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| Windows CE 2.0: An overview | Windows CE: Where does it stand after Year 1? | |||||||||||||
| Slow start, revving up now By Conrad H. Blickenstorfer |
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| Does "Mercury" have wings? By Conrad H. Blickenstorfer |
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Rancho Cordova, CA, Nov 97-- Windows CE 2.0's code name of "Mercury" was aptly chosen given the mini operating system?s heritage and intended purpose. Mercury was the Roman god of commerce, son of Jupiter, and the fleet-footed messenger of the gods. Windows CE, likewise, has an impressive lineage and its purpose is to serve the business community by providing connections and mobility.
Another much welcome addition is PCL3 print support. Among the
first generation of CE devices, only the HP 300 and 320LX offered
direct printing. This has now changed and all HPCs will likely
offer TrueType font and bit-mapped print support through installable
printer drivers. 2.0 also supports IR connection to printers. On the connectivity front, there are new hooks for items like
cameras, an NDIS mini-port driver, network support, wave-in/wave-out
audio, and microphone support. Those who need it will welcome
SLIP support. Wireless connections now work better. And 2.0 has
secure sockets. Storage and file management have been improved as well: version
2.0 supports multiple FAT volumes and drives. This means that
HPCs are no longer limited to the C drive. People frustrated with the somewhat clumsy 1.0 interface will
be pleased to learn that 2.0 offers cascading menus like Windows
95. This makes all those shortcuts that cluttered CE desktops
all but unnecessary. 2.0 also supports special purpose keys. The
system font is larger and more readable, although the icons often
remain hard to decipher, and the overall look is cleaner. There
are common controls and dialogs for cascading menus, color, and
printing. Though Microsoft concedes that good pen API support is very important
in handheld devices, those who expected better pen support in
version 2.0 will be disappointed. Except for the addition of inking,
there aren?t any major improvements. Better desktop connectivity
The file system browser is now pretty much integrated with the
web browser. The inbox supports file attachments and includes
group scheduling, both very welcome changes. |
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Rancho Cordova, CA, Nov 97-- It has as been a year since the Microsoft Windows CE platform was formally unveiled at Fall Comdex 1996. When Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates himself introduced the new operating system at Treasure Island's Theatre du Soleil, excitement and expectations ran high. After the spectacular show, vendors showed their first generation CE devices, and PR people and product managers tirelessly answered questions by the press and those lucky enough to somehow secure an invitation to the grand event.
This no doubt created some frustration for Casio and NEC who had
stuck to Microsoft's schedule and then found themselves playing
guinea pig for their more cautious competitors. For example, consumers
ignored the memory-impaired 2MB versions, and were put off by
the lack of backlighting in some of the initial units. NEC probably
didn't sell too many of its 2MB MobilePro 200 units and, in an
effort to save the day, quickly unveiled the backlit MobilePro
450. Casio, likewise, didn't do too well with the A-10, and, since
even 4MB turned out to be marginal in an HPC, introduced the 6MB
A-11+. It also turned out that Microsoft's initial hardware specifications
had been too strict. This resulted in a disappointing uniformity
among the first HPCs. There was little to differentiate the Cassiopeia
from the NEC MobilePro or the LG Electronics/Hitachi units. Reviewers,
including us, scrambled to educate the reading public that there
were indeed differences, but the message didn't hit home until
the "renegade" units from Philips and Hewlett packard hit the
market well into 1997. Philips, for example, had marched to the beat of a different drummer
from day one. This was not only evident in the Velo-1's unique
European styling, but also in the company's decision to relegate
the Microsoft-mandated PC Card slot to an expansion module and
offer two miniature card slots instead. The Velo further differentiated
itself with a unique voice-recording feature and a well deserved
reputation for speediness. In our tests, the Velo was up to twice
as fast as some of its competitors. Philips' decision to go with
a softmodem also turned out to be right on the mark. While 28.8
and 33.6 kbps modem cards drained an HPC's two meager AA cells
in minutes, you could effortlessly cruise the web for hours on
the Velo-1. HP, too, was among the winners of the first round of the HPC sweepstakes.
Its 300 and 320LX models alone offered the ability to directly
print from an HPC, leaving the others stuck with this rather peculiar
omission of CE 1.0. HP was also prescient in its choice of screen.
The HP?s was 640 pixels wide, just like a regular VGA screen.
Everyone else's 480 pixel screens soon seemed cramped. HP's significant
experience in building palmtop computers was evident in all aspects
of the 300/320LX. It somehow seemed more grown up than the others. Not much was heard from the rest of the initial licensees. Compaq
marketed its PC Companion, a rebadged Casio, in a decidedly low
key manner and eventually resorted to undercutting the Casio's
price. The LG Electronics/Hitachi twins actually had some nice
features, such as a slightly larger screen and an internal 28.8
modem option, but they weren't actively marketed and we only saw
a few of them. By mid-1997, things didn't look all that rosy for Windows CE.
