Windows CE reaches end of life, if not end of sales
- Reference: 1698666314
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2023/10/30/windows_ce_reaches_eol/
- Source link:
Windows CE – and there's never been an official explanation of what the [1]WinCE-inducing name stood for – debuted in November 1996, just a few months after Windows NT 4, the [2]first version of NT with the Explorer desktop from Windows 95.
Earlier this month, as [3]reported by HPC Factor, the last ever version, CE 8, [4]branded Compact Embedded 2013, reached its end of support. In 2011, Microsoft said it would be replaced by a [5]unified platform based on Windows 8 , but we know how well that went down. By 2020, the official migration path was set – to a [6]container on top of Win10 IoT .
[7]
Its fortunes have always fluctuated. In 1999, we asked [8]does MS care about WinCE? By 2003, we reported that eTForecasts said it [9]would outship PCs . Indirectly, the researchers were right – smartphones did end up massively outselling PCs. They just weren't Microsoft ones.
Teeny-tiny laptops
The early 1990s was a boom time for pocket-sized computers, with multiple brands and families getting in on the game. Windows CE's genesis lay in chasing one style of device, but then switched track to pursue another fast-growing niche.
The Reg covered one type of device when we looked at [10]ten ancestors of the netbook a decade ago. Very early iterations such as the [11]DIP/Atari Portfolio were very constrained, but in 1991, HP's calculator division offered the HP 95LX, a pocket-sized DOS PC with Lotus 1-2-3. Over on this side of the pond, [12]Psion's Series 3 came along some five months later with a (keyboard-operated) GUI and multitasking.
[13]
[14]
Both were based on NEC's Intel-compatible low-power CPUs – the 95LX on the V20, with an 8-bit data bus like the 8088, and the Series 3 on the V30 with an 8086-style 16-bit bus.
It took a few years for Windows 95 to bring its user interface game up to speed, and back then you couldn't fit the 386-class CPU and hard disk that 95 required into a pocket-sized device that would run on two AA batteries.
[15]
Windows Pegasus became Windows CE 1.0
Enter stage left, Windows CE 1.0. A whole new OS for various low-power RISC CPUs, including MIPS and Hitachi SuperH. The first Windows CE devices launched in 1996 aimed at the palmtop PC segment: Casio's [16]Cassiopeia A-10 and the [17]NEC MobilePro 200 .
The rise of the [18]'scribble thing'
In the meantime, though, the handheld market had been evolving in a different direction. First came [19]the Apple Newton in 1993 , which was an amazing design and showed the potential of a handheld "personal digital assistant" – without actually being a very good one itself ( The Reg FOSS desk owns two of the things). Although Apple fixed this in NewtonOS 2, the original Newtons could only read cursive, not print, and they had to learn their owner's handwriting – making it almost impossible to effectively try a friend's, or a shop demo unit.
[20]
Apple Newton MessagePad
That led to a third-party replacement text-entry system for the Newton, [21]Palm's Graffiti , which ended up evolving into a separate device, the Palm Pilot 1000. This launched in 1996, just slightly before WinCE Palm PCs came to market. Famously originally [22]a wooden mockup , they're described and pictured in our Newton story above. The Palm Pilot 1000 was deliberately much smaller, simpler, and cheaper than the Newton, and was designed to be tethered to a PC or Mac, from which it let you take your address book and diary with you. These simple little monochrome gadgets were a big hit, with millions of units sold.
[23]When product names go bad: Microsoft's Raymond Chen on the cringe behind WinCE
[24]Just can't let go of those Windows CE apps? Microsoft has a container for that
[25]MS has yet another crack at handheld PCs
[26]Does MS care about WinCE, or is the browser the platform?
That sort of success attracted Microsoft's interest, and by 2000 led to what we described as [27]Microsoft having yet another crack at handheld PCs – keyboardless palmtops, rather than tiny laptop-style devices, and marketed at "down-the-line MS-supporting systems managers, determined to stamp out Palm Pilots in the name of 'security'."
[28]
A Start Menu on your palmtop? Why not?
