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WinCE is not just for phones. Drive Ford car? It's likely powering your car It powers GPS, it... you know i was going to give off this giant! list, but lets jsut say it powers things from trafic lights to the guidance system in some of our offensive missiles. I think Systron Donner used it as their guidance system OS

Thank you for reminding me not to buy a new Ford. I am sure that, that nice Mr. Putin is breathing a sigh of relief that it is powering the guidance system in your offensive weapons.

Very offensive indeed.

yeah, because the OS is just shit no matter what you do to it because you have personally had bad experiences and/or had to help people with big issues and hear about viruses and worms and security breaches on the /desktop/ version of the OS.

*rolls eyes*

chrysler vehicles mygig(now uconnect) is QNX :p made by harmon becker

Thanks my last two vehicles have been Chryslers. I will get another if they survive. Minivans made in Canada from Canadian steel.

and QNX is god, I really do mean that. I am pretty sure its the OS that powers the universe.

My Fujitsu GPS Navigational unit has a sticker on the back claiming it's running Windows CE. I wonder if it's possible to hack it and see if I can access its real shell (Windows Explorer)

There is a reason why Tomtom is regarded being one of the best Car GPS systems out tehre, it does not use WinCE and therefore being faster and stable...
The average WinCE car navigation system is relatively slow and crashes way too often (there are exceptions however)

This is not Soviet Russia. We demand sources.

ROFL...that is a good one. Indeed, although I know Linux is considered rock-stable when it comes to embedded devices, I always wondered if a stripped down version of Windows or Windows CE can do a similar job, without any errors. Sadly, there seems to be no benchmarks or detailed tests out there comparing the two... :-|

My friends built in navigation freaks out sometimes, freezing the whole car's entertainment/navigation & entertainment controls. The car lucky still works fine, but he has to disconnect the car's battery to get the system to reboot. Not sure what OS.

I sure hope windows mobile 7 is more stable than 6.x, especially if it's going to see wide use on netbooks. Windows CE itself is just the base upon which an embeded CE-based os can be built, however, so there's nothing saying that a device based on Windows CE has to use Windows Mobile, and CE itself seems stable. As is typical with Microsoft, the kernel is pretty good... the userland sucks.

Microsoft is working on singularity right now - people are thinking it'll become a replacement for Windows where I think you might end up seeing it being the replacement for Windows CE and Windows Embedded.

For me, I have no personal hatred against Microsoft or Windows; what frustrates me is the lack of attention to details rather than monumental faults in the system itself.

Getting back to Arm, I'd say if they do have a plan - they are already working on a solution to it but I think it'll turn out to be too little too late when it comes to ARM.

Just an interesting side note; vodafone NZ is selling mobile broadband bundles with a netbook in a 24 month contract. It'll be interesting to see how ARM, Microsoft and mobile phone companies are going to work together to come up with packages for end users. People might boohoo the whole 'well, the data allowance is small' but the reality is that the vast majority don't use gigabytes upon gigabytes. My parents has 3gb allowance per month and would be lucky to use it all. So the new 'outlet' for these netbooks in the future will be as a mobile device being sold by mobile phone companies.

Hey where's that article you said you were going to do about custom building WinCE for the desktop (X86)? I'm still curious as to what could be done on my ASUS EeePC 901...

--bornagainpenguin

Not only has CE 7 not been released yet, I think that something like 6.5 has been delay and not even released yet.

I think you are confusing Windows Mobile versions with Windows CE versions.

The current version of Windows Mobile is 6.1, based on Windows CE version 5.2. I cant seem to find any information on what CE version is behind Windows Mobile 6.5, but it's unlikely to be greater than 5.5.

It will be a long while yet before CE makes it to version 7.

hate to burst your bubble slick but MS and ARM are good friends.

http://search.arm.com/search?q=Microsoft&spell=1&access=p&output=xm...

Good friends? I doubt that. But I'm sure ARM will take Microsoft's money.

I doubt it. More likely migrating to Power.

I doubt it. More likely migrating to Power. "

Now, that would be rather ironic. Apple migrated off of PowerPC, only to migrate back to that architecture again just on different devices. I can't help but find something kind of funny in that.

I wonder why they would choose PowerPC, the ARM guys have all kinds of System-on-Chip based solutions with GPU options and all kinds of in hardware decoders which all save power (more efficient than software) and shutdown when not needed anymore if I'm not mistaken.

*shrug* explain why Apple would buy a company that designs Power SoCs and is now hiring CPU engineers.