While the Velo-1 and the 320LX developed somewhat of a following,
by and large the verdict about CE and HPCs was dismal. "Not enough
memory," "too slow," "screens too small," "icons unreadable,"
said the buying public that didn't seem to see a need for Windows
CE. Yet, for every article trouncing CE there was another that
pointed out CE?s strategic importance to Microsoft. What did Microsoft do in the light of all that? A lot. Redmond's
CE group and leadership took a very active role in encouraging
developers, listening to feedback, preparing improvements, and
generally plotting out the future. A Microsoft CE conference in
May was attended by almost 1,000 developers. At that conference,
Microsoft unveiled its plans for the future, and part of that
future was finally presented to the public as Microsoft Windows
CE version 2.0 on September 29 at the Embedded Systems Conference
in San Jose. There are numerous changes and improvements in CE 2.0, just like
there have always been numerous changes and improvements in each
successive version of Windows. There is support for color and
direct printing now. There are cascading menus just like in Windows
95. The "pocket" applications have been tweaked and improved and
a PowerPoint viewer was added. The whole operating systems is
now "componentized," which means that licensees can design products
for different purposes by including just the components they need.
This, together with Microsoft?s considerably relaxed hardware
requirements, points toward a much more diversified future for
the Windows CE platform. There is, however, another aspect of Windows CE that's worth mentioning,
and that is its multi-CPU architecture orientation. Unlike desktop
Windows PCs that almost exclusively rely on Intel, CE devices
have a choice of several chip architectures. Starting out with
support for Hitachi's SuperH architecture and two variants of
Silicon Graphic's MIPS engine, Windows CE now also supports Intel
486 and Pentium, the PowerPC 821, and soon the ARM architecture.
The competition among those chip manufacturers is heavy and this
has already resulted in a much welcome "arms race" to deliver
faster and more integrated chipsets. This year saw the introduction
of much faster versions of the Hitachi SH-3, the Philips TwoChipPic
set, and the NEC 4100 family. Eager to join the fray are newcomers
Toshiba (with the MIPS-based TX39 family of RISC processors) and
Digital (with the StrongARM-1100), as well as AMD with its 486-compatible
Elan variants. All the pieces are therefore in place for the emergence of a much
wider variety of hardware, a notion that seems at least partially
confirmed as we look at the initial representatives of the second
generation of Windows CE devices. As of this writing, NEC, Philips, LG Electronics, Casio, and HP
have all announced new hardware, joined by newcomer Sharp (and
others will soon join this group). The dinky little 480x240 screens have generally been dropped in
favor of the wider 640x240 format, and everybody now offers backlighting.
HP and newcomer Sharp were the first to announce color screens
in their Palmtop PC 620LX and Mobilon HC-4500, respectively. We're
certain that color screens will soon become a standard, but for
the time being they extract a heavy toll on the meager HPC battery
packs: While the new Sharp HC-4100 with its monochrome screen
runs 25 to 30 hours on a set of NiMH rechargeables, the HC-4500
color version quits after only four to six hours. Many will be
willing to pay that price in exchange for a color screen, but
it remains a concern, especially since we expect to see full 640x480
VGA screens on CE devices very soon. Either the battery manufacturers
cook up a miracle on short order, or HPCs will have to switch
to heftier battery packs. There has been much speculation about the future form factor of
HPCs. The small screens and tiny keyboards of the initial devices
caused a lot of customer criticism. Handwriting recognition would
alleviate the data entry conundrum for some, but the clamshell
form factor simply doesn't lend itself well to writing on the
screen. As a result, what we're seeing--at least with this class
of CE devices--is a move towards larger units. All of the new
units are larger than the ones they replace, with the possible
exception of the new Casio that actually looks a bit sleeker than
the old one. LG Electronics opted for a larger unit with a larger
screen, and NEC topped everybody else, at least in the size department,
with a big new MobilePro that looks and feels more like a subnotebook
than a HPC. It?s also obvious that the licensees are learning from one another.
Some of Philips' pioneering features now show up on other devices,
such as voice recording (now available on all the other second
generation devices) and the softmodem (Sharp and LG). Great attention
was also paid to details: The Casio A-20's keyboard is not only
larger, but it also provides infinitely better tactile feedback
than the A11. The backlights are universally brighter, with HP
switching to an especially pleasing "paper-white" backlight. The new processors, likewise, are being put to good use. The Casio
A-20, for example, is more than twice as fast as its predecessor.
Another benefit of the faster processors are faster softmodems.
Though we never had a complaint about our Velo-1's 19.6 kbps speed,
28.8 kbps in the new Velo and 33.6 kbps in the Casio Mobilon sound
even better. So where do we stand with Windows CE? 2.0 is no doubt a substantial
improvement over the initial release, but Microsoft's newest operating
system platform remains a work in progress and will likely remain
that way for some time to come. With Microsoft declaring its intention
to branch from servers, desktops, and notebooks to mobile and
embedded systems of all sorts, we'll be seeing lots of growing
pains. No one knows yet whether Microsoft's "leverage" argument
(i.e. you don?t have to learn something new to program for all
those new platforms) is really valid, or whether you can indeed
take the root and soul of a desktop operating paradigm and scale
it up and down. Some of the biggest criticisms of Windows CE is
about the illegibility of its miniaturized Windows interface.
It's true that an interface is largely a cosmetic thing, but it's
something that has not been adequately addressed in Windows CE
yet. This whole growing process will be very hard on the licensees
who'll see their hardware being obsoleted again and again by new
versions of CE. The strong will hang in there and eventually reap
the benefit of their investments. We, the consumers, will bleed
with them as our HPCs will grow old quicker than last year's PC,
and we're probably going to be playing the role of unpaid beta
testers for some time. But at least, and rest assured of this,
it is going to be an exciting time. - |
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