Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2018/06/19/louis-vuitton-windows-ce-pocke.html
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I tend to feel that if a design needs the designer’s name on it, it can’t be a great design.
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That thing is a gorgeous collector’s item!
Something you put in a glass case and never use? Sounds right.
It’s a color device. That makes it of even more questionable utility. I seem to recall my greyscale CE device lasting weeks on a pair of AA batteries.
The expensive branding stuck to the outside and the problematic WINCE operating system notwithstanding, I was surprised that the form factor shown here was so spectacularly unpopular. Because this is about as small as you can get with a useful keyboard.
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Pocket PCs were quite useful, it’s just that Win CE was… well, Win CE.
I wrote a good deal of the raw text for my thesis on a DOS pocket PC. MS-Works in the ROM, usable keyboard, centronics & serial port, 2 PCMCIA slots for extra memory, ran for a couple of days on 2 AA batteries. Traveling light.
(If anyone is interested, I still have a Panasonic toughthingy somewhere. Looks like a clunky labelmaker. Colour display, full keyboard, can double as the proverbial ‘blunt instrument’ in hand-to-hand combat.)
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LV died as a real luxury brand the day Arnault took over. 
The appeal eludes me.
(Perhaps because it’s not purple and doesn’t run IRIX.)
My feeling is that humanity doesn’t deserve a nice expression of the ultra-mobile concept. We were given the opportunity by Psion, but we rejected them and should have to live with the consequences.
It’s just really frustrating to see half of humanity enthusiastically internetting away on tiny tiny screens with tiny tiny keyboards, only a decade after every reviewer trashed the netbook/clamshell pda form factor for having screens and keyboards that were smaller than a full laptop.
Back in the early 2000s I worked on software for the various PDA-ish WinCE formats.
This device is actually a “Handheld PC”, which competed with Psion organisers. They were made with at least 4 different incompatible CPU architectures (possibly ARM, MIPS, SH3, SH4?), and we tried to support all of them. There was no concept of fat binaries, multi-architecture packages, or app stores that would select the right package for the device. We had to rely on users to select the right one.
I think the Pocket PC format (successor to “Palm-sized PC”) was ARM-only. But you still couldn’t build a single binary that would run on ARM-based Handheld PCs and Pocket PCs, because reasons.
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