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Windows CE's final day
- ClassyJacket 3y agoMelbourne's public transport ticket scanning machines are running on Windows CE... hope (but doubt) they have a plan. https://wongm.com/2012/06/myki-runs-on-top-of-windows-ce/ https://wongm.com/2012/06/myki-runs-on-top-of-windows-ce/
- taspeotis 3y agoTrialling its replacement in 2024 https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2023/may/15/we-will-now-reach-the-21st-century-victoria-to-overhaul-myki-system-with-new-ticket-operator https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2023/may/15/we-wi...
- LeoPanthera 3y agoIf they're not connected to the internet, does it matter?
- mschuster91 3y agoYou still need someone to write and maintain the apps running on these devices, and that's getting really hard.
- cogman10 3y agoSeems like a ticketing system would need some connectivity no?
- Nextgrid 3y agoDoesn't have to be internet-accessible though. Even if they need to interact with the "open" internet, they can do so through a gateway - there are many industrial-grade, DIN-form-factor VPN routers that will take an internet feed and some VPN credentials and spit out a "clean" VPN'd port so your vulnerable thing can stay isolated from the open internet.
- taspeotis 3y agoThese days yes but in the olden days no. Brisbane City Council used to sell tickets with a magnetic strip that would be read and written with how many trips you have can take on the ticket.
- oldbbsnickname 3y agoSymbol barcode scanner PDAs used to run Windows CE also. IIRC, there was a cheaper PDA-like version with a laser scanner usable instead of the bulky industrial pistol-grip ones. I'm sure UPS or FedEx still use WinCE-based devices to do their job. I'm curious. Does anyone know what model / OS Amazon fulfillment centers use for their field force handheld devices?
- thriftwy 3y agoUsed to program for the thing. Even ported POWDER roguelike to it in my spare time.
- WarOnPrivacy 3y agoCE's cousin, WinMo was my phone favorite. WinMo6 was the right direction for software to go; it was fairly inviting to developers and a diverse, healthy ecosystem had sprung up around it. But MS wanted Apple's level of control more than anything - certainly more than they wanted success. They poisoned their loyal userbase with Phone 7 and every good (mobile) thing they had died in that grave.
- thriftwy 3y agoThey also did very un-Microsofty thing where the software will need to be rewritten and rebuilt for every new version (Windows CE -> Windows 7 -> Windows 8). They ditched backwards compatibility. Perhaps they expected they will see so much adoption that the existing ecosystem will be dwarfed. Guess who got dwarfed for good.
- dashundchen 3y agoMoving to the closed app store ecosystem, and breaking app compatibility twice with the move from 6 -> 7 -> 8 definitely killed all developer momentum for their platform. But the Metro UI on Window Phone 7 and the Zune HD was handsdown the best and smoothest smartphone UI I've used yet. It's a shame it was killed with the Windows 8 blunder. The Nokia Lumia phones had some amazing hardware for the era too. Head to head with Apple and leagues better than the chintzy Android phones of the era. Neither Apple nor Google have come close to replicating something as intuitive.
- WarOnPrivacy 3y ago>the Metro UI on Window Phone 7 and the Zune HD was handsdown the best and smoothest smartphone UI I've used yet. In the face of no cut/copy/paste, no multitasking, no sdcard support and only MS store apps allowed - you could have made do with wallpaper of the Phone7 GUI for all the functionality you got out of it. Zune on the other hand was absolutely as good as you say. Maybe the mistake was trying to make that perfect Zune OS work on a smartphone.
- Sylamore 3y agoI really was happy with my Nokia 1020 and Dell Venue phones. I ended up going back to Android after the death of Windows Phone till I got frustrated with the lack of support of even former flagship devices and switched to Apple. I've gotten used to Apple, but I really still miss how intuitive and customizable Windows Phone was.
- charles_f 3y agoNote: it will still work, it's just not supported anymore. It's sad that such discontinuations don't come with an open-sourcing to allow community based support if need be.
- ska 3y ago>It's sad that ... It's really hard to see how that would work. Most non trivial systems unwrapping the licensing etc. alone would be a huge job, let along disentangling from codebase used for other things, etc.
- AshamedCaptain 3y agoA lot of Windows CE licensees had access to quite a lot of the source code, or at least most of the parts that would be interesting for "maintanenace" anyway. Even though in paper Windows CE's and Android/Linux licensing could not be more different, they are in practice more similar than one would think. You'd get the source, you'd make your modifications, and you'd (not be allowed to|get away with) not redistribute the source.
