CrunchGear over-simplify Windows CE/Windows Mobile OS relationship ?
CrunchGear are running a series of articles on the current models in the Smartphone market. 
This article is good, but the description of the relationship between Windows CE and Windows Mobile is that Windows Mobile is a subset of Windows CE. Strictly speaking Windows Mobile 5 is an operating system which is built from Windows CE. Windows CE 5.0 is a product which allows manufacturers of various types of devices to build operating systems for their products. Microsoft have at least 3 internal customers who use it in this way. There’s Windows Mobile for Automotive (Operating system for Cars and the like), an OS for Portable Media Centers (I think its called Windows Mobile for Portable Media Center) and finally there is Windows Mobile 5.0 which is currently a pair of operating systems for handheld devices. When the Windows Mobile 5.0 team build their operating system, they start by selecting a set of functionality from Windows CE which they want to include, then they add Windows Mobile specific drivers and a whole load of additional functionality like the Pocket Office applications and such.
This is the base OS which is then sent to OEMs to build into their phone and PDA equipment. In most cases, they will add other additional drivers and make other changes to the OS. There are quite a lot of requirements on the OEMs to keep functionality, in order to be able to use the various Microsoft trademarks. There is also some latitude for the OEMs to modify the operating system to better suit their devices. In the past some OEMs have even introduced platform specific bugs into some of the generally available functionality. Oops.
The Pocket PC operating system and the Smartphone operating system. Both of these OSs are built by a different team within Microsoft from the team who build Windows CE. In fact, the Windows CE team have just released a new version of their OS (Version 6.0), but it looks as though the next version of Windows Mobile (Whatever its called and numbered) will still be based around version 5 of Windows CE.
Its not entirely clear to me when, but “a future” version of Windows Mobile will see the Pocket PC and Smartphone OSs merge into a single entity. The functional similarities were more pronounced in version 5 than the 2003 version (For example using additional buttons from the Smartphone on the Pocket PC and the fact that both Pocket PC and Smartphone now use static memory), but the codebases will finally merge and mean that developers like me can distribute a single binary which supports both Pocket PC and Smartphone (Presumably this distinction will disappear).
http://www.gemini4smartphone.com – Windows Mobile Smartphone based RSS Feed reader and Netcasting client.
