Mike Temporale
06-24-2004, 08:30 PM
<div class='os_post_top_link'><a href='http://www.windowsfordevices.com/news/NS7866353660.html' target='_blank'>http://www.windowsfordevices.com/news/NS7866353660.html</a><br /><br /></div>"John Starkweather, product manager for Microsoft's Mobile and Embedded Devices Division, says the Windows CE Core offering, introduced in May, 2003 and priced at approximately $3 (or less) per device, was created to support "device makers who wanted to leverage the rich functionality of Windows CE to bring devices to market quickly, but didn't require the broad range of features such as media playback and browsing." More importantly, the low priced offering enables a minimally configured version of Windows CE to compete more aggressively for design wins in a wide range of cost-sensitive embedded applications that do not require the full spectrum of Windows CE features -- a market increasingly experiencing downward price pressure from royalty-free RTOSes and open source Linux."<br /><br /><a href="http://www.smartphonethoughts.com/images/ce3dollarbill.jpg"><img src="http://www.smartphonethoughts.com/images/ce3dollarbill-thm.jpg" alt="User submitted image" title="User submitted image"/></a><br /><i>Click the image to see a full size version</i><br /><br />This is a great article on what Microsoft has been able to achieve in little over a year with Windows CE. At $3 a license, you can be sure that a Smartphone license isn't much more than that. Which means the majority of money we spend on a new device goes back to the manufacturer, and not Microsoft.