Well, I did not know that. I just knew they bought chip-engineers, that could be for anything, not just CPU's.

The bought them because they were a cheap way to acquire a very talented group of processor engineers. They have guys that worked on Alpha, Strongarm, Sparc, Opteron, etc. If you think those guys couldn't turn around and build an awesome processor with a different ISA then you've got your head up your ass.

sp, processor architect

Except Apple hasn't made such devices with Power in the past so the statement is completely incorrect.

Windows CE is modular, has lots of GUI customization options, and is immune to desktop windows malware.


blah blah blah

But linux is superior to Windows CE in almost all features, it is free as beer, it already has many programs and it is not only a gadget OS like windows CE.

Windows user will want the full "windows experience", which means install the popular and old x86 binary programs. If they cannot do this, linux will be an alternative and cheaper solution than Windows CE solution.

Netbooks are not about fast, they're about being extremely portable and long battery life. Something ARM still has a huge leap over anything else. I agree about wanting to run Windows. IMO it is a completely stupid, but Windows (l)users want that garbage.

They will be utterly dissappointed, no matter if the vendor goes towards windows xp for arm or wince, what they really want is to get the binary compatibility to windows xp for intel. This cannot be done (emulation is way too slow on ARM)
So what they will end up is a windows machine unable to run their latest warez they get from their friends, this is worse than linux where they at least have a software pool tailored towards their distribution and processor. So any vendor going towards such a thing will get a load of returns from users wanting to buy a windows machine!

Well there is no advantage, the funny thing is those stupid tech journalists think probably once it is ported everything else runs. They do not have a clue that windows being ported only does not help at all that all the software ecosystem has to be ported as well.
But oh well thank god windows is ported...

Spot on. In the mind of the normal consumer things like Windows CE ... and by extension putting the ARM processor in netbooks, will relegate them right back into being the stupid little 'toys' things like the Psion Netbook were - cute, but ultimately either returned by angry consumers or relegated to the back of the sock drawer along with the Geode powered thin clients, all those winCE 1.x and 2.x handhelds that you only actually used for a couple weeks, the atari portfolio, and noodle-doodle products like the "New Internet Computer".

There really are two big problems ARM is going to face in the netbook market:

First is overcoming the public perception of ARM based netbooks as "upsized handhelds" instead of the "downsized notebooks" that make the intel based ones so popular. ARM based chips have been put in endless crappy slow handhelds for a decade - giving it a reputation that is going to be hard for it to shake.

Second is the mindshare that x86 Windows has... a mindshare which is the reason so much effort goes into backwards compatability in windows, WINE for *nix flavors, is why Parallels for the MAC sells like hotcakes and why even Apple provides a mechanism for booting Windows on their products.

Of course that mindshare would likely be easier to beat if Open source software for the desktop didn't consistantly come across as tinkertoys compared to their windows equivalents - with the possible exception of Firefox, VLC and maybe blender it's a fairly accurate description of the state of open source applications, where most of it, even the desktop managers no matter how pretty and fancy the graphics or visual effects, from a functionality standpoint feel like a trip in the wayback machine to windows 3.1

Though, that windows XP seems faster and more stable than linux on everything from the crappy little first gen sub-ghz intel mobile's right up to the dual core atom doesn't help. Long gone are the days of linux being smaller/faster - assuming such days ever REALLY existed. Having watched this **** for about fifteen years now, I still say it NEVER did - More secure, more stable - FINE, I can agree to that. Faster? LEANER? IN YOUR DREAMS!!!

Though 99% of that can be blamed on X and not Linux itself. If X itself didn't suck so bad everyone and their brother wouldn't be developing their own toolkits and WM's to sit between it and applications to actually make it USABLE!

Edited 2009-05-03 07:39 UTC

errrr, just no.
before the iphone era, when i showed people my phone, an htc blue angel, they always think "wow! this guy has the same computer (winxp) that i have i my desk, but portable!!!"

just because my phone was a pda with a big screen, a keyboard, and it cannot fit in a pocket (wich is wrong, i put this in my pocket ...), the internet was in, and most of it, windows was on it.
now, when people will see arm/winmo netbook, they will see: a big screen, a keyboard, it can't fit in a pocket and certainly not calling people (phone app), so it's a computer, like a winxp notebook ....

Edited 2009-05-03 09:47 UTC

What on earth are you on about?

Linux beats Windows on the same hardware in every single aspect, including the quality of desktop applications.

This is not Soviet Russia. We demand sources for statements of fact.

