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November 16, 1998

WinCE: Your Next OS?

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Notebook Competition
Windows CE 2.0-based handheld PCs are beginning to compete with notebook computers--they support printing, networking, color screens, and VGA adapters. With the upcoming handheld professional features, disk drives, parallel ports, and other devices will be supported, further improving these products' ability to compete against full-featured notebooks.

The first thing you'll notice about a new handheld PC is how much the desktop resembles the Windows 95/98/NT desktop, with shortcut icons for all the commonly used programs. Like the palm-sized devices, you can see only a single program running at a time, although switching between them is much easier with a handheld.

With the handheld PC, you get basically the same Pocket Outlook you get with a palm-sized PC; the user interfaces are slightly different--mostly due to the larger handheld screen--but the overall functionality is essentially the same.

You also get a set of tools that are collectively called Office for Windows CE, which includes stripped-down implementations of Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. Pocket Word supports font and paragraph formatting, bulleted and numbered lists, outlines, and a spell checker. Pocket Excel supports more than 110 calculation functions, most of the cell formatting from the desktop version of Excel, split and freeze panes, series and copy fill, and sorting features. Pocket PowerPoint has only the ability to display PowerPoint presentations one frame at a time without animations, transitions, sounds, or embedded objects. Pocket PowerPoint is also the only application able to display in full-sized VGA on handheld devices with a VGA adapter.

You'll find limitations as well in these tools. For example, you can't embed one type of CE Office document in another; a Word document can't contain an Excel spreadsheet; spell-checking is available only in Word. On the other hand, Windows CE Services file synchronization does a fairly good job of converting Excel, Word, and PowerPoint documents between the desktop and the handheld PC, although you'll lose any macros and some complex features in the conversion. You'll also find that E-mail attachments of these file types are converted by the synchronization services, which is a big help.

Windows CE 2.0 also includes Pocket Internet Explorer, which is an implementation of the Internet Explorer browser that supports some HTML, but it currently doesn't render most pages properly or support Java, client-side scripting, or audio. A terminal emulator program is also included for connecting to character-oriented host systems while you're on the road.

Networking is supported with an included driver for NE2000 interface cards. Printing can be accomplished on the handheld PC using the serial or infrared ports, as well as via the network interface; the only included printer driver supports Hewlett-Packard's PCL3 standard, but printer vendors may write and distribute their own as well.

Battery life varies by model, but most come with rechargeable batteries that last anywhere from eight to 25 hours, depending on the demands of the screen (color screens requires more battery power than grayscale ones).

With the upcoming Windows CE Handheld Professional Edition 3.0 (H/PC Pro)--expect to see devices by early next year--the handheld PC enters the domain of on-the-go computer for power users who need much of the power of a notebook computer. The inbox and Pocket IE have been significantly improved. H/PC Pro includes additional hardware device support: disk drives using the FAT32 file system; Universal Serial Bus, parallel port, and Fast IR connectivity; larger screens, capable of 640 by 480 pixels or 800 by 600 pixels with 256 colors; alternative input devices, such as a mouse or touchpad; and the Intel StrongARM and Hitachi SH4 CPUs. H/PC Pro also includes on-device synchronization support for Word and Excel files. Pocket Access is also provided for creating local databases (see sidebar story,"Professional Edition Improves E-Mail, Browser").

This direction will probably be the big winner for Microsoft, although Windows CE won't replace desktop and notebook systems for most folks for another couple of years. Windows 98 is the last of its breed, and Windows 2000 won't be the desired next-generation operating system for everyone. However, don't expect Microsoft to admit that Windows CE will replace Windows 98 any time soon; the politics and financial effects of this admission on Microsoft and notebook-computer vendors would be too problematic.

Extending The Product
Third-party Windows CE applications come in three flavors: communications apps, limited implementations of desktop applications, and development tools. Because of their memory and screen-space demands, most user applications target the handheld PC as the primary user platform.

Communications applications run the gamut from terminal emulators to Internet clients and fax software. You can even get a CE version of Symantec's PC Anywhere for taking control of your servers or desktop systems while you're on the road.

Desktop applications for which you can find CE implementations include Symantec's Act! and Multiactive's Maximizer contact managers and On The Go Software's Quicken ExpensAble 98, which is an expense-reporting tool that can exchange data with Intuit's popular accounting packages. Sybase and Oracle are offering CE implementations of their desktop database servers, which are further discussed below.