Nevermind quitting smoking (though that is important), using it to help get off of snacks is really quite interesting haha. Never would've thought of that
I bought one of these for $89 in December 2010 and made a video about it at the time. It also happened to be the last thing I ever bought at a Kmart store.
I can't remember the exact last thing I bought at a k-mart in general but I definitely remember visiting them in the mid-late 2010s specifically out of pity and wanting to get a last glimpse as they were dying. I don't think you can count on one hand the amount left in the entire 6-state area of New England if there are any at all.
Ah, Windows CE. Reminds me of my favorite joke. "Have you heard of the latest Windows OS, it's a merging of previous systems. CE ME NT, hard as a rock, dumb as a brick."
"Probably the only good piece of software on this entire machine." Doom co-creator John Romero wrote a WinCE game called Hyperspace Delivery Boy. Might want to give that a go.
From a developer perspective, windows CE was low key great. It allowed you to “roll your own” OS where you can select exactly what packages, libraries, and drivers to include into an OS deploy, for embedded systems etc. You could make Windows code run in 1MB of RAM!
stuff like this is why Windows used to be great cuz stuff like that is just so fucking impressive although it's kind of hilarious how janky they did some shit back then which is now affected us for decades because of insistence on backwards compatibility in this weird spaghetti code mess......but hey at least it's not all held together by a fucking coconut
This, again. Windows CE was universally reviled only when Microsoft and their partners tried to sell it in a laptop-like form factor (that is, the "Handheld PC" and "WebPad" form factors). Turns out that when people buy a laptop-like device with the Windows logo on it, they expect Windows compatibility. Microsoft made the same mistake of selling Windows-without-Windows-compatibility again with Windows RT (which despite being Windows NT-based, didn't run Windows desktop apps).
@@GeistInTheMachine With the difference Windows CE had a graphical OS image builder (where you could pick from factor and what you want to include/exclude), came with a pre-configured UI, and Microsoft offered a source license where you could make modifications without having to release your changes to everyone (like the GPLv2 mandates). As long as you paid the per-device OS license, Microsoft was happy.
well, compared to the real time OS the Blackberry phones used, WinCE architectually did have a lot of weird constraints, but it was great that could customize it to roll exactly what one wanted - and the AutoPC variant supported voice commands (is what I worked with to build a turn-by-turn navigation systems for vehicles back in 2000. Combined with an ATT wireless data packet network (to sync email and local traffic info) and GPS, it was possible to build a working navigation system in 2000 that wouldn't show up on smartphones until many years later.
Windows CE still refuses to die. I've got clients that are still using their Windows CE inventory keeping apps, we run them as virtual machines in Azure and then they access them through Android based handheld scanners. If it didn't work so well I would be a lot more interested in finding a replacement, but everything we've demoed so far just sucks.
Oh God, this bloody thing! My Aunt bought one of these from eBay for my cousin over a decade ago, she bought it because it was cheep and she always shops to get the "best" deals. I remember her telling the specs over the phone and I told her not to get it but she went ahead and then the shenanigans happened! It wasn't this exact model, she had a black unbranded one which had 2GB of storage and I think 128MB of RAM with some ARM CPU running WinCE. This thing had a fault whereby the WinCE image would corrupt itself ever 2~3 days and you had to reflash it from an SD card, I'm not sure if it was a bad image or something hardware related. She only got this solution because the seller knew this was a common fault and said this was the fix. When it was "working", the thing couldn't go browse to sites that was more than text otherwise IE would crash. I get that this version of IE wasn't designed for that but most people who had this would have tried the full Facebook/Twitter/UA-cam etc... sites, the mobile ones did work bit not as well when compared to the browsers in iOS and Android at the time. The UA-cam app did work surprisingly well however I'm sure whatever URL/API it was using has long since been killed by Google, I think all the other web shortcuts were affiliate links, at least that's what I'm seeing in that URL when Sean tried them. When she came to the realisation that this was just trash, she tried to send it back for a refund. Unfortunately, she made the rookie mistake of contacting the seller directly as opposed to via eBay. The seller gave her some random address in China which was initially rejected and then another address which I think took in the package. The seller claimed that the package wasn't received and refused the refund, she tried to issue one via eBay but I think the refund window had expired and she couldn't log a case because of the aforementioned contact mistake. Ultimately she accepted that she had lost the money and always listened to me when giving computer purchasing advise since.
I remember (in Germany) TV reports were warning against these pseudo-laptops, because the browser simply got stuck (and locked up the whole OS?) when loading many web pages by lack RAM and CPU power to handle modern stuff full of scripts (dynamically resizing pages etc.), and also video ran with 3fps or also crashed if too large or in newer formats.
