The start of something beautiful.
I have become completely dependent on my computer for all sorts of things. Obviously, I use my computer to develop software, but I also use my computer for banking, email, my personal phone book, my appointment schedule, playing games, and so on.
I am not quite at the point where I leave my machine on 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, but soon I will be able to carry a computer in my pocket during those rare hours my desktop machine is not at easy reach (like when I’m flying back and forth between Seattle and San Francisco). This computer’s official name has not been announced yet, but its codename is Pegasus. It’s being created by Microsoft with six hardware partners. I’ll start by showing you the Pegasus hardware from the user’s perspective. In the second part of this article I’ll dive into the details of the software platform and discuss the programming issues you need to understand to write cool Pegasus apps.
Don’t believe the haters and retrospective I-bought-my-first-smartphone-in-2009-and-now-I-know-everything naysayers – PocketPC was an amazing platform that put so much functionality and awesomeness in your pocket back when Google was still Altavista and Apple had just started peddling music players.
Palm OS may have been my dressage show horse, but PocketPC was my trusty workhorse.
I coded for a Cassiopeia. It wasn’t exactly beautiful, but clearly the best you could get back then.
But let’s face it – compared to what we have it’s pretty crappy.
I can’t recall those functionality and awesomeness of PocketPC devices. What I do recall, is that when I had both Palm PDA and PocketPC smartphone, my usage pattern led to selling PocketPC device and buying a Philips “dumb” phone with good battery and solid bluetooth. This was a huge improvement in my mobile setup. (Unfortunately, Treos were too hard to buy and too expensive at my location back then.)
Edited 2015-02-10 23:23 UTC
I used a Palm and Pocket PC device back in the day – didn’t care for either one of them. Even the original Palm Pre was a miserable experience. People talk about Android lag? Sheee-eeee-eeee-iiiiiiiiit the Pre was TERRIBLE.
Well, sure they all are slow compared to modern hardware, but back in the day I didn’t feel any of my devices slow. Actually, my Palm Tungsten T3 felt like getting things done pretty much instantly. Can’t say for Palm Pre though – I never even saw one.
Well, once you are riding Pegasus, you aren’t going to be able to get off when you want. Even better than a walled garden, assuming you don’t have a parachute. Sounds like Microsoft.
I still personally feel that Maemo was close to exactly what I wanted…
Not polished enough for the general public, but man I wish it had actually been continued properly (instead of split, restarted, & merged with other interests so many times).
Yep, that was a true unix in your pocket.
Jolla is a bleak cousin at best. Too consumer (sheep?) oriented and beholden to big media.
Can you please explain the differences between the two that make the Jolla not a true Unix?
In what way is Jolla too consumer oriented and beholden to big media?
(This is a serious question. As a former Nokia N900 owner and current Jolla mobile owner I don’t understand what you mean.)
Maemo was never going to work because Nokia was inept. Every single release broke some level of compatibility with the prior ones to the point where it was just a complete farse. I used (NITOS/ITOS/NIT, don’t remember the correct prefix)2007 and 2008 quite a bit back in the day, and I swear that between NITOS 2006 and 2008, at least 60% of the apps from 2006 stopped working and were never updated. The “app” catalogue was dismal and half the time when you installed an app the dependencies were broken till you dug around and found the right repos to manually add…. sigh.
I find myself reminded of a demo video of a Nokia phone being used as a “desktop” computer. Bluetooth keyboard, bluetooth mouse, and video out to a TV. At that point in time Android could barely do video out, and yet Symbian was considered obsolete by the tech press.
Frankly what happened was that Apple and their big media partners made it “vital” to have music and movies in addition to apps in a single “store”. Thus Google had to bend over backwards to curtail what users could do with their own devices before big media was willing to offer their content via Android Market (later renamed Play).
You see a similar curtailment in the move from the PocketPC/Mobile lineage to Windows Phone. This complete with a automatic locking of SD cards to that specific device (that only Symbian had the capability to unlock, ironically).
Exactly what my post title says…
Win-Pad… Then, about 13 years after, somebody arrived and changed the ‘Win’ for an ‘i’. 😉
I have owned a lot of PDA’s and smart devices over the years, the PocketPC platform was nice, it was good to have color and was quite powerful, activesync was great and really sync’d things well.
For a device that could stand on it’s own and was very stable i would have to say that my Psion 5mx was the best, i owned a lot of Psion’s but the 5mx was great, the outstanding factor for me was being able to code directly on the device, it was so useful to quickly knock together little utilities.
Palm’s were great, i loved my IIIc and v5 and Tungsten E5 very stable and the grafitii worked well.
The only thing i will say that none of them could do well was a smart phone OS. Ok Psion went on to become symbian, but of all the nokia phones i used i never classed it as a true PDA replacement, it always felt quite restrictive.
PalmOS and Pocket PC generally crashed too much to be counted on, the worst of these was pocket pc, with horrible process limits which meant that after the operator loaded their crap you barely had enough left over to run other apps, i used to get crashes when receiving calls, making calls, receiving texts etc.., replaced the phone, still the same, got a different brand still the same, really crap.
Pre-iPhone the best smartphone i owned was the Sony P990i which was a symbian (psion) based OS, it was a little clunky, a little crashy but the most stable of the bunch, however where it was really productive was with it’s jog wheel which allowed you navigate the whole OS with just the wheel, it was really great and really allowed single handed use.
Thom, I seem to remember you writing about how you used to use your PocketPC. Checking email, web browsing, writing documents, and watching episodes of The Simpsons ALL AT THE SAME TIME on a device from, like, the mid-90s… Do you remember what I’m talking about? It was so cool.
(DISCLAIMER: I might be crazy and my memory completely wrong.)