Microsoft Makes Surprise CE 6 Release

An anonymous reader writes "Unexpectedly, Microsoft has released a beta of Windows CE 6, at its mobile developer's conference (MEDC) this week. CE is the real-time OS that underpins Windows Mobile and Microsoft's other device software stacks for phones, PDAs, set-top boxes, and the like. CE 6 looks to be a major rewrite, featuring the capability to support several orders of magnitude more concurrent processes and virtual memory. Also new is support for MS's .NET IDE. Together, these new capabilities seem calculated to morph CE from a closed-box, off-the-shelf OS into a more customizable OS."

Comments

This shows publicity priorities...

[ZSpade]

Meanwhile Microsoft's Major new consumer operating system has been pushed back several times, and talked up every chance they get. I think this says a lot about the order of importance of the mobile OS to people. Having worked in retail I can honestly say nobody ever asked me if that palm I was selling them came with a windows based OS or which OS it came with, yet with people who bought desktops I'd always get this question: "Does it come with XP?". This was, of course, years after XP was common, and computers really weren't packaged with anything else.

I don't think this release was so much a secret as it was an unadvertised release. If microsoft thought there would be a huge public reaction to this, they would have talked it up publicly before they even started work on it.

Re:This shows publicity priorities...

[Anonymous Coward]

The difference is that MS already "own" the desktop. They feel that they don't really need to make much of an effort. To an extent their server OS can piggyback off the desktop machines. They have competition, but can get by with fud a lot of the time, at least in windows shops.

The embedded space is different still face serious challenges in the embedded space, so they actually have to do some work. They actually have to do some work with CE because they don't have a monopoly.

Re:This shows publicity priorities...

[Serapth]

Ah... thats simple to explain. Microsoft has to hype Vista all the way to hell and back, simply because who is their biggest competition? Its not linux... its not Mac OS X, its Windows Xp/2000. They need to convince people to buy the new product and thus keep their purse lined with gold, or their business model fails.

In the embeded market there is no such presure. For the most part, people dont "upgrade" devices like the do computers. Point blank Microsoft needs to convince millions of people with the mindset of "Xp is good enough" that XP isnt good enough, while at the same time convincing them that the alternatives arent any better. Not a place I would like to be personally... but then they did it with 2K users going to XP, so dont be shocked if they do it again.

Re:Windows CE realtime?

[ad0gg]

Um do you know what a realtime operation system is? Glad someone modded you insightful, because your post was truly that.

Several orders of magnitude?

[Tim C]

The Cambridge Advanced Learner's Dictionary defines several as meaning "some... fewer than many" and many as "a large number of".

Given that, I think it's fair to assume that three is not too large a number to be "several"; certainly, about that many is what I generally mean when I say "several". Working on that basis, then, supporting "several orders of magnitude more concurrent processes" means supporting about three orders of magnitude more processes. Three orders of magnitude is 1000 (=10^3). If we up "several" to four or five, we have 10,000 or 100,000.

Perhaps the OS can support that many concurrent processes (although I admit to having my doubts), but I'd be amazed if any hardware it runs on does.