That video showed that the UA-cam application was very lackluster back then, only being able to play videos in a small size (as having it fullscreen would make it lag).
I have about a dozen in a shoebox with a pair of drives, one internal, one USB. All of them worked fine when I went through them to check their contents a couple months ago. (Now watch them all be dead the next time I check them.)
I had used a Windows CE device for flight navigation back in the day. That was the beginning of the "electronic flight bag" era, and it had GPS-referenced approach plates and charts. It was pretty snappy, but it was the only thing I was running on it.
Ah yes, the 99$ CVS/Walgreens Sylvania Windows CE Netbook Used to see those pop up right at the Holiday season and a month later eBay would be flooded with them once everyone found out they were terrible. Fun times lol
Windows CE is still alive, it's used in HP's enterprise printers. They still pay for support from Microsoft. Source: I was a developer at HP in 2019, and all enterprise devices still ran CE 6 under the hood, albeit with a new modern UI. We were limited to programming with .NET 2.0 Compact which was greeeaaaattt (sarcasm)
The UA-cam app might work if you can fool it into connecting to a YT2009 instance instead of the UA-cam legacy API. These laptops were made by a company called WonderMedia, and many of them also run Android. Many of these don't use blobs or MSATA cards for storage, instead using USB flash drives soldered to the main board
I tried installing Android on mine, but I never succeeded. I did get Arch Linux running though, without a GUI, once I tried getting a GUI it broke the system lol. Windows CE on this thing runs DOS software though.
"...world's worst keyboard"? No. The flat membrane keyboards (Atari 400 as an example) were pure hell to type on. Anything with any degree of travel (even typing on a touchscreen) are vast improvements.
How about those keyboards where you had to press a certain key and then a letter to get statement like print, for, etc.? I am thinking the calculator like keyboard on a Bally Astrocade.
@@alexandershendi7428 corrona leaf springs... they are so scrachy and are so stiff that they literally give you rsi after a year. At least you can get some response time and dont have to feel the scratchy and extreme mush of corona leaf springs
Windows CE was absolutely amazing. It ran multitasking applications with gui on very low power risc cpus, very little memory, and had a full network stack and usb plug&play. I used a couple of HTC windows mobile smartphones for almost a decade before moving to android. Some people got in earlier than that with windows PDAs.
The company I work for still manufactures equipment that uses Windows CE. It seems like they're going to keep at it until the very end of extended support, which I think is in 2028.
I have a decent CRT TV from Sylvania. I’ve also seen other electronics made by Sylvania in thrift stores. They’re quite an interesting company, and I hope to see more of Sylvania on your channel, soon.
those unused pads on the board are actually for mini pcie, sort of a cousin / predecessor to nvme. it ended up getting phased out in favor of nvme. if those pads were populated you could theoretically hook up a gpu to the tiny machine, albeit limited to one lane
This was a birthday present for me when I was younger... If only they knew how useless it was, even then... Finding programs for Windows CE was in itself nearly impossible back in the day, barely managing to source a working version of 7-zip (which would forget its installed every time because of the *volatile system partition*). The manual wasn't even for the device in question, stating that it needs clearance on the bottom for the fan that doesn't exist, and showing a different version of Windows in the documentation as well. I can confirm, getting it when it was still being sold new, that it could not browse websites even of the time. It was unusable in netbook terms, and not being able to run anything else I was familiar with made it a paperweight before it even broke. What was I supposed to do, tell my parents to take back my useless birthday present? No happy memories with this machine...
_"volatile system partition"_ The Eee 701 was similar with its Xandros OS (Debian Linux based) using volatile (temporary) directories overlay mounted over /usr, etc. Any changes to system files would disappear next time it was booted. One had to jump through hoops to permanently modify the system.
@@cyberyogicowindler2448 I forget exactly how I dealt with that. Pretty sure that I only ran software installed via apt. Getting write access to the underlying system mounts wasn't too difficult though IIRC. I mostly used the SD card slot for a bootable XP install. For user data I soldered a 32GB flash drive (bare circuit board) to the unused USB pins on the mini-PCIe slot. I put a switch on its power rail since IIRC XP got very confused if it was present at boot time.
