> Microsoft and mobile has been a disaster every time they've tried.

Not true. Windows CE was a solid offering.

I'm going to agree with this. People forget how spartan Palm OS was in comparison, and the balkanized Linux mobile offerings as well as the lack of a good mobile UI toolkit. Making mobile apps for Win CE was a breeze compared to Palm OS.

By what metrics?

Every implementation of this I've seen has been a slow burn disaster. It's still deployed, and it still sucks.

I assume they meant the original release/products. In the late '90s, CE palmtop computers were a joy. I had no idea it was still deployed; it can't have any real connection to those little pocket PCs I loved.

They were loved by extreme early adopters. In practice they were a nightmare: Limited software options, terrible battery life, brutally awful screens, ridiculously big and heavy. They were like a laptop computer crammed into a brick with all the useful features stripped out.

I knew a few people that loved them, but they were not ordinary people.

That's rather overstating things. They were limited, yes, but they were fine for doing email, taking notes, and playing text adventures, which was pretty much what I wanted them to do. This was the late '90s; nobody expected a pocket device to have a full-featured web browser and a massive library of apps. The batteries in mine were for good several days to a week of normal use. 480x240 greyscale was plenty for text-only work. They were certainly less powerful than a laptop, but they were also a lot cheaper, at least at the prices I was seeing in late '97. And they did well enough that several different manufacturers released several generations of machines each, over a period of years.

The Windows CE devices I saw had color screens with a comically narrow viewing angle, incredibly huge batteries that lasted a hilariously short amount of time, and required a fussy little pen to use since most operations could not be done by keyboard alone.

I'm not saying it was totally useless, or that people didn't find it "fine" for some tasks, but it was like a crippled notebook that could barely do any of those things. The only advantage it had was size, and even then it still weighed vastly more than any of the phones from that era. They still cost a small fortune, maybe half the cost of a decent laptop, but since they weren't a laptop or a phone you still had to get one of those anyway.

Compare with two competitors from that time, Danger Hiptop and Sharp Zaurus, took a very different approach: Keyboard centric, good battery life, limited functionality but focusing on specific things rather than trying to do everything.

I never used the later/color models, so that may be the difference. I'm sure it jacked up the battery burn. The B&W ones ran for a good while, and you could find low-end models for $150 or so.

As I recall, the pen was fiddly but not necessary; the screen was pressure-sensitive, so you could use a fingertip just fine, or the eraser end of a pencil. Modern capacitative touchscreens are much more accurate, but I sometimes miss being able to use any object as a stylus. :)

Those are hardware issues with devices from that era, and have little to do with the OS. The iPhone 1 was far more powerful than the CE devices.