A Windows CE Shell For Netbooks

nerdyH writes "Netbooks such as the Acer Aspire One and Lenovo Ideapad S9 usually ship with SSD storage and the Linux operating system in low-end configurations, or else with hard drives and Windows XP Home at the higher end of the market. Therefore, customers who want a "Windows experience" have no choice but to shell out for extra RAM and disk storage, potentially impacting battery life. Perhaps not for long. Quarta Mobile says its open-source (yes, open source) "MID-Shell for Windows Embedded CE 6.0" provides a Microsoft-based alternative to Linux for low-end devices with SSDs (solid state disks)."

Comments

Re:Who would want that?

[SQLGuru]

My Windows Mobile smart phone runs quite a few programs that you'd desire. It supports .Net (compact framework), so development isn't that different than desktop apps. I'm actually surprised that there aren't MORE Netbooks going the Windows Mobile route vs the XP route. I'm sure the license cost is similar or lower and the hardware footprint is significantly less (my HTC Wizard does fairly well with a 195MHz processor: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTC_Wizard imaging what it could do with a 1GHz Atom). I would also include Andriod in that line of thinking.....once it gets released in some other commercial form.

Layne

Windows Apps

[nurb432]

*Very* few windows apps you mean. Especially now since mainstream embedded windows is on embedded XP now.

Shared source actually

[SpazmodeusG]

It's actually shared source licensed.
http://www.linuxdevices.com/news/NS6932977445.html
"The company has thus far declined to submit the license for approval by the Open Source Initiative as an open-source license."

Re:Extra ram and disk storage my arse

[StrategicIrony]

The Asus ships with a base of 512MB and is upgradeable to 1.5GB out of the box.

Personally, I got the Linux version and upgraded it. Same specs as the EEE 901 but almost $200 less and an extra 512MB of RAM. :-)

Well, not quite

[Weaselmancer]

It does work. Same way a brick flies, but it does work. (Disclaimer: I'm a Windows CE developer by trade)

You're looking at the wrong market. Around CE 3.0 when SmartPhone came out, yeah. That completely sucked. Hardly worked at all.

Windows CE's market share is in industrial devices that need to talk to Windows desktops. And PDAs. That's why it sells. It's an extension of the MS monopoly into the embedded market space. If you need to get data from a widget to a Windows box, you use Windows CE. At least that's the sales pitch, anyways.

Back on topic, CE on a Netbook? Yeah - no thanks. It would be no different than a PDA. Just bulkier.

Re:Who would want that?

[roc97007]

> My Windows Mobile smart phone runs quite a few programs that you'd desire.

My Windows Mobile smartphone crashed and hung more often than my Windows XP desktop, required frequent reboots, and would not reliably make a noise at an incoming call. My expectation of a solid state laptop-like device is to be more reliable than my PC, not less.

For example, Windows Mobile seems to want to keep your applications persistent after you've dismissed them, apparently for faster starting when you go back to them later. This tends to cause the device to run slower and slower over time, requiring the user to periodically go into the task manager and kill apps, or, if they're not a total geek, just punch the reset button and wait through yet another reboot. It's design decisions like this (and many others) which makes Windows Mobile such a miserable experience if you try to use it for anything other than the built-in applets that are fed by Activesync.

Parenthetically, I don't understand the vendors who are trying to paste an iPhone-like interface on top of Mobile 6. Like that's going to fix it. Mind you, having to punch Start... wait for the GUI to catch up... navigate... wait... navigate again... choose application... can get tedious, but it is not, by far, the only issue.

Re:Linux on the low end?

[Iceykitsune]

I find your lack of knowelge... disturbing.

Re:Linux on the hight end -- FAIL!

[budword]

Linux runs 85% of the top 500 computers in the world troll. Maybe it's your skills that are lacking.

Re:Who would want that?

[DarthJohn]

I've had an HTC Titan for a few months now and haven't been able to find much useful software.

Most of what I find are sites full of crap shareware. I don't want to pay $30 for a text editor thank you very much. I'd love to have a port of vim or emacs though.

I've managed to find bits and pieces of free software here and there. PuTTY works really well. I'd really like to find a good media player. I came across a project to port mplayer, but it didn't look very far along.

Also, what do you use for a dev environment? Is VS2k5/2k8 + the Windows Mobile SDK the only option?