I can't believe you released a video on this little idiot! I just got one of these from Goodwill for $10 last week and I'm absolutely in love with it. I couldn't find a power adapter for it, so I modded it with USB-C charging! I'm currently getting Debian installed on it so I can use it as a teeny tiny SSH client to manage my big server. For some reason, I'm really amused by the idea of using this dumb little trash netbook to do Real Serious Work remotely on my servers. And yeah, that wifi adapter is awful, I don't understand why it gets so hot. I'm absolutely certain it was an off the shelf USB adapter that they ripped the board out of and just soldered wires to. It should be as simple as finding a modern USB wifi adapter with a driver supported by the OS and replacing it. The big mystery blob chip is probably actually the keyboard controller. The WM8505 module has its own flash storage for the main system drive. I've seen other versions of this board which have no flash on the module, but use a hacked-up USB flash drive instead. Probably this board would have supported M.2 instead of the onboard flash.
Goodwill Tenneva doesn't allow computers. If you see one of their trucks and you look at the "We are Unable to Accept the Following", you will see "Computers/Monitors" on the list. I hate SW VA/NE TN. If I had the money, I would leave the area in an instant. Unfortunately, my parents don't wanna go with me if I do so. Why is Goodwill Tenneva the only one like this? Why are their "Unnacepted Items" rules segregated?
I used to have a Siemens WinCE tablet ("Simpad") and a NEC WinCE "notebook" MobilePro 900 back in the early 2000s. They were usable, but software was scarce. The NEC had, however, one very strong point: preinstalled MS Office, including Word, Excel and Access. I could edit files on the go and then transfer them easily to my main PC. In fact there were even hardware buttons to launch these programs and they launched almost instantly (were they in ROM?), which wasn't the case for most computers these days. I still have lots of downloaded apps in the WinCE format on my PC, like Foxit PDF reader, iSilo ebook reader, MiniStumbler (WiFi sniffer) and many more.
Will never forget this, that was my first computer with Internet. My parents bought it for me on a Sunday when they saw it on sale in the paper. It was hideous red and the UA-cam app never worked right. Thank you for bringing back Great memories.
thank you so much for making this video! i found one of these for very cheap in a local thrift (?) shop a few months ago. it was under the "nativa" brand (the name was written in the vaio font). it had no charger and came with a spanish keyboard. i bought it immediately but couldn't for the life of me find any information about it online. since i saw the battery on mine was spicy as well and couldn't plug it in, i sorta assumed/pretended it was dead and didn't try to look inside it much further. i figured i could eventually just stick a raspberry pi inside it and say that was the plan all along! now that i know someone else has done it, the thought of running linux on it as-is is gonna hold a large portion of my brain hostage for a while. and i have a lot more information to go off on. i just need to find a compatile power adaptor....
My experience with CE was a never ending trail of tears, from not only a user perspective, but also software development and board bring-up perspective. Trying to make a mobile solution that was actually usable was an exercise in being repeatedly kicked in the balls while on a trapeze, due to the infinitely random and crippling compromises of processing power, RAM, and networking hardware support, to say nothing of the wildly differing UIs that were mostly terrible. (with the UI from Palm being the best by a mile; their hardware was extremely underpowered.)
I had this thing under the Meteroite brand running Android and I absolutely hated it! It deleted all the data and broke the Android installation all the time. And the fact that this ran Android 2.2 which was very much not optimized for it to be used in landscape orientation made it even worse, especially when the touchpad wouldn’t rotate.
Until a few years ago at my job, the scanning devices we used for taking inventory ran a version of Windows CE. They were the worst manmade devices I have ever had the displeasure of using. They crashed about once per day, could never connect to the network, were slow as molasses, and for some reason they would work especially poorly for me specifically. They gave us new ones using android a year ago and despite running the same web-service, I no longer wish to jump out the break room window every time I make a minor mistake navigating the UI
Yes, my brother brought it (German counterpart branded “jaytech” but the FW was identical) from the “friend” with claim that “UA-cam works fine there” It wasn’t
1:36 OMG that "NO DISASSEMBLE" flag is just too much 😂 8:39 Whoa, a Sony Spressa! I had one of those at work circa 2000. CD-ROM via USB 1.1! The horror! XD
I wonder how the hardware would handle a lightweight distro of Linux? Might be able to squeeze a bit of extra performance and battery life out of this thing
Got one of these bad boys for the cheap about a decade ago now. Wired up the UART to get the U-boot splashes, thought I don't think I was able to interrupt it on this one for some odd reason. I remember a neat feature was that you could just run whatever from the SD card on boot, so you could have one OS installed on the thing (In my case WinCE and a few games), while having a separate SD card with Debian when you wanted to go full Hackerman. 😆
Windows CE laptops in the 90s was definitely a thing. I remember watching the Computer Chronicles doing a spot on them and wanting one. Better battery life as a full laptop, thinner and lighter, and used ROM instead of a HDD. In the age of netbooks they were worthless but they had their day.