These did rather better, and led to one of the many rebrands of the OS, as it became [29]Pocket PC 2002 , already found on some [30]very early smartphones . Although these were still based on Windows CE, Microsoft was very keen to make it clear that [31]Pocket PC isn't WinCE … although the same OS was underneath.
Gonna get myself connected
Until the iPhone came along, Microsoft smartphones continued to battle PalmOS-based ones, neither much troubling the wider consumer world. In 2005, we subtitled our [32]review of Dell's Axim x50v "the Perfect PDA?" – instantly invoking Betteridge's Law of Headlines: Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word 'no.' Palm devices, as that review noted, remained more responsive, but
Windows CE Pocket PC ones boasted color screens, richer multimedia, and slots for more storage or other gadgetry.
[33]
Dell Axim X50 Pocket PC
After the iPhone, the smartphone market soon became an A/B choice between iOS or Android. The final major release of a Windows CE-based OS was [34]Windows Phone 7 in 2010 . Although "Tango" made it to [35]version 7.8 , that was the end of the line. The new [36]Windows Phone 8 was a whole new OS, based on the NT kernel of Windows 8, and very few Windows Phone 7 devices could be upgraded.
Microsoft's [37]off-again then [38]on-again purchase of Nokia's phone division made little difference: Windows Phone was left in a fairly distant third place as the budget option. When this vulture moved to Central Europe in 2014, we soon noticed that while smartphones in general remained rare, most of those we saw were Windows devices. In the West, they also [39]mopped up former BlackBerry users , but a couple of years later we [40]called Windows Phone's market share a rounding error .
[41]
The misplaced branding exercise of calling two unrelated OSes "Windows Phone," and selling inexpensive but decently-specced CE-based WP7 devices that couldn't be upgraded to the NT-based WP8, sealed CE's fate. The UI was good, and from personal experience, owners liked it and liked the devices.
The non-Phone version trundled on for a while, used in point-of-sale devices and other embedded hardware, but now its journey is over. Microsoft being the company it is, although there will be no more updates, you can [42]still buy it :
While Windows CE 2013 will reach end of extended support in late 2023, Microsoft will allow license sales to continue for Windows Embedded Compact 2013 until 2028. And of course, Windows CE devices can continue to be used indefinitely. ®
Get our [43]Tech Resources
[1] https://www.theregister.com/2021/12/15/chen_wince/
[2] https://www.theregister.com/2013/08/20/nt_at_20/?page=2
[3] https://www.hpcfactor.com/news/871/end-of-an-era-windows-ces-final-day
[4] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/previous-versions/windows/embedded/gg154234(v=winembedded.80)
[5] https://www.theregister.com/2011/07/16/microsoft_one_big_windows/
[6] https://www.theregister.com/2020/08/12/windows_ce_4ever/
[7] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/oses&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=2&c=2ZT-hPptfU9Va8YCrY0Wd9AAAAQQ&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D2%26raptor%3Dcondor%26pos%3Dtop%26test%3D0
[8] https://www.theregister.com/1999/12/10/does_ms_care_about_wince/
[9] https://www.theregister.com/2003/04/08/windows_ce_to_outship_pcs/
[10] https://www.theregister.com/2013/04/29/feature_ten_netbook_ancestors/
[11] https://www.theregister.com/2007/06/07/forgotten_tech_atari_portfolio/
[12] https://www.theregister.com/2014/03/07/bugger_my_jetpack_wheres_my_21stcentury_psion/?page=2
[13] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/oses&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44ZT-hPptfU9Va8YCrY0Wd9AAAAQQ&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[14] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/oses&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33ZT-hPptfU9Va8YCrY0Wd9AAAAQQ&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[15] https://regmedia.co.uk/2017/01/27/peg1.gif
[16] https://www.tech-insider.org/mobile/research/1997/0121-d.html
[17] http://www.nec.co.jp/press/en/9611/1801.html
[18] https://www.theregister.com/2014/02/12/ten_apple_greatest_device_fails/
[19] https://www.theregister.com/Print/2013/09/17/20_years_of_the_apple_newton/
