I suppose the repo is more telling than the video and shows some of the work put into it. The 'bit' he does in the video is jarring to me and makes me think of your typical crypto bro/AI bro/someone who may not know the inner workings of things, but the repo shows that isn't the case. I personally am not a fan of behavior like that for engagement/likes sake.

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.

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.

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.

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.

CE 6 doesn't get enough love. It was an amazing OS that had a tiny runtime and a tiny on device foot print (it could get under 16MB iirc).

Too bad the tooling around it was so bad. I should do a writeup of why, it is an interesting case study in how poor extendability of tooling can hurt an entire company.

That video is very annoying and doesn't in any way replace just having a screenshot of it running.

Tinfoil Hat Take: Avoiding screenshots on the project page drives eyeballs to YouTube, which the provides ad revenue, which then feeds back into the project.

First they laugh at us...

> Why every advertising agency needs to have a review panel of twelve-year-old boys

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20080501-01/?p=22...

Don't miss that link in the above!