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Windows Mobile was a thing and sideloading was the standard method of installing applications. WinCE also had handwriting recognition built in to every device r

Windows Mobile was a thing and sideloading was the standard method of installing applications. WinCE also had handwriting recognition built in to every device running locally on a 200MHz arm processor with 16 Meg of RAM. Programming was possible on WinCE 6 using .NET 2 or 3.5 as well as C++. It was very performant on a device with 64 Megs of RAM. I guess the problem was that versions after WinCE 7 binaries were not compatible with the previous versions as well as Microsoft working solely through OEM's for releases rather than direct to consumer like Apple or Google's partnerships. There were lots of also rans in the industry such as Palm OS Cobalt (6.0) not being used by anyone and the Amazon Fire. Article from 2007 : > Of course, the discussion included the upcoming Apple iPhone and Mr. Ballmer had a few funny things to say about the device. >> It's sort of a funny question. Would I trade 96% of the market for 4% of the market? (Laughter.) I want to have products that appeal to everybody. Now we'll get a chance to go through this again in phones and music players. There's no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share. No chance. It's a $500 subsidized item. They may make a lot of money. But if you actually take a look at the 1.3 billion phones that get sold, I'd prefer to have our software in 60% or 70% or 80% of them, than I would to have 2% or 3%, which is what Apple might get. https://www.zdnet.com/article/steve-ballmerwindows-mobile-60-vs-apple-iphone-at-3/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/steve-ballmerwindows-mobile-60...

ansible 4y ago
What Ballmer and others missed (or blithely ignored) was the user experience with the iPhone vs other devices back in 2007. I had used various PDAs and mobile phones that had Internet access (of a sort) back then. Generally speaking, they had very tiny screens, a poor or nonexistent touchscreen, grossly underpowered processors with insufficient RAM, a cut-down network stack, and a crappy "browser". The best pre-iPhone experience (that I experienced) was the Moto Q, running Windows CE, which actually had WiFi and a almost tolerable text browser. I won't even talk about WAP and WML and how well all that worked. Compare that to the debut iPhone. Much larger capacitive touchscreen, smooth scrolling, pinch zoom / expand and more. You went to regular desktop websites, and they just worked. Then you see all the effort put into the UI for the address book and other apps, and that all adds up to a user experience quite unlike anything else at the time. Revolutionary. A better experience than even the Windows CE handheld PDAs.
- guessbest 4y ago
  You are 100% correct. They probably all missed this because the executive class all used Blackberry's (Google executives and Microsoft executives) which is another "also ran" in the business. I agree with your point about mobile browsers. No one ever putting much of any effort into supporting fast rendering of html or javascript much less AJAX in the web browser applications and feature phones all used something other than HTML like WAP. The best a user could hope for was a phone with a fast web proxy that performed the rendering like Opera Mini. > Opera Software pioneered with its Small Screen Rendering (SSR) and Medium Screen Rendering (MSR) technology. The Opera web browser is able to reformat regular web pages for optimal fit on small screens and medium-sized (PDA) screens. It was also the first widely available mobile browser to support Ajax and the first mobile browser to pass ACID2 test. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_browser https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_browser Web hosting providers and content creators didn't put much effort in to creating an alternate internet using WAP and WML. It just never materialized as viable.
- dwighttk 4y ago
  >You went to regular desktop websites, and they just worked. Yeah I kinda wish fewer sites gave me the mobile version. I really hate the sites that give me the mobile version after I request the desktop version.
throwaway821909 4y ago
Obviously 2% is pretty far off but it strikes me, given that objective, that this is sort of what happened except that Android usurped Windows Mobile/Phone, and that's what they needed to be watching.

ansible 4y ago

What Ballmer and others missed (or blithely ignored) was the user experience with the iPhone vs other devices back in 2007. I had used various PDAs and mobile phones that had Internet access (of a sort) back then. Generally speaking, they had very tiny screens, a poor or nonexistent touchscreen, grossly underpowered processors with insufficient RAM, a cut-down network stack, and a crappy "browser". The best pre-iPhone experience (that I experienced) was the Moto Q, running Windows CE, which actually had WiFi and a almost tolerable text browser. I won't even talk about WAP and WML and how well all that worked. Compare that to the debut iPhone. Much larger capacitive touchscreen, smooth scrolling, pinch zoom / expand and more. You went to regular desktop websites, and they just worked. Then you see all the effort put into the UI for the address book and other apps, and that all adds up to a user experience quite unlike anything else at the time. Revolutionary. A better experience than even the Windows CE handheld PDAs.

guessbest 4y ago
You are 100% correct. They probably all missed this because the executive class all used Blackberry's (Google executives and Microsoft executives) which is another "also ran" in the business. I agree with your point about mobile browsers. No one ever putting much of any effort into supporting fast rendering of html or javascript much less AJAX in the web browser applications and feature phones all used something other than HTML like WAP. The best a user could hope for was a phone with a fast web proxy that performed the rendering like Opera Mini. > Opera Software pioneered with its Small Screen Rendering (SSR) and Medium Screen Rendering (MSR) technology. The Opera web browser is able to reformat regular web pages for optimal fit on small screens and medium-sized (PDA) screens. It was also the first widely available mobile browser to support Ajax and the first mobile browser to pass ACID2 test. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_browser https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_browser Web hosting providers and content creators didn't put much effort in to creating an alternate internet using WAP and WML. It just never materialized as viable.
dwighttk 4y ago
>You went to regular desktop websites, and they just worked. Yeah I kinda wish fewer sites gave me the mobile version. I really hate the sites that give me the mobile version after I request the desktop version.

throwaway821909 4y ago

Obviously 2% is pretty far off but it strikes me, given that objective, that this is sort of what happened except that Android usurped Windows Mobile/Phone, and that's what they needed to be watching.