This month sees a lot of activity around Windows CE. More Handheld PCs (HPCs) are coming out, the LG Phenom and the Philips Velo 500 should be in the shops about now, and the first production Palm-sized PCs, the Everex Freestyle and Casio E10 should also both be in the retail channel.

Sega Dreamcast

Sega Dreamcast

Sega have also just announced the Dreamcast next generation games console, to replace their ailing Saturn. Dreamcast is a Windows CE based machine with DirectX based on the Hitchi SH4 CPU, and Microsoft have apparently been talking to Sega about this for nearly two years. The real time features being incorporated into future versions of CE have rather more to do with the needs of the games market than embedded systems.

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsce/dreamcast/

I've been seeing pre-production models of the Palm-sized PCs at conferences for several months now, and I'll confess to mixed feelings about them. Some things are smart and very right, and other factors are very weak. However, it isn't fair to make long term judgements from brief exposure to hand built prototypes.

The US and UK CE Developers Conferences took place in April and May, with the first Palm-sized PCs stealing the show. At the US conference, all attendees were given vouchers for a free Casio E10, to be shipped when they hit production. The biggest surprise was that the vast majority of the attendees in the London conference said that they were interested in CE for use in embedded systems, and less than 10% were interested in Handheld or Palm-sized applications. This is a surprise because CE just doesn't have the features that have always been considered important in the embedded marketplace: only very approximate real-time control features, to be introduced in the next release; and an absolutely enormous RAM footprint. Talking to developers, the reason soon becomes clear: to them, embedded to them means custom versions of HPCs, built to the specifications of large corporate users, with custom ROMs eliminating unwanted features, and including their own applications. In other words, Psion's traditional market for industrial computers like the Workabout.

Words and design by:
Paul Lynch
Last updated: June 8, 1998