[BuildTheRobots]

WinCE had a load of weird issues (and looked consistently awful), but moving onto PDAs and even phones running it from a world of Psion and Palm was like stepping forward a century. This might be rose tinted recollections - and helps that it coincided with with the consumerisation of WiFi and Bluetooth - but fond memories. I still can't believe how Microsoft had a surprisingly capable mobile OS years before Android or Apple and yet managed to fail so badly.

[kube-system]

All tech enthusiasts at the time remember how amazing WinCE looked on the shelf. The thing that held it back was that it was just a cool technology, but wasn't an actual solution for any problem regular people had.

Regular people didn't need to carry around a pocket calendar or phone book. And most of the people who did -- carried paper ones that were easier to use didn't need charging.

Smartphones didn't get any traction until email started to take off, and Blackberry and Windows Mobile solved a problem by bringing email to handheld phones. And then they remained email devices for people who needed email on the go (business and tech-forward people)

Feature phones at the this time were catering to the two things people did want on the go: music and text messaging. Apple then started the smartphone consumer market by making a music-phone out of an iPod, and the rest is history.

[andix]

The main problem was, that barely any useful apps existed. In the early 2000s internet connectivity was working well on those devices at some point (Wifi, via bluetooth phone, or integrated). But there was nothing to do with it, except syncing Outlook and some very limited mobile websites.

The only thing those Windows Mobile 2003 era devices were good for: Playing Age of Empires. There was a full featured port of Age of Empires I, and it was really awesome! It worked really well with the pen input.

[flomo]

The big issue with Wince was mobile IE was just an awful browser. I probably was not alone in wanting some 'webtop' gadget, but these weren't it. (In other words, iOS safari really was a killer app.)

[ssl-3]

They somehow kept failing, too.

A decade or so ago, my partner's cell phone provider was bought by AT&T and the old network was to be disconnected. AT&T's network was incompatible with their existing phone so they were required to get a new one.

The only smartphone they could get for free was a Nokia device running Windows Phone 8, so they picked that.

Their level of technical sophistication was not very high and this was to be their first pocket computer.

It had a fraction of the CPU grunt of my Galaxy S5 so I expected it to be slow and for them to hate it. I also expected to be asked to solve problems with it and help them along with some aspect of it or another.

But there was none of that. It just worked. They never had any questions. Like many people with a pocket computer, they came to use it all the time for things.

I poked at it myself a few times and found the user interface to be very different from Android and IOS, but it flowed well and was always instantly responsive. It was a neat little machine that seemed to perform extraordinarily well.

And despite finding a way to get this kind of positivity from me, a former OS/2 zealot and long-time user of free operating systems, they still managed to completely fuck up the entire operation. It remains the only example of a Windows Phone device that I'm aware of ever having seen someone use in the wild.

[toast0]

> And despite finding a way to get this kind of positivity from me, a former OS/2 zealot and long-time user of free operating systems, they still managed to completely fuck up the entire operation.

Indeed. I've ranted on this a bunch, but tldr; all they had to do was keep making cheap phones that worked surprisingly well and building the install base; but they wanted to focus at the top of market and wm10 was a disaster.

> It remains the only example of a Windows Phone device that I'm aware of ever having seen someone use in the wild.

They had some placement in Scandal or House of Cards, I think. Was pretty weird for me as a WP user to hear the ringtones and see the UI on the shows I was watching. Not a whole lot of market penetration in the US, but pretty decent in lower income countries where something that was very inexpensive and worked enough had legs.

[koutakun]

> Lower income countries where something that was very inexpensive and worked enough had legs

As a lower income country citizen who had a Lumia 635, that's exactly how they got me. It was something like 150-160 U$S and at the time, in my country that would've bought me a Galaxy J2 or some other bottom of the barrel phone with a laggy Android UI. In contrast the Lumia 635 was just as compute/memory-starved but Windows Phone could handle it way, way better. My dad even used it into 2019 after I upgraded because it was just there and worked better than any cheap Android phone.

The developer experience of the platform was weird. As someone with (a bit of) C# experience I found XAML+C# way easier to get into than Android's kludgy layout system, but as expected the ecosystem of libraries was just not there, and while it was easy to get a free developer account as a student it was a bit pretentious of Microsoft to expect normal people to pay 25(?) USD for the privilege of publishing in a marketplace of between 0 and 5 users.

[pjc50]

Not having the hardware vertical integration until buying Nokia was a big limitation. As was the use of resistive touchscreens, which usually requires a stylus to achieve any accuracy.

CE wasn't too bad. It was nice having mostly the same API as desktop windows, so you can easily cross-test.

[xp84]

I certainly thought the c. 2001 PDAs under the PocketPC brand were absolutely sick. My hot take is that if the US telecom industry had by that year built out a network of good 3G coverage, those PocketPC devices would have of course had cellular capability, and would have sold like hotcakes, and would have become the basis, the ‘trope originator’ if you will, for Mobile computing. What iPhone was in our timeline.

I think what really held them back was that Wi-Fi was only starting to roll out, and outside a hotspot area, the universe of things you might do with one was necessarily quite self-contained. It limited what “killer apps” could be developed, as anything designed for the platform probably needs to be fully offline most of the time.

[gattilorenz]

I don’t know, I remember them being great from a HW point of view (I had an iPAQ 514 and it was mindblowing even without touch and just a tiny screen), but UX wise…

I now have another iPAQ with a stylus and touchscreen, and I’m grateful back then I did not have it nor the mobile version of Age of Empires… it’s addictive stuff and a crazy good port. I don’t remember anything so good on PalmOS 5 (we had a Garmin iQue 3600, with integrated GPS and navigation… also very futuristic).

[xp84]

They were great from a hardware point of view!! I'm just saying adoption was held back, compared to what it was in 2008-2010, because most of the things people lost their minds about in the later era were the always-networked type of things: Fast and accurate texting, web browsing, Google Maps, watching YouTube or Netflix on the bus or as you enjoy your lunch break at work. All those things require Internet and most people who might have (or did) buy an iPaq etc. would have usually not had access to Wi-Fi in most of those places and 3G data wouldn't come around (the US at least!) for a few more years.

We did see Windows Mobile 2G and 3G smartphones a year or two pre-iPhone, though, so maybe I'm full of it and that platform somehow didn't have something else the mass market wanted.