[20] https://regmedia.co.uk/2007/06/29/messagepad_1.jpg
[21] https://www.theregister.com/2003/01/14/palm_draws_up_plans/
[22] https://www.theregister.com/2011/01/21/computer_history_museum_revolution/
[23] https://www.theregister.com/2021/12/15/chen_wince/
[24] https://www.theregister.com/2020/08/12/windows_ce_4ever/
[25] https://www.theregister.com/2000/09/07/ms_has_yet_another_crack/
[26] https://www.theregister.com/1999/12/10/does_ms_care_about_wince/
[27] https://www.theregister.com/2000/09/07/ms_has_yet_another_crack/
[28] https://regmedia.co.uk/2017/01/27/003-start-menu-1.gif
[29] https://www.theregister.com/2001/10/04/samsung_signs_for_pocketpc/
[30] https://www.theregister.com/2001/10/04/bt_cellnet_to_unwrap_pocketpc/
[31] https://www.theregister.com/2003/04/16/why_pocket_pc_isnt_wince/
[32] https://www.theregister.com/2005/01/17/review_dell_axim_x50v/
[33] https://regmedia.co.uk/2004/10/13/dell_x50.jpg
[34] https://www.theregister.com/2010/10/11/windows_phone7_launch/
[35] https://www.theregister.com/2012/11/28/phone7_upgrade_ui/
[36] https://www.theregister.com/2012/11/02/win8phone_capsule_summary/
[37] https://www.theregister.com/2013/06/20/microsoft_nokia_merger_no_go/
[38] https://www.theregister.com/2013/09/03/microsoft_buys_nokia/
[39] https://www.theregister.com/2015/06/22/q1_smartphones_uk/
[40] https://www.theregister.com/2017/04/19/microsoft_windows_phone_insignificant/
[41] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/oses&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44ZT-hPptfU9Va8YCrY0Wd9AAAAQQ&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[42] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/iot/windows_ce/windows-ce-migration-faq
[43] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
Re: What's in a name?
I thought it was caveat emptor
Re: What's in a name?
Windows CE was ..... Windows Crap Edition !!!!
:)
Re: What's in a name?
No no no, you've got it all wrong.
It's just "wince". A perfectly good English word that accurately describes using it.
Re: What's in a name?
I thought CE was for Crash Enabled
Typical Microsoft
I had a Compaq device. It was awful. Haing to press the little 'start' button with a stylus to get anything done was just abysmal. I also had a windows-CE based non-touch phone with just a regular phone keypad. It had the advantage that it could do email. At the risk of sounding repetitive, it was abysmal.
I bought those devices because they were the only devices on the market that could do what I needed at the time, but as is usual with Microsoft, these were poorly executed and unreliable.
I did see a windows-8 based phone a customer of mine had in 2010 or so, and it looked quite clever and he liked it, so that sort of bucked the trend. But it was too little, too late.
Re: Typical Microsoft
OTOH, and in a marked departure from my usual feelings towards anything Microsoft, I loved my Windows based phones. Partly because the learning curve was pretty much non-existent (they behaved more or less just like the Windows PCs I was using at home and work), and partly because they pretty much gave you the ability to use your hardware how you saw fit rather than daring to presume on your behalf how you ought to be using it.
Granted, I'm probably an atypical smartphone user in that I actually do want to be able to use them as pocket computers, so I was more than willing to put up with the desktop-centric UI and all the problems that came with trying to use it on a small screen, because the trade-off was that my phones of the day actually DID behave like pocket computers - most notably the HTC Universal, which was genuinely as useful to me back then as a laptop is to me today.
Re: Typical Microsoft
Yeah I know what you mean. At the time, it was very much the case of "use the thing as a computer" because everything was so new. Syncing outlook over-the-air for erample. And I'd come from the Psion/palm generation. Practically nobody send/received email from their phones let alone used it as a satnav.
Re: Typical Microsoft
I had an HTC6500* which was absolutely brilliant, there was very little comparable at the time. I followed it up with a Nokia Lumia 1120 for the superb (by the standards of the day) camera. Sadly the app infrastructure ultimately killed them for me.
