Old Hardware Emulated - Windows Mobile 5.0

Working title for this post was "But Mama, That's Where The Fun Is!". Appropriate as by the middle 2000's, Windows Mobile was where all the action was at. The sky was only getting brighter for Microsoft as Palm was slowly imploding on itself. With Microsoft's mobile offerings becoming more widespread by the day, the Redmond Giant followed up with the newest version of WM, version 5.0, on May 2005. On the surface, it appears that little changed. However, the biggest change were "under the hood" with the incorporation of the .NET Compact Framework, which is basically the mobile version of .NET. Also, WM 5.0 introduced newer power-saving capabilities which often improved the battery life of devices by as much as 50%. WM backed up everything to flash memory. WinMobile would use a combination of RAM and flash memory to preserve battery life. This wasn't noticeable by the user.  As such, their is no data loss if power is lost. 

Windows Media Player was updated to version 10. Microsoft Office for WM 5.0 was enhanced as well and now included Pocket PowerPoint (PPP). Commuting office workers could now commit various PowerPoint sins while creating craptastic presentations on the go. However, the enhanced features of the new office would benefit office workers on the constant go. WM 5.0 also got enhanced Bluetooth, GPS, and Caller ID support. WM 5.0 supported graphics acceleration now, a first for WinCE.

MP3 playback was possible on the device emulator. Video playback is technically possible. However, one would see framerates in the single digits as the playback of the WMV8 encoded video at 320 by 200. Video playback was slow as molasses. It worked though, which is more than I could say about the CE 4.2 SDK. 

Not surprisingly, the new version of WM needed more powerful hardware. The new version needed at least 64MB's of RAM, along with the latest ARM processors. For developers, in order to use the WinMobile 5.0 SDK, one needs to install Visual Studio .NET 2005. I installed Visual Studio on my XP Virtual Machine running the other WinCE SDK's. Afterwards, one can use the SDK's. However, on my setup, no shortcuts for the various emulated configurations were created. As such, I had to launch WinMobile 5.0 (Phone and PDA) from the command line. Here is the command for those interest:

"C:\Program Files\Microsoft Device Emulator\1.0\DeviceEmulator.exe" "C:\Program Files\Windows CE Tools\wce500\Windows Mobile 5.0 Pocket PC SDK\DeviceEmulation\0409\PPC_USA_GSM_VR.BIN" /memsize 256 /skin "C:\Program Files\Windows CE Tools\wce500\Windows Mobile 5.0 Pocket PC SDK\Deviceemulation\Pocket_pc_phone\Pocket_PC_PE.xml" /s pocketpc_pe.dess /p /funckey 193

The device emulator will create a PDA virtual machine with a system rom, 256MB's of RAM and a Pocket PC skin. The device emulator is conforming to the specs of a Pocket PC handheld as defined by the xml file. 

WinMobile starts up, and it takes awhile. Unlike the CE 4.2 emulator which uses virtualization, the emulator for WinMobile 5.0 emulates an ARM processor. Not surprisingly, this results in a massive performance hit. At the same time, compatibility is greatly enhanced as most applications developers compiled their programs for the ARM processor. As such, like with the PocketPC 2003 emulator, I could take various applications on a test drive under the WinMobile 5.0 device emulator.

It's a safe bet that anything that worked under the 2003 emulator would work under WinMobile 5.0 as well. As such, I decided to only test programs that I had installation issues on the 2003 emulator. The UC Browser and Opera were installed on the emulated PDA. The UC Browser worked without issue and was able to connect to the internet. However, Opera was a different story. The SDK emulator emulates a WIFI connection using Ethernet. This is how the UC Browser was able to get on the Internet. However, Opera didn't support WIFI, and thus, couldn't get on the Internet. 


More recent WinMobile applications complain about not having the current version of the .NET Framework. As mentioned in previous articles, one would be given a false impression about the size of the WinCE library if looking for these programs today. The vast majority of software archives that features WinCE software are no longer active. Archive.org has archived many of these programs. Also, their are still a few software archives that feature WinCE applications, along with various  Symbian/J2ME programs. However, most CE applications were made for much-more recent versions of CE (6.0), which use the later versions of the .NET Framework. They won't work on WM 5.0. However, the opportunity to test these programs is coming as these device emulators will be tested as well. 

Microsoft could only see nothing but bright days ahead. Hopefully, nothing earth-shattering will occur within the next few years.....



Windows Embedded Compact (Wikipedia) - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Embedded_Compact

Windows Mobile 5.0 (Wikipedia) - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Mobile_5.0

Windows Mobile (Wikipedia) - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Mobile

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