Windows Mobile

History [edit]

Windows in your pocket, literally

Pocket PC 2000, released on 19 April 2000, was exactly what the name promised: Windows shrunk onto a PDA, with a Start menu, pocket versions of Word and Excel, and a stylus, because the interface was made of desktop-sized targets. Microsoft renamed the platform Windows Mobile on 23 June 2003, formally folding phones into the Windows brand family.

Its argument was familiar from the desktop: one operating system, many manufacturers, and your office everywhere. It licensed to anyone, and mostly that meant HTC, the Taiwanese firm that at one point built around 80 percent of all Windows Mobile phones, many of them rebadged by carriers under their own names. For IT departments it was the sensible choice: Exchange email, corporate policy, familiar management. By the mid-2000s Windows Mobile sat with BlackBerry and Symbian at the top of the smartphone market, such as it then was.

Obsolete in an afternoon

The iPhone's June 2007 debut did not compete with Windows Mobile so much as make it look like a different, older category of thing. Windows Mobile 6.5 in October 2009 put bigger buttons over the same stylus-era interface, and even Microsoft's own executives barely defended it. The market share numbers fell through 2008 and 2009 while Microsoft, having seen the same iPhone as everyone else, worked on something that shared no code with the past.

The reset

That something was unveiled on 15 February 2010 as Windows Phone 7: new interface, new developer model, and no compatibility whatsoever. Every Windows Mobile application, and every developer relationship built over a decade, was written off in one keynote. The old platform got a quiet wind-down; its Marketplace, opened only in 2009, stopped taking new submissions in 2011 and was switched off on 22 May 2012.

The reset produced a genuinely original design and arrived three years too late to matter. Windows Phone never escaped single-digit market share and has its own entry here. Windows Mobile's real legacy is the counterexample it provides: it proved a licensed, manufacturer-neutral phone OS could work, which is the model Android executed, against it and everyone else, a decade later.