Windows Mobile

» see microsoft.com/windowsmobile as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

windows mobile's peak years (2003 to 2008) overlap with my university time on ttnet broadband, but the os itself sat in the enterprise-pda world that none of my circle lived in. we were on nokia symbian feature phones with t9 keypads. the people who carried htc touch diamonds and palm treos were a couple of years older, in white-collar jobs, with company-paid devices. when i finally touched a windows mobile handset around 2008 it already felt like an oncoming wreck.

microsoft shipped pocket pc 2000 on april 19 2000, built on the windows ce 3.0 kernel and aimed squarely at the palm os pda market. the brand became "windows mobile" with the 2003 release, which also unified the pocket pc and the smartphone editions. windows mobile 5 (2005) added persistent storage so a dead battery stopped wiping your contacts. windows mobile 6 (2007) reskinned the chrome to look more like vista. windows mobile 6.5 (2009) was the last release with the stylus-first start menu and the tiny windows logo in the top-left.

htc built around 80 percent of all windows mobile devices, an estimated 40 of the 50 million units that shipped over the platform's life. the rest came mostly from samsung's blackjack and omnia lines, palm's treo 700w and 750w, with dell and motorola filling the bottom of the bill. all of them used a resistive touchscreen with a stylus. all of them required a hard reset every few months when something in registry land got corrupt.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the rise ~

by 2007 windows mobile owned 42 percent of the global smartphone market. it was the most-shipped smart-phone os on earth. then the iphone arrived in january 2007 and the market changed shape in eighteen months. multi-touch made the resistive stylus interface look ten years older overnight. the app store (july 2008) made the windows marketplace for mobile (launched october 2009, two years late) feel like a panic patch.

microsoft's response was not a rapid update to the existing platform. it was a full-stack rewrite called windows phone 7, announced at mwc in february 2010 and shipped in october. windows phone shared the brand and the windows ce 7 kernel but discarded the entire pocket pc shell along with every existing windows mobile app. developers had to rewrite from scratch on silverlight and xna. enterprise customers who had built around the platform were told to wait.

~ the postmortem ~

windows mobile 6.5.3 shipped february 2 2010 as the final maintenance release. existing devices kept working. the windows marketplace for mobile closed on may 9 2012, which meant new app installs stopped. by that point market share had dropped from 42 percent (2007) to below one percent (2012). htc and samsung had pivoted entirely to android by then. palm had been acquired by hp and the treo line was already dead.

the platform never had a clean death announcement. it just got abandoned by every oem that mattered while microsoft told the press to look at windows phone instead. when windows phone itself died (marketplace closed december 2019), the broader public mostly remembered "windows phones" as a single failure rather than two separate failed platforms.

~ the inheritance ~

htc came out of the wreckage by becoming the lead android oem in 2009 with the hero and the desire, then spent the rest of the 2010s slowly dying anyway. palm was acquired by hp in 2010 and killed in 2011, with the webos team scattered to lg's tv division. dell exited the smartphone market entirely while samsung emerged as the dominant android oem and never looked back.

the cultural memory that survived is the stylus. for almost a decade carrying a windows mobile device meant carrying a tiny plastic pen in a slot on the chassis, which you would lose within a month and replace with a chewed pencil. the iphone deleted the stylus, then the apple pencil brought it back as a $99 accessory.

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