Do you remember the time before everyone had a mobile phone? Even what it was like to not have 24×7 internet access? It is nearing on 20 years since the smartphone revolution as we know it started, with the release of the iPhone in mid-2007.
History is littered with technologies which quickly faded, after everyone saw what followed them. In the mobile phone world, once people realised what they could do with a big, colourful screen, faster-and-faster mobile internet coverage and ubiquitous Wi-Fi, everything changed.
Not for the first time, Microsoft was a real leader in the field but managed to fumble the ball, while Apple and later Google harnessed fast-developing technology to give people an experience that was like magic compared to what they were used to.
The origin story of Windows Mobile
In the mid/late 1990s, Microsoft built a modular operating system called Windows CE (the CE bit doesn’t stand for anything, apparently – it’s sometimes thought it was “Compact Edition” but that’s not true). It could target a variety of different hardware types, since Intel x86 wasn’t really viable on a pocket-sized, battery-powered device, and CE could be heavily customized by the OEM using it. Essentially, a device maker could roll their own operating system using just the bits they needed for their specific hardware; it might have a screen, it might have a network, or it could be something totally custom.
Microsoft itself came up with some reference categories for mobile devices using CE underneath, the first of which was the Handheld PC.
HP Jornada 720 Handheld PC – one of the later and more capable “HPCs”
The thinking was that people could have a smaller, mobile device running something that looked a bit like Windows (albeit smaller in scale). It might use a stylus to control it, and it could be licensed in the same way that PCs were – i.e. the OEMs would pay Microsoft $10 or whatever for every device they sold. Microsoft would bundle a load of built-in apps like shrunken versions of Office, and 3rd parties might build their own apps to run on it too.
The initial batch of devices were seen as companions to the PC and communicated over a relatively slow cable or even using Infra-Red (remember IrDA?). Bear in mind that in the late 1990s, Wi-Fi as we know it didn’t exist and internet access from any mobile device would have been dial-up modem speed. GPRS data comms didn’t arrive until 2001, and even that was in the realm of 50-60 kilobits/second.
Competition for these companions were mostly things like Psion organisers or PalmPilots (if you don’t mind a bit of NSFW humour, check out what Sweary Brian Blessed had to say about them). It was a market that was growing amongst an enthusiastic user base, mostly tech-savvy and business-oriented and doing the kind of thing you might have had a Filofax for previously.
Other form factors
Handheld PCs evolved and were joined by other Windows CE form factors, like the Pocket PC, with Compaq’s iPaq being the most successful, arriving in early 2000.
The iPaq 3630 was one of the first consumer devices with a Lithium-ion battery, making it surprisingly light and powerful. If you wanted to expand usage, you could buy “jackets” that incorporated additional battery capacity and offered CF memory cards or PCMCIA slots to plug in Wi-Fi cards, modems and the like.
May 2001 – Some Microsoft spiv showing Tony & Cherie Blair around an iPaq with PCMCIA Wi-Fi card in a jacket, half the size and weight of a house brick
The Developer promise
Microsoft brass at the time could see the revenue opportunity of licensing Windows CE to handheld device makers, and the highly modular nature of Windows CE could be turned to other things like “headless” operations where it functioned just as an embedded control system. The Sega Dreamcast console famously used Windows CE and Microsoft had an effort (later called Windows Automotive) where they tried to persuade car companies to fit their software into the car.
If you’re interested, delve more into the history of this dead-end on The time Microsoft made a car stereo – The Auto PC Story, presented by ex-MSFTer, Andy Haslam.
Anyway, the architecture of Windows CE was such that it looked familiar-ish to developers who were used to writing software for Windows. Even though the underlying hardware was very different, you could build CE-targeted apps using Visual Studio, test them on the PC and then deploy them to your connected device.
At the time, some 3rd party apps were available for Windows CE devices – some licensed and some free. Generally, they were deployed by downloading an installer to the PC, then docking the device so the app could be side-loaded. At the time, a perfectly reasonable way of doing things. A UK company called Visual IT built a widely-used Tube app, to allow offline planning on the London underground. Everyone had it but now there isn’t even a screenshot of it online.
