CE is alive and well!

Mike Hall posted in his blog yesterday an article from the NY Times, “Can Microsoft make Windows for a small world?”. While the article is mostly about Windows 7, the notable here for us in Embedded land is that they say we hardly even mention CE anymore… I’m not going to recap the whole post, so go pay Mike’s blog a visit. He is the “Godfather” after all.

My point to this is that we have a ton of shipping devices that run CE as their Operating systems. One of the main pillars we sell the OS under is that you don’t have to tell the world it’s a Windows OS if you don’t want to. hence “embedded” . We spend a ton of time evangelizing it to the world, however we are “Little Windows” both in footprint and number of units. Of course everyone knows about Windows Vista and Windows 7, but not  everyone knows about Windows CE. as Mike pointed out, Windows Mobile is based on Windows CE, but they are truly different products. Windows Mobile is a platform – in that you ship a device that is a PDA/Phone, etc… under the hood, they mostly do the same things, or sorts of things. Windows CE is an Operating System – you have complete customization capability, including not even showing the fact that it’s running Windows at all!

Olivier put up a post in his blog with pictures, even of some devices running CE. Another one, not mentioned by either -

Here’s SonoSite’s M-Turbo, a portable handheld ultrasound device – very cool for trauma situations to diagnose internal injuries quickly. Windows CE is in there! We actually did a case study on this one Take a look!

We have lots of other stuff out there too! You’ll be surprised where you see Windows CE pop up! Keep your eyes open, we have lots more to come! It only gets better from here!

JC