- garaetjjte 3y agoWindows CE Platform Builder did come with large part of sources, including entire kernel. Notable omissions were GWES (windowing subsystem) and filesystem drivers.
- g-b-r 3y agoI remember being able to find documentation for some Windows aspects only in Windows CE stuff, I guess that's the reason!!!
- cogman10 3y agoIs cross licensing really a big issue with closed source software? At least where I work, my software is basically 100% backed by open-source software. If the company wanted to, some of our larger and more complex systems would be trivial to open source as the only proprietary software they use is our own. For an OS, I could see there being issues around drivers. However, it seems like the actual core of the OS would be pretty trivial to open source.
- yakk0 3y agoI read almost all of the Lord of the Rings trilogy on a Windows Mobile phone in the 2000s. They were a great tool for the time, and I much preferred them to the Blackberrys that were more popular with many of my coworkers.
- delta_p_delta_x 3y agoI remember fiddling with my dad's Pocket PC in the early 2000s. My little mind was blown when I saw that tiny screen with a Start menu.
- onemoresoop 3y agoIt was quite something at the time, I remember it too and this was way before the era of smartphones, touch screens and all that. I remember messing with a palm pilot in the late 90s and that too felt like magic.
- andrepd 3y agoI read the entire harry potter series on a .jar application on a 240x320 pixel mobile phone!
- tiltowait 3y agoMy first eBook was Dracula on a Compaq iPAQ 3630. At the time, it blew my mind both that I could read a full book on it, and that the book was free! It occurs to me that, though I've read Dracula a few times, to this day I've never done so in a "normal" manner. Right now we're nearing the end of "Dracula Daily", so the tradition continues.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- adapiz 3y agoI also had a Windows Mobile 6 based pre-smartphone. Very Windows XP'ish especially regarding the permissions. The new smartphones with their framework and managed access were a huge thing. Windows UAC allowed to control administrator privileges but the framework allowed to prevent access to APIs like the camera. A huge win for security and privacy! I've watched movies and series in 320x240 on my 1.4 inch mp3 player before I got my 2.4 inch pocket pc. Wild times but I loved how the operating system and apps were designed to display more information than modern apps. Everything was so tiny but it was what I wanted.
- baz00 3y agoI wrote a mobile POD system for CE years ago which was still used recently here in the UK. It got replaced with android phones a couple of years ago. RIP. I still like the platform if I'm honest.
- altairprime 3y agoMy 2013 car had a Windows CE head unit, which was absolute crap for seven years of usage, so I’m glad to see it finally going away.
- buggeryorkshire 3y agoYeah, had a car once with a Windows sticker near the gear stick once, funnily enough the head unit was a bag of shit. They're still around though - seen plenty of scanners in supermarkets in the UK (for the self checkout thing) that run it. God no.
- thrownawaysz 3y agoI live in Hungary and I have fiber and IPTV from Deutsche Telekom. You can choose between 2 set top boxes, an older model with Windows CE and the newer one with Android. The technician said they much more problems with Android. The system itself has more features but WinCE is just more robust. Anecdotal story I know but at least it's still in use in some areas of the world.
- kaetemi 3y agoMy Android TV box doesn't even let me pick a keyboard layout. Useless crap. Most apps barely have functioning navigation with a remote. Play a game of guess which button is the highlighted one.
- tacoman 3y agoThe Mediaroom IPTV platform which DT is probably using has millions of deployed STBs still running WinCE 5.0.
- adapiz 3y agoInteresting, afaik Deutsche Telekom had to replace all their media receivers because they decided to stop licensing Windows CE.
- kristopolous 3y agoyou could arguably backdate it if you want to fuzz things. Microsoft had a WinPad and Windows for Pen Computing product that started in 1992. There was also the hardware side, the Pulsar project. It wasn't Pegasus (CE), sure, but it was the same vying for a palmtop market that they eventually gave up on. Here's a decent article that gets most things right https://tedium.co/2021/02/10/windows-ce-history/ https://tedium.co/2021/02/10/windows-ce-history/ You can get winpad in some early chicago builds (windows 95) ... it's been extracted and put on archive.org https://archive.org/details/winpad275 https://archive.org/details/winpad275 There were also actual products such as the Samsung PenMaster that were released with Pen Windows ... here's a video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YkJxWtTPyb0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YkJxWtTPyb0 It's wild how early they were in the race, how long the stayed in, how much money they tossed at it and how they still failed so phenomenally
- wnoise 3y agoWindows Common Era? Is that really that much better than Windows Anno Domini? (When did they stop naming releases after years?)
