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by xyzzy_plugh 27 days ago
Part of the reason CE 6 didn't get much love is that everyone had been burned so many times by all the previous CE releases -- not to mention that CE 6 was far too late!

In the end, though, it was better than Mobile, but hindsight is 20/20.
1 comments
ThrowawayB7 27 days ago
Parent poster is probably conflating Windows CE, Windows Mobile, and Windows Phone.

Windows Mobile 5 was tremendously popular with over 100 phones from various manufacturers. But that was also around the time iPhone was released and by the time Windows Mobile 6 rolled out, the iPhone 3G/3GS was taking the world by storm. Windows Mobile 6.5 had a partially revamped UI but not enough to be competitive. From there we go to Windows Phone 7, 8, and 10 and that story is well known.

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xyzzy_plugh 27 days ago
Me? Conflating? I think not.

We all dumped Windows CE for Windows Mobile. It was a lot of work and in the end it was an inferior product for pretty much every use case imaginable. The certification was not difficult but costly. Porting practically every application was a huge waste of time and money when they already worked well enough on WinCE.

Windows Mobile, built on WinCE, effectively cannibalized itself. We had Microsoft PMs and engineers tell us WinCE was a dead end. I moved onto to greener pastures before WinCE 6 but my understanding is that it triggered a crisis of faith within at least a few engineering organizations.

There were a number of things Windows Mobile excelled at compared to its predecessor but in particular it excelled at wasting corporate resources.

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com2kid 27 days ago
I worked on WM6, 6.5 and WP7.

WP would've had a better chance if the windows org hadn't murdered CE to move everything over to the Windows Kernel.

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