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

o_0

[David Gerard]

Why yes, I want a WINDOWS experience. It will involve bending shoes together. Or something.

What on earth? Windows CE is a fabulous example of software that sells in magazines and looks good on feature lists but basically doesn't bloody work. There's a reason the accursed iPhone is so popular, and especially so with anyone who's suffered a WinCE phone and done the wince of WinCE.

Re:Who would want that?

[jmorris42]

> If you want Windows, don't you want "real" Windows...

Exactly. The only reason to suffer with a Microsoft OS is the applications. And on a netbook the big one is the browser. The cut down thing they call IE on WinCE isn't going to be much competition whem stacked up against Firefox on Linux.

Finally!!

[krazytekn0]

2008 could be the year of Windows on the net-top!

Re:Who would want that?

[uassholes]

Do they get the dog that wags his tail when you search? If not, it's not real windows.

Re:WHAT?

[roc97007]

> WHY?

Because Microsoft has nothing that plays in this space, and because of past design decisions, there's no way they can reduce the requirements on their current products to function on these devices.

The Microsoft development model has for many years depended heavily on computers getting faster, disk getting denser, memory getting memoryer. The low-power solid-state PC market came on the scene faster than an OS design cycle -- no time to prepare, nothing to do except concede that you're not a player, or blow the dust off off WinCE and try to make it work. Or convince manufacturers to increase hardware specs until they're like, you know, real laptops. At the expense of the very factors that make them so appealing in the first place -- price, size, weight, heat, battery life, carbon footprint.

To be fair, the hardware requirements for Linux has gotten steeper with time too, but at a much slower place, and for that and other reasons, Linux is much better positioned to compete in this space.

There's a couple ways I see this playing out. The majority of people who actually try the devices with Linux will be pleasantly surprised that the "experience" is not that much different from Winders for what they do, and will appreciate the long battery life, low heat, and low heft.

The people who get WinCE-powered devices with the expectation that they're running Windows, will rapidly run into issues and will blame it on the device. WinCE then becomes almost a disruptive technology, setting people's expectations that the devices are not usable unless they have enough guts to run "real" Windows.

What amazes me is that a vendor would allow this to happen. Putting WinCE on these devices is at best a short-term strategy. When people figure out that their applications won't run, they're going to be upset. Which would you rather have, a user who buys a device with OpenOffice already installed and figures out he can edit his existing documents just fine, or a user who buys a device and then discovers that Office XP won't install? Which one is going to be clogging up the support lines and leaving venomous reviews on Amazon?