I disagree with you on a number of your points The symbol/intermec handhelds are expensive, terribly unreliable, slow, require a lot of maintenance and are ter

I disagree with you on a number of your points The symbol/intermec handhelds are expensive, terribly unreliable, slow, require a lot of maintenance and are terribly fiddly especially for people with gloves on (as you'd expect in the freezer department in Morrisons). I had different experience with industrial scanning equipment from reliable manufacturers. I found them to be reliable. They could be dropped and still function and they had a much wider functional temperature range. If the operator is wearing gloves I would expect that the environment is outside the functional temperature range of a tablet. As for the software development side of things, you're pretty much limited to a subset of win32 that isn't very pleasant to use or a mobile CLR which is so incredibly slow it makes you want to hang yourselves. Then there's the incredible deathly pain of deploying the code to all those devices. There were many devices that supported OS's other than Windows CE as well as Windows CE device that didn't require the CLR for applications. There were also thin client models where the code executed on the server which made deployment much simpler. It took us three years to deliver a point of delivery system with the same staffing level with much smaller scope which was simply signing for stuff and listing a delivery schedule. The integration was done by a third party - we just passed messages back and forth. You had a remarkably tolerant customer. They did a damn good job at TW on this one if you ask me. I disagree.