*I got it free thanks to a very good Orange customer services agent, "You're thinking of leaving us, and don't want to pay anything for a new phone, do you?" £500+ worth of phone with no upfront payment on a relatively low monthly contract.
Re: Typical Microsoft
[Author here]
> I had an HTC6500* which was absolutely brilliant
Never heard of that one, and neither had Google.
After some searching I found this...
https://www.gsmarena.com/htc_p6500-2129.php
That what you meant?
Re: Typical Microsoft
[Author here]
> the HTC Universal, which was genuinely as useful to me back then as a laptop is to me today.
Yup, I had one, with a very fat extended battery on the back. Despite WinCE, and a too-small keyboard with an awful layout and horrible keys designed _not_ to be tactile enough to distinguish from one another (smooth bumps sculpted to blend into one another), it was a superb little device.
Sadly mine -- a borrowed one, at that -- was stolen.
Windows CE still alive but quite unwell
I encountered it during a hospital stay recently; both me and it were quite unwell. Each bed in the NHS ward had a small TV on an extending arm. It was pretty crap really with only a handful of TV channels and the rest were daily subscription based. It kept crashing. During its long tortuous boot sequence I noticed it was based on Windows CE. According to the technician who came around to fix it, it was in end of life care.
Palm Pilot
I had one of those and it was excellent for customer facing techies. That you could swap business cards virtually using the infrared port was mind blowing. I wondered if this was the end of the business card, but no. Maybe Apple’s new-fangled feature to do the same thing by bashing two phones together will finally take us away, but I doubt it.
Re: Palm Pilot
[Author here]
> That you could swap business cards virtually using the infrared port was mind blowing.
Indeed. Because most owners didn't know how.
I watched Palm-toting mates scribbling away frantically and just zapped them my card from my Psion 5mx.
Unfailingly blew their minds.
Sadly, file transfer didn't work. There was a later add-on but too little too late.
I have a few customer who use smart barcode readers with that. They have a significant plus for me: they run .NET Compact. That means my knowledge of WinForms from desktop development translates directly, and I can test almost everything by simply executing on the desktop, without having to faff around with devkits and emulators and remote connections and whatnot. I can even use a lot of desktop code from other projects, maybe with a few pragma statements.
Setup and administration is horrible, which means that pretty much the only use case is when they run exactly one bespoke application that is made to execute at startup, never shut down, and stick to foreground.
But that significant plus is really significant. I just wish MS kept supporting .NET Compact development in recent VS versions. The devices that run this sort of thing can easily last decades, and so does software support. Currently, I have to keep a copy of VS 2005 around just for that.
At my previous job, I supported a bunch of barcode scanners that ran WinCE. I also did .NET development for them. As you said, it was great being able to write in .NET, and run it on the scanners in the warehouse.
I wrote several custom apps for our warehouse crew. We had Wi-Fi running on the scanners, and they talked to a SQL database on one of the servers.
At one point we bought a new Android based scanner to test, but incorporating it into a very MS-centeric infrastructure was not going to be easy.
WinCE is still kicking around
In a local supermarket are little price gizmos. Scan a product and it'll tell you how much it costs.
Once in a while it is poorly and the application dies, leaving a rather oversized Start button on the screen. Which is an invitation for people like me to prod it...and get Solitaire running.
Sega Dreamcast
Worth mentioning that the Sega Dreamcast used a (sort of) version of Windows CE.
It didn't really do much. I think really some games were "compatible" with Windows CE, in so far that the game contained the CE OS. There was then some sort of abstraction layer involved, meaning the developers could opt to use CE instead of coding to bare metal. But the Dreamcast itself didn't have CE installed on it.
Quite quite bizarre really when you think about it.
I had an iPaq and a something else..
Who's name escapes me. It had 5 keys to type with each combination giving a different letter. I liked it. I even remember you could install SQL server on your iPaq and now look at the size of it.
Re: I had an iPaq and a something else..