back in 2000 became expert on WinCE in its AutoPC incarnation. It was designed to go in an auto center console and could accept a vocabulary of voice commands for hands free use. In those days ATT had a wireless packet data service so we could get email access and traffic information delivered to the console. And then the company I worked for had a visual turn by turn navigation app that ran on WinCE. Went about navigating a major metroplex using this system in 2000 to test it. Many years before such things were finally a reality as mapping apps on smart phones. This got shown in a joint Microsoft and Yagisaki demo using a BMW at a major auto tradeshow but the company failed to get adequaete funding so I moved on. Microsoft could have been ruling this space years ahead of others if it had kicked a few million toward this company - and WinCE would have had a niche to justify its existence outside of PDA market - with cellular modem of packet data and gps it had all the ingerdients of the smart phone we would see later on.
My work was using Windows CE Panel PCs for displays for our industrial controllers up until last year. I should steal one and see what I can do with it.
Windows CE variants lived on in Windows thin-terminals for a number of years after. I preferred them to the Windows 7 (and higher) embedded systems because they were far simpler and easier to manage in some ways.
I had this exact WiFi card back in the days. It was an OEM module sold readily in china and mounted in some PC cases. It was quite unreliable and drivers were extremely unstable under both Windows and Linux. It was always hot, to a point of finger-burning-hot, so nothing wrong with your unit ;)
A number of midrange ($5-20K) oscilloscopes sold today still run on Windows CE (like the Keysight 3000G and 4000G series, and the LeCroy WaveSurfer 3000Z and 4000HD series). Keysight has been migrating its WinCE products to Linux (like the 1000 series), but LeCroy is kinda stuck, since their entire software stack is super tightly dependent on the Windows APIs, so they may end up needing to migrate even their lower-end models to Windows Embedded (like their more expensive scopes have done for years and years already).
May be they used WinCE because it is more realtime-capable (just like DOS) than regular MS Windows. But for sure there are also Linux versions suited for this purpose.
I had bought one of these units back in the day for fun. The interesting thing was the company that was selling this one specifically had a skin overtop of WindowsCE and you couldn't get to the regular desktop. Except, once the unit booted to the regular desktop. Just once. After that it was stuck at that silly skin. It was fun to tool around with but I never considered it to be a serious computer.
Windows CE is one of my all time favorite operating systems. Everybody forgets that back in the 90's and 2000's the only alternatives handheld junkies like myself had were things like PalmOS, GEM and QNX. WinCE felt like you were carrying a piece of your desktop with you. I have a Newton and an eMate, but I don't enjoy playing with them nearly as much as I do with my old Windows Palmtops (20 years late and I'm still not calling them HPCs, take a hike Ballmer).
The first Windows CE laptop was the Psion Netbook Pro (I own one), which was a very serious and expensive device for special (industrial and business) purposes, because it had 8h battery life when any regular x86 PC laptop only had about up to 2h. To install a driver, you will need to put it on SD card, but it will be hard to find existing drivers for these anyway. Later Win CE "netbooks" were mostly scam-like trash. Famous was the brand "Q-Book".
@@cyberyogicowindler2448 Yea, I have one too. Never liked the built-in battery, especially with the colour screen drawing a lot more power. The earlier Visors used AAA cells, could just carry a couple of spares for when they ran down. (To this day I avoid built-in batteries whenever possible.)
Someone mentioned Psion, albeit one of their CE devices, but Psion was a pretty significant handheld player in the UK, maybe also Europe, throughout the 1990s. The Series 3 set them up pretty well, and the ergonomics of the Series 5 were rated well enough for Planet Computers to collaborate with one of the original designers to do their Gemini device in 2018. Psion's EPOC operating system eventually became Symbian OS and was rather more widely used.
these windows ce things always seemed cool because it made me think i could run older pc games on it and multitask. but it could only run special windows ce programs that nobody actually made .and you couldn't even multi task so you may as well use windows 1.0 or any of the other mobile systems that existed back then
Woah this threw me back in time. I remember seeing this, an odd Sylvania Android tablet, and some other Interesting... electronics back in the day at CVS
I too worked at a CVS in 2011. If I recall, this sat behind the counter near the cigarettes. A few folks came in and asked about it after seeing it in the Sunday flier (along with the 10/$10 albacore tuna). I would tell them to not spend their money on this. It just looked so sad.
Windows CE is like older mainframe systems that operate banking systems. I think that in decades to come we will still see devices running this still going. So many devices running CE that people don't realise.