When Apple launched the iPhone in 2007 and then the App Store a year later, it revolutionized how you could get software quickly and at scale onto mobile devices. After that, Microsoft lost any advantage they might have had with developers already knowing their tools and some of the technologies shared between Windows and Windows CE. Professional developers flocked to the millions of iPhone users within a year or two of its initial release, even if the actual development environment was less than ideal.
The Windows Mobile Family grows
Windows Mobile was the collective name given to the variety of mobile devices Microsoft was working on (though during their gestation, they had many different branding eras). It’s a noteworthy distinction – Windows CE was the operating system that could be applied to all sorts of things, and Handheld PC, Pocket PC etc were software layers that sat on top, and defined a category of device that would be manufactured by a host of OEMs.
Archive.org’s snapshot of the Microsoft Mobile website, April 2003
In early 2002, the first of a whole new category of product was also launched – the Windows® Powered Smartphone (branding simplicity was never a Microsoft strength). At that point, mobile phones were either “candybar” (i.e. a single shape with a screen and some buttons) or “flip” (like the Motorola Razr). Some strayed a bit – like the Nokia “banana” phone with a slide-out cover over the keys (fun fact – when Neo answers the phone in the Matrix, it’s spring-loaded where the regular phone wasn’t… thereafter every 8110 user tried to flick it open because it looked so cool).
When the original Smartphone was launched, it featured a small colour screen and a keypad with a joystick/cursor pad for moving around the various menus. It was functional, and gave easy access to contacts, email and calendar, all the time using GPRS (aka 2.5G) to keep up to date.
Getting into the phone business was a complex affair – for premium handsets, the phone would invariably be bundled with a contract, meaning the device was really owned by the network at least until the contracted period was up. As a result, the networks expected to have complete control over how it worked, when it was updated and even what features should be enabled or not. Given that they were supplying and supporting the devices, that seemed fair enough at the time, though in hindsight one of the most revolutionary things about the iPhone (5 years later) was how it empowered the device maker over the network operator.
The first Smartphone launched worldwide was the Orange SPV, in London, in late 2002.
It really was an exciting time since there was nothing really comparable on the market, unless you strayed into Blackberry for being a portable email machine, or the various Nokia type phones (“feature phones”) for being really good at phoning & texting and having battery life measured by the week.
Motorola launched a flipphone version of the Windows Mobile Smartphone …
… and a variety of handsets continued to evolve (the Orange SPV C500, aka HTC Typhoon, becoming standard issue to everyone in Microsoft UK)…
Meanwhile, in the touchscreen, larger sized device world, there were also developments.
Microsoft built phone capability to run on the Pocket PC, essentially extending what had originally been an offline device to have a built-in radio, and the phone & messaging software to go with it. Compared to the Smartphone it was a much less good phone, and the battery life was not good; but then it had a nice big screen and could do a lot more…
Launched originally as the O2 XDA (and the catalyst for the device hacking community which still exists, XDA Developers), it heralded a load of larger and more capable devices which could be used for more than just the basics.
Both Smartphone and Pocket PC Phone evolved further, sprouting devices with slide-out keyboards (to compete with Blackberry).
HTC Vox
HTC Herald
Steve Ballmer famously mocked the original iPhone because it was expensive and didn’t have a keyboard so businesses wouldn’t want it. Right.
HTC was a very capable OEM who was happy to churn out devices that would be picked up and customized by the various networks; the Orange SPV was really an HTC Canary; the O2 XDA an HTC Wallaby and so on. The ultimate Pocket PC was arguably the HTC Universal, a clamshell device with twist & flip capability that had a forward-facing camera and was the first such device available supporting 3G/UMTS.
The networks were still too slow, the hardware wasn’t really capable enough, it was ferociously expensive, heavy and the battery life was terrible. But apart from that, it was fine.
Windows Mobile stumbled on until 2009, with its final release trying to catch up with the iPhone. Android was only getting started, with HTC making the very first device with a similar set of “throw everything at it” kind of design that was a hallmark of Windows Mobile.
Microsoft went on to throw Windows CE and the whole Windows Mobile ecosystem away, starting again with a whole new OS, hardware design and app development ecosystem. Windows Phone 7 was released to critical acclaim in late 2010, but it was too late. Android was getting a head of steam and Apple had already launched the iPhone 4. What might have been?
