1995)
I was in a building once where the lifts had an LCD display above the door saying what level you were on.
:)
Found out that these displays were running windows.
How I found out - got into a lift and saw 'this program has executed an invalid instruction'.
The Blue Screen of Death does not inspire confidence when stepping into a metal cage hundreds of feet above the ground!
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.
MS is eventually going to have to do something, because it's not getting any better. The line between virus and legitimate program is getting blurred. Maybe this trend will push people to Linux. If companies tried to make spyware for KDE/GNOME, the open-source community would come out with a spyware remover program within three days, and it would be installed in the next release of every major distro.
main(c,r){for(r=32;r;) printf(++c>31?c=!r--,"\n":c<r?" ":~c&r?" `":" #");}
Slashdot is the only place I know of where the BSOD is still a prevalent meme. It's one of those things everybody talks about happening constantly without ever really seeing. Sure, now and then someone gets one due to a driver, but let's get real.
It's the same with Clippy jokes, even though I haven't seen Clippy in close to six years in ANY Office installation, and he never installs by default anyway. Never mind that telling him to "Hide" always got rid of him anyway.
To use a bluetooth mouse you must have a bluetooth stack that supports the HID profile.
Microsofts bluetooth stack was completed after Windows XP shipped, It was supposed to have been included in XP SP1 but was delayed due to a lack of hardware support. It will probably be included in XP SP2.
The only way to get hold of the stack at the moment is with a MS Bluetooth keyboard/mouse or direct from MS if you are a Bluetooth hardware device manufacturer.
Mac OSX 10.2 includes support for HID devices but it was shipped after Windows XP so they had time to let the standards finalise.
I don't think you can complain about needing a driver disc for a major new Wireless subsystem.
"Taligent is still pure vapor. Maybe they'll be the last who jumps up on Openstep... "