Originally published at: 20 year-old Windows CE gadgets rule | Boing Boing
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No I can’t.
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I love my current fuss free “smart” devices. The OS now has built in OCR and TTS, though I still prefer the third party apps and voices that I have purchased though those apps. That said, I hate lack of root and control over so many aspects of the OS.
I had a real love for a HP95LX, a portable DOS based 286 that ran Derive and Lotus. That keyboard was small, but felt like every good HP calculator. I bought the keyboard adaptor and made a battery pack, and for a while it was a great little portable computer. Fast forward some years, and Windows CE seemed great at first, but it never really bought me the joy and ease of use that I got from a simpler OS from the past or newer os’s pf today.
As complexity is added, it is easy to feel nostalgic for simpler machines and interfaces. I still have my TTS capable AlphaSmart, Newton, and some z80 clones that could serve as distraction free writing machines. Despite not having root, it is nice having speedy access to the written world and the plethora of apps that turn my smart phone and tablet into quite a useful little multi tools. That isn’t to say that it couldn’t be done on some older general purpose computing device, but I just lack the patience and the drive to have to fiddle with an OS to run the way I want it to.
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I had forgotten about CE entirely, Rob!
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In 2000, I did my final year report for my degree using a Casio Cassiopeia A-11 while backpacking around SE Asia. It had a decent version of Word on it and ran on AA batteries.
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You can’t/wouldn’t want to develop Win CE software on it for practical reasons. Notably that compilation would take forever and debugging would be terrible/impossible. The development toolchain from back in the day involved using Visual Studio on a Windows PC and uploading your program to the device where you could debug remotely if needed. I recall there was also an emulator so you could develop your software or test on different form factors without needing a physical device.
This is pretty much how things work today on modern mobile devices as well.
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I remember thinking the Jornada line was pretty nifty, but I went with Psion (5mx, then a 7 upgraded to Netbook) because I was a Mac user and could not fathom using anything Windows related.
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You’re a curator in a museum somewhere aren’t you Rob?
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I’ve always thought the Jornada would be a great device if it wasn’t for that whole CE thing…
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Us ancient types still think back fondly to the Psion 5 (that keyboard!) and Clive Sinclair’s portable masterpiece - the Z88, and wonder where everything went wrong.
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That’s the core of the problem, isn’t it - at the end of the day almost everything that ran Windows CE was just a gadget, or little more.
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… if only they’d put a phone in it 
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I’d just like to tip my hat to Redmond. After all the development money they poured in, after all the focus groups they conducted and high priced branding consultants they hired, they decided to name their operating system….
WinCE.
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Windows CE never appealed to me because it was such a cut-down version that it made the systems running it just a peripheral to some “real” Windows machine.
I have stayed with the HP 200LX and always appreciated its simplicity and tremendous battery life (weeks).
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My GPS runs on WinCE. It has an OTG USB port, so theoretically I could plug in a hub, keyboard, mouse, external storage, etc, depending on the device drivers.
But why? It’s a GPS, and does that job fine.
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I have pretty fond memories of my two eeePc netbooks (I had a 7-inch one and then a 10-inch one). Too slow for much beyond a linux commandline, but that’s basically all I needed. It was interesting how quickly the netbook idea came and went…
Eventually my on-the-go setup was just termux running on my phone or a cheap tablet with an external keyboard. It felt like living in the future, being able pull out my phone on the beach to log into a server, or to my computer at home, and fix a problem.
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I never had one, but I was intrigued by the Nokia N810, a sort of proto-tablet that ran Linux out of the box. It wound up being an evolutionary dead end in portable computing.
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I had one of their PDAs, back when I was working for the American Historical Association. It was a wonder of the [then] history geek world. I crammed almost the entire Annual Meeting program into the calendar, with reminders. People were amazed.
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