This is not Soviet Russia. We demand sources for statements of fact. "

(1) So in Soviet Russia they don't demand sources for statements of fact? Is that what you are saying? I think you got it backwards from what you intended, or something.

(2) Why did you not post the same demand for the garndparent unsupported statement, which was this utterance: "Though, that windows XP seems faster and more stable than linux on everything from the crappy little first gen sub-ghz intel mobile's right up to the dual core atom".

I demand sources for BS FUD such as that.

PS: BTW ... OK, sources:

http://www.tuxradar.com/node/33

http://ubuntulinuxhelp.com/why-is-linux-faster-than-windows/

http://mediakey.dk/~cc/tomcat-performance-linux-faster-than-windows...

https://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/linux-newbie-8/what-makes-l...

http://it.toolbox.com/blogs/locutus/why-linux-still-runs-faster-tha...

Quality of applications? You won't find anything on your menus after you have installed Windows that can touch most of these:

http://tuxarena.blogspot.com/2009/05/top-10-kde4-applications.html

Edited 2009-05-03 12:13 UTC

Quality of applications:

My install of Kubuntu Jaunty also has these out of the box:

http://www.openoffice.org/
http://about.openoffice.org/index.html

http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/customize/
http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/features/
http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/security/

http://okular.kde.org/

Whereas I looked at a XP netbook recently, and out of the box it included a 30-day trial version (trial version!! how lame!!) of MS office and it also included IE6 crapware. Windows didn't have a PDF viewer at all.

The quality of Windows distribution applications comes nowhere close to Linux distributions.

PS: Remember, the topic of this thread is Windows on ARM. If Microsoft ported Windows to ARM, what you would get is the Windows desktop OS and lame applets like Notepad, Wordpad, Calc and Paint.

http://www.osnews.com/thread?361402

Whereas is Ubuntu was ported to ARM ... then one would get Ubuntu, which is a hundred times more functional.

... actually a port of Ubuntu to ARM is already underway.

Edited 2009-05-03 12:45 UTC

Which is exactly what my article states.

Which is exactly what my article states. "

So what is your beef? Where is your problem?

Those are all fine links, but they are not sources to back up a factual statement. I think you need a lesson in the difference between "fact" and "opinion".

"Linux applications are better than Windows applications" is an opinion.

"Ubuntu comes with more functionality out of the box than Windows does" is a statement, which can become fact by providing the proper sources to back this claim up. However, in this specific statement sources are not required, since we all know this to be true.

The statement you made is an opinion, and the links you provided do nothing to turn that opinion into fact - they only back up your opinion. My own opinion is that if I were to look at the quality of applications, I'd say Mac OS X is the best *overall*, then Windows, then Linux. However, this is just my opinion. It's not fact.

It's a subtle difference that's hard to grasp, especially for fanatics, but there you have it.

Edited 2009-05-03 12:47 UTC

The statement to which I responded was also opinion, yet you had no qualms with it.

I provided several links backing up my opinion.

You have nothing.

Furthermore, on the same hardware, benchmarks will show that Linux beats or equals the best performance of Windows ... and it absolutely spanks Vista. (Vista won't even run on a netbook, for example, but Linux will, quite nicely thankyou.) We all know all this to be true, too (as do the people who run supercomputers, or those who run high-performance databases, or critical web servers, or low-resource embedded devices), so where is the rub? What has got up your goat?



We are talking about a "port to ARM" ... by one party.

If you took the OS and all the software that could be ported (ie. one party has to have all the source code, and rights to distribute it, in one place) ... the order would be:

Linux

...

daylight

...

Mac OSX

Windows.

Easily.

Self evidently true.

Edited 2009-05-03 13:05 UTC

What opinion am I trying to profess here, then? The one in the article is one you agree with... The one I mentioned in my comment... Well, I don't feel the need to seek confirmation for my own opinions all the time. Oh, and application quality is such an enormously inherent subjective thing that you can provide ten billion links either way, and you still wouldn't convince anybody either way. It's pointless.



I'm sure of it.



I guess I'm living in some alternate universe then, since I used Vista on my Aspire One quite nicely whythankyou. Sure, it took a few months of updates and a service pack, but hey, we're there now. Fanatics like you are still stuck in January 2007.



...?

What are you on about? Supercomputers? What does that have to do with the discussion at hand?

Mandarin foxtrot application wooden floor cat banana table stone car bicycle left field! So there!

Yeah, but I've seen worse... like Openmoko, for example. Wm 6.1 isn't as bad as some earlier releases--still buggy, of course, but as typical with Microsoft it's built on a good kernel with a userland that was designed by someone smoking something very potent.