I had a few Windows CE devices; a Cassiopeia, an HP of some stripe, and an HTC Trinity phone. All of them were extremely capable, and could do a ton of things e

I had a few Windows CE devices; a Cassiopeia, an HP of some stripe, and an HTC Trinity phone. All of them were extremely capable, and could do a ton of things early iPhones could not do. The problem came down to the interface: it was fundamentally still Windows, you had to use a pen for everything, it was slow to respond and a little unpredictable, crashes were commonplace. Fingernail would work, but fingertips would not. Every feature felt half-implemented; there was a browser but barely any pages worked at all, there was bluetooth a2dp headphone support but I only ever had much luck with 96kbit WMA files, and so forth. Ultimately it felt like nobody at MS cared about the phone use case; the devices were better suited for embedded purposes where they live on to this day, in smart barcode scanning devices, transit card readers, etc. MS could easily have had this market if they had been able to convince themselves to care about it and to approach it, say, the way they approached Xbox.