Yeah I remember when these things showed up in drugstores. I’ve always wanted to know what the weird Windows CE OS was like since that thing was different on like every device. At the time $99 was above my “buy weird crap” threshold and I’ve regretted not buying one so thanks for the video - looks like it was just as awkward and weird as I imagined.
Finally someone does a proper video on one of these devices. This brought back huge nostalgia for me as someone who used to tinker with these Sylvania / Craig UMPCs. At one point I had quite a bit of software including a few decent albeit older games running on them, such as Duke Nukem 3D and an rpg game that I think must've been Elder Scrolls Daggerfall or something. That was fun, but the actual productivity of the device felt super limited. Then I remember getting an early version of Android to work on the device and it was pretty snazzy though janky since there was no proper touchscreen.
Windows CE still exists today in some devices in the retail shopping world. I used to use a scan gun that had Windows CE on it to run inventory checks a few years ago. Another place you can find it (if you know how to spot it) is on self-shopping devices at some supermarket chains.
Oh my god, I had one of these as a kid but I completely forgot about it. I think I bought it from CVS for like $100 with birthday money, but it was so useless I ended up returning it.
It's not as weird as it sounds that a Zip Drive worked. Most USB Zip Drives present as a normal generic mass storage device, and will work on any device that supports flash drives. Even my car's headunit can play media off of Zip Disks.
Back when I was working in a budget department store across the pond as a late-teen (nearly 15 years ago now) my department got a delivery of similar netbooks to these (I think the brand was Zoostorm?) with WindowsCE and an ARM Based CPU on it, think it sold for £100 at the time. None of us had any idea what ARM was at the time and found it curious... All the apps on the netbook had 'For Arm' listed on their shortcuts, which we also found wierd. We advertised the crap out of them, but the store didn't sell too many of them and they ended up being returned a lot due to the public finding out that x86 applications wouldn't run on them. When the store closed down for good, they were still in storage. I was tempted to buy one for univeristy... but I bought a MSI Wind when they came out. Definately a nostalgia trip watching a video on these things again...
Oh man, The Core Pocket Media Player. Halcyon days indeed. TCPMP was *the* way all of us in the Pocket PC and Palm communities watched our media files. Loading your giant 1GB SD card up with 512x384 xvid episodes of The Next Generation.
I have been trying to figure out what this laptop was that I saw in a display case in big lots when I was a kid, cannot believe you finally found it this is awesome
imagine if we slap a raspberry into dis thing, like completely mod into something else we actually can use for light web browsing, media player, or as a back up system
i actually remember seeing one of these things at my local bowling alley. It was in one of those arcade games where you have to try and cut a string and let the prize fall to the bottom.
My mom owned one of these! She actually really liked it, but unfortunately, it died within six months. I think it was just low-quality eMMC storage that was never designed to last.
I remember those laptops making a resurgence in 2012 / 2013 online, this time running Android (either 2.2 or 2.3). They usually had the exact same internals, so if you really wanted to, you could just put Windows CE on a SD card and run that. They ran terribly, but I really wanted one for some reason, it was so cool in my teenage mind. Some people ported Debian on them, so it made them kinda useful, but it used a horribly outdated version of the Linux kernel (the one found in Android 2), so it must be extremely unusable nowadays.
The Mini PCIe slot only has USB wired up to it and it seems like those USB traces are also connected to the Wi-Fi module in the screen. So it was intended for a USB Mini "PCIe" form-factor Wi-Fi adapter. It can't be for a 3G module since there is no place for a SIM card slot. The blob chip isn't the flash storage, it's the keyboard controller. The flash storage is soldered onto the SoM (System on Module) that has the WonderMedia CPU on it.
I bought a Sharp Mobilion TriPad back when they were blowing them out for some ridiculously inexpensive price. Came with Windows CE and a PCMCIA slot that supported about 5 compatible devices. The actual device was for its' time amazing, just there was zero compatibility beyond what came out of the box and a couple of 3rd party devices. CE was weird yes - just a bit badly timed methinks. Thanks for the blast from the past...
If only Kmart hadn't left SW VA and NE TN for stupid U-Haul before the rest of the fucking US. If only everybody knew about how magical adult adoption was so I could get out of my communist hellhole. #IHateMyArea #AdultAdoption
Not sure if this was mentioned, but it’s possible to use the LG burner as a USB drive by holding down the eject button for three seconds while the tray is open and connected to a USB port. 6:32
Bought a version of this at Kmart in 2010 ... Worked great for the time... I attemped a Android 2.2 upgrade and it bombed. Went back to CE... Attempted to upgrade to CE version 7, bricked the device....
There used to have a lot of these things advertised as “laptop” in china in around the year I believe 2007, equipped arm926ejs with 64mb