Give Slackware A Shot

[Gazzonyx]

Try Slackware, I've yet to see a box that can't run Slack. I have had AHCI issues with the NForce4 chipset, though and I had to hang around kernel 2.6.21.5 (only because fixing it meaning breaking iSCSI in the kernel - which was a deal breaker for my NAS box). Use the 2.6 huge kernel on install, it's got the kitchen sink and a bag of chips.

Then make sure to get your drivers right from NVidia (BTW, isn't the 9800GT one of the 'plagued' NVidia cards? I'd keep that thing cool if I were you) and you should be set. Head over to kernel.org and compile a bleeding edge kernel for your mobo, too. If you really like gnome, you'll be wanting to look in to dropline or freerock, as Slackware only ships with KDE, flux, xfce.

12.0 is very stable, 11.0 is generally good, and 10.2 is like a rock. If nothing else works, 10.2 with generic kernel modules will run on anything.

Re:Who would want that?

[miknix]

(my HTC Wizard does fairly well with a 195MHz processor: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTC_Wizard [wikipedia.org] imaging what it could do with a 1GHz Atom).

Really? I also have a HTC wizard, and the embedded windows mobile really sucks.
Mobile IE is totally useless, the wifi networks interface is very incomplete and sucks.
Active sync is totally resource intensive.
There is little you can do with mobile Office.
In all the windows mobile default applications, only the mail client does the job.
Besides useless applications, the windows mobile kernel is always crashing.
Looking to non-default applications, Mobile Opera its very cool but it totally nukes the device memory after a while.
This is totally unacceptable in a device with WIFI/GPRS/EDGE/IRDA/BT/USB.

But anyway, Linux on the HTC Wizard (http://linwizard.sourceforge.net), which I'm one of the project admins/developers, does a much better job. You can have GPE
http://familiar.handhelds.org/releases/v0.8.2/install/dl-gpe.png
qtopia
http://wiki.openmoko.org/images/e/ea/Qtopia002.png
or even the openmoko
http://www.palminfocenter.com/images/palm-tx-openmoko-2.jpg
running on it.

The wifi and bluetooth drivers are still missing and the GSM driver is incomplete. With some programming love on them, the wizard would be a much better device.

Re:Linux on the low end?

[m50d]

Gentoo - it's that little bit more up to date that makes all the difference. Working beautifully on my P45 motherboard right here.

Re:Who would want that?

[Cyberax]

Windows CE has a lot of stupid limitations. For example, it is limited only to 32 processes and total address space is limited to something like 64Mb (not sure about that).

It's incredibly easy to hit these limits on modern mobile phones. And don't even think about netbooks with fast ATOM CPUs and lots of RAM.

Re:Good

[TheRaven64]

The instruction decoder is a big power drain (you can't turn it off, because it's always in use). This is around 10% of the core of an Atom, while on ARM chips it's a tiny proportion. Modern x86 chips need to do a lot of tricks to make up for the poor architecture. Since they have so few registers, they keep the top few cache locations in hidden registers, so they need to add a bit more logic to handle turning push and pop instructions into register read and writes, then back in to memory accesses when the stack pointer register changes.

A big chunk of an x86 chip is a complex branch predictor. ARM code has very few conditional branches compared to other architectures since all instructions are predicated and in a superscalar implementation all are executed and only the ones where the predicate was matched are committed back to memory. This design also gives you much denser instruction cache usage, and so ARM chips can get away with smaller caches than x86 chips (the one advantage x86 has over most other RISC architectures).

220mW sounds impressive, until you remember that it takes a supporting chip which consumers an order of magnitude or so more power, while when TI or Samsung claims 250mW for their ARM cores it's including the memory controller, GPU, DSP, and peripheral controllers. Some are including around 128MB of RAM and a similar amount of flash in this figure too.

Re:Limits

[TheRaven64]

You are assuming the buying public has some understanding of computers. In general, there are three sets of customers:

1. People who actually know what they want (which might, in theory at least, be Windows).
2. People who want 'it to run Microsoft' because that's what they've heard of.
3. People who just want 'a computer.'

The third set are easy - you can sell them whatever they can afford, as long as it looks easy to use. The first set are easy too - you either have the product they want, or you don't. They're a fairly small set, so there's no point devoting resources to them. The middle set, however, are quite large. You can't sell them a small system running XP, because they can see how slow it is. You can't sell them one running Linux because it isn't Microsoft. You can, however, sell them a Wince system, because it says 'Microsoft Windows' on the box in big letters, and looks like Windows. They won't discover that it's not sensible until it's too late to return it.