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It is an improvement and has more future than WinMo (although that doesn't say much), but "best" is a big word .. most embedded devices at this years CES would disagree.

But anyways, I think it is a pretty safe bet that WP7 will have no real multitasking (where it counts) and that app development will done with Silverlight 4.0 and you get apps from the market, but I guess MS will be more developer friendly than Apple in some ways .. not sure which though.

Most of my coding goes into the embedded space these days, so as far was WinCE (not win phone, but it's underlying platform go) its surprisingly good.

As for multi tasking, WinCE 6.0 R3 is very very good at multi tasking. I would be surprised if MS prevented their phone setup from being able to, after all they are trying to get the edge over apple and that would be a good way to do it. even apple is reportedly going to have multi tasking enabled in their 4.0 release. The only drawback if battery usage increases (and some other things not worth mentioning due to irrelevance). MS wants to get the upper hand, and I would be shocked if they shipped this new mobile OS (based on CE 6.0 R3) totally stripped down, it just wouldn't make sense.

MS already announced that there won't be multitasking.


So recent experiences with webOS phones getting really slow when a few apps are open is "not worth mentioning due to irrelevance"?

They have not announced any such thing. They haven't said ANYTHING about this.

"So recent experiences with webOS phones getting really slow when a few apps are open is "not worth mentioning due to irrelevance"?"

The WebOS problem you use as an example is, well, a WebOS problem. It's a fairly new operating system and its multi tasking implementation is not as good. WinCE 6.0 has been tried and tested under a staggering amount of different circumstances and mission critical environments. WinCE's multi tasking is incredibly efficient and has been fine tuned over many years. WebOS is still, to an extent, in it's infancy and does not have it's roots any deeper than the hand held market.

So just to wrap things up, WebOS's slow downs, due to multiple applications running at the same time, effect (drum roll).... WebOS.

Edited 2010-02-16 23:47 UTC

webOS is a standard Linux OS with a proprietary GUI slapped on top of it. There it nothing new about its multitasking capabilities.
Are you sure you are a "professional" on that field when you don't even know such basic things?

Err, it might be Linux underneath, but webOS has a completely custom userland - heck, it has a very revolutionary userland. It's not just a reimplementation of some existing idea - it's completely new.

As such, it is to be expected that the webOS' multitasking capabilities need refining.

Since when does the userland handle multitasking?

Oh, and BTW: webOS's userland is far from being totally new. If you look at http://opensource.palm.com/1.3.5.2/index.html you'll see many familiar packages (at least familiar to people with some Linux knowledge)

Edited 2010-02-17 00:24 UTC

An operating system is more than the just the kernel; an operating system is made up of many components and just because it uses a component from few open source projects doesn't change the fact that it is more or less a new operating system. New doesn't have to mean "from the ground up".

The original postered pointed out that it is a new operating system because many of these components aren't full optimised for the constrained environment - thus there has been severeal releases so far fine tuning different parts of the operating system to make battery life better, multi-tasking smoother and so on.

The way you're behaving sounds like you're accusing Palm of simply grabbing some soruce code, compiling it and then throwing it on a telephone and hoping for the best.

Edited 2010-02-17 02:02 UTC

It doesn't sound like they used a Linux-variant that is actually tuned for embedded use. But more of a general purpose one, normally used for desktops or maybe even servers.

What do you think "tuned for embedded use" even means?
Linux kernels for embedded systems are not total rewrites. Embedded developer Monta Vista does all its work upstream in the Linux kernel -- Monta Vista is one of the biggest kernel contributors.
It's not rocket science to turn off features that are not needed on phones, just as it's not rocket science to turn on or tweak other options.

He said he was a RT programmer, which seems more knowledgable than you. Your door opening example may well not be an OS problem, it's easy to take a good kernel and trash it with bad coding, especially in the RTOS world.

"Compared to what?"

BeRTOS, VxWorks, QNX, Nucleus, FreeRTOS, Nuttx, LynxOS, Microware OS-9, MontaVista Linux. (QNX is my favorite. ACCESS linux too, but it doesnt quite count).

"I distinctly remember a door locking system based on an earlier version of WinCE we had to 'hard reboot' several times. Does not sound like a "fantastic kernel" at all."

Prior to WinCE 5 the platform was less than impressive, only keeping up with customer demand, very little innovation. When 5 was released MS aimed at taking their embedded development seriously and innovating instead of doing just what it took to get by. Version 6 later came out making version 5 look like garbage. WinCE 6 is more powerful than any of the OS's I listed at the top (with the exception of QNX).

on a side note, Flash support is going to be easier than with the other OS's since 6.0 R3 already has flash working (flash lite). See what I mean here: http://www.microsoft.com/windowsembedded/en-us/products/windowsce/p...

"New: Internet Explorer Embedded
Internet Explorer feature enhancements like panning and zooming, Flash Lite 3.1 support..."