News · 2 Mar 2011 · MTW Editorial Team
After much delays Windows Embedded Compact 7 (formerly known as Windows CE 7) is now finally available to the public. But the real question now is: Does it still matter? Lots of things have changed in the past couple of months that make this late release a bit underwhelming. First you have to remember that Windows Phone 7 is based on a different CE kernel (which is close to the CE 7 Kernel though) and developed by teams that are not even in the same business unit at Microsoft. As of right now the Windows Phone teams are probably closer to the Windows crew than the relatively small CE team. Secondly, the announcement that Windows 8 will run on ARM architectures is also seen as a nail in the coffin of Windows Embedded Compact primarily because Microsoft tablet strategy will be focused on bringing Windows 8 to the slate form factor and not CE + UI shell on top.
But there’s still a need for for thin clients especially in the enterprise sector and Microsoft has also recently shown that it’s planning to retire the regular HTPCs concept (running Windows x86) and focus on CE 7 + Media Center set-top boxes instead. As it is usually the case with Microsoft there’s a lot of overlap between their products so it’s always hard to guess how thing will end up being in the months and years to come. How will the Windows Phone CE Kernel evolve? Will Windows 8 slates really be ready for a mid 2012 release? You can head over Mary Jo Foley’s blog for a closer look at this new Embedded Compact 7 release.
Here a some of the some of the features that CE 7 support:
* Support for ARM v7
* New developer and designer tools
* New technology for creating user interfaces
* New SMP (symmetric multiprocessing) support for x86 & ARM, MIPS
* New multimedia player, with customizable UI
* New version of Internet Explorer (which is based on IE 7 with some “performance updates” from IE
* Flash 10.1 support (which requires an Adobe license by OEMs who want to include that feature)
* Silverlight for Embedded support
* Improved Connectivity to PCs, servers (NDIS 6.1 support)
source: Microsoft
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