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- fleeno 3y agoWindows CE in the late-palmtop days was pretty neat. I did a lot with my HP Joranda!
- more_corn 3y agoWin CE <Wince>
- cryptoz 3y agoWindows CEMENT https://archive.org/details/wincement https://archive.org/details/wincement
- jonathaneunice 3y agoNo love lost for Windows CE per se, but the HP Jornada handheld PC that ran it was a great little note taking computer and PDA for its era (2 decades ago). Genuine all-day battery life when essentially no classic laptop could even come close.
- pdntspa 3y agoWindows CE was a bit of a white whale for me... something that I kept hearing about and wanted to see and experience, but I could never find anything actually running it.
- wahnfrieden 3y agoDreamcast
- pdntspa 3y agoYeah but you couldn't ever open it to a desktop with Explorer and all that
- eska 3y agoOnly a tiny minority of games used windows ce
- wahnfrieden 3y agoThe web browser. Didn't it ship with the console, so every console had it
- TheSkyHasEyes 3y agoI walked past a third party ATM last week. It was showing a Windows CE error.
- pdntspa 3y agoIt amazes me how many ATMs run Windows (CE or XP), it seems like Linux would be a no-brainer for them Now that I think about it I do recall encountering a POS system running CE. But I never got to interact with it.
- Mountain_Skies 3y agoOS/2 seemed to have filled much of the 'not Windows' market for ATMs.
- causality0 3y agoThe H/PC market was, in my opinion, doomed in part by refusals of manufacturers to innovate hardware, in particular the displays. At the end makers were shipping devices with 400mhz processors and built in wifi and Bluetooth but they still featured the same dogshit 640x240 DSTN screens.
- WarOnPrivacy 3y agoI think the price of devices worked hard against it. A lot of CE fans would only ever have 2nd-hand CE hardware - because they couldn't afford used car prices for the new stuff.
- buggeryorkshire 3y agoThe first Windows Mobile phones (the XDA etc) were doomed from the start as they didn't haave hardware acceleration, so the screen redraw was dogshit.I loved the idea, but the execution was appalling.
- ge96 3y agoWhile Librettos ran on 95, I got a couple to play around with. There's that coolness to it, the design/tiny body but then you realize it's not useful now... too small to type on, can barely run anything other than what it has already. Make sense but yeah. I have seen CE in similar style devices it's neat history.
- moron4hire 3y agoThe really great thing about Windows CE was that it was largely "just" Windows. Most of the API bits one would care about were all there. The development tools were all the same tools we were already using to write desktop software. And unlike modern mobile OSes that look at you sideways for even running your own code on your own device, there weren't any hoops to jump through to deploy your apps to anyone. It made for a nearly zero learning curve in terms of transitioning from desktop to mobile. I had written several programs in C# that leveraged code I had collected I've years of web and desktop development. Nowadays, the closest thing is web apps. In some ways it's better because the devices are so much more capable than they were back then. In others, it's worse because you're not really writing to one platform, you're writing to at least 6 (Chrome/Firefox/Safari cross Desktop/Mobile).
- helf 3y ago[dead]
- oldbbsnickname 3y agoPocket PC was a variant of Windows CE. HP iPAQ PDAs ran it along with many other Palm PDA-alikes. It was used in an industrial GPS system controller I worked on because it presented a convenient, stable UI. The Motorola MPx200 ran Windows Mobile (Windows CE) which replaced Pocket PC. EMC Clariion CX700 SANs already migrated FLARE to Windows XP Embedded in the early 00's. I recall there was a way to access the UI head of Clariion SANs over the control network (not FC) using some magic commands. Unsure if XPe had some CE crossover.
- nunez 3y agoI bought an MPx200 from eBay when I was a freshman in college (2005). I remember _running_ after a FedEx truck after they missed our house hoping that they'd still have it. They, fortunately, did. I was so happy. That phone was buggy as shit, but was so badass. It had real speakers (for listening to MP3s with), Internet Explorer (for surfing the WAP internet...slowly) and Windows Phone 2003 (which is based on CE). Battery life was awful. I didn't care. Loved every minute of it until I bricked it trying to flash a hacked WP ROM. Thanks for great memories, Windows CE. I'll now go back to the modern Internet with ads and accidental subscriptions on every corner!