The Microwriter Agenda was the 5-key one. The small software house I worked for became agents for them but unfortunately they were just too quirky and the displays weren't really big enough given the overall size. I don't think we ever actually sold any but I used mine for a couple of years.
Re: I had an iPaq and a something else..
Thank you, thank you, thank you. Been driving me nuts since I posted trying to remember what it was called.
https://www.microsoft.com/buxtoncollection/detail.aspx?id=4
Still more of MS's blatantly unhelpful mix-and-match branding
Windows CE is yet another example that combines two of the most characteristic (and irritating) aspects of MS marketing over the past three decades. Either they confusingly rebrand the same product or service under several different names:
> One of the many rebrands of [ Windows CE ], as it became Pocket PC 2002 [and although] still based on Windows CE, Microsoft was very keen to make it clear that Pocket PC isn't WinCE … although the same OS was underneath. [..] The final major release of a Windows CE-based OS was Windows Phone 7 in 2010
Or- equally confusingly- they'll reuse the same or very similar names for two or more completely different products:
> Windows Phone 8 was a whole new OS, based on the NT kernel of Windows 8 [..] misplaced branding exercise of calling two unrelated OSes "Windows Phone,"
And then there was MS's [1]PlaysForSure certification for music from the MSN store that, er, didn't play for sure- or at all- on the Zune music player, even though both formats were "Certified for Windows Vista".
MS's worthlessly-confused branding in a nutshell.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_PlaysForSure
Re: Still more of MS's blatantly unhelpful mix-and-match branding
They all do it, but Microsoft Excels (if you'll pardon the pun) at it.
Look at Microsoft Outlook - there are three versions (Outlook for the web, Outlook you pay for and Outlook previously known as Windows Mail). Then there's your account at Microsoft. If you have a personal account, it's called a Microsoft Login, if it's a work account (which can be the same email address), it's a Microsoft Work or School login. I think.
And there's Teams - two similar-looking icons. One is called Teams, but the other is cunningly called Teams instead. One for work, one for personal again.
And the raft of expensive equipment that it's installed on? Yeah, that's not going anywhere. Support is a relative term.
Too much, too young...
WinCE was an incredibly ambitious project which succeeded, and in doing so sealed its own death warrant.
It succeeded in providing a fairly portable, robust OS which carried with it a significant subset of Win32 and later also .NET APIs that made development for it much easier than many competing platforms.
Unfortunately if you want three quarters of a PC OS, you need three quarters of a PC to run it on. They somehow managed to shrink that to run on a mere two thirds of a PC, but it was a tight fit and more expensive than their competitors.
It can't be denied that Toshiba, Dell, HTC and others made some very nice Windows CE devices. But they were also more expensive than their competitors for most purposes. And I do wonder if they ever made much money on those devices...
By comparison the Palm platform was profitable enough within 3Com that they felt it worth spinning off as its own company, and they did fairly well for a number of years.
Yes, they had a slower CPU and less RAM. Yes, they lacked memory protection and were slow to move towards multitasking. Yes, they required learning an entirely new platform for your programming. But the money customers saved on the device would often pay for more software or accessories to make the device even more useful.
I'd hope most of that was a fairly uncontroversial assessment of the practical aspects of Windows CE. Now for the more controversial bit - the opinion.
The biggest problem that Windows CE had was that it was trying to put a PC in your pocket. Unfortunately, experience has shown that's the wrong direction to approach the problem from.
For the developer it's great that they can use the same tools, but that means they're thinking about desktop usage patterns. A lot of the user interface and workflow that they choose is then, well, wrong.
By contrast the Palm platform, and later iOS and Android, have specifically eschewed the idea of bringing the desktop to a small device, and instead went out of their way to have a specific "small platform" or "mobile" mindset. Love it or hate it, it tends to produce much better results in terms of software usability and workflows.
Hindsight makes it easy to see why Windows CE seemed like a great idea, and also why it was ultimately doomed.
But for a while there, it was definitely a contender...
Compact Edition
Or that's what a software house I interviewed with and who had the source code on CDs in a safe thought.
What's in a name?
I always thought it stood for Consumer Electronics...