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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)."
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
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.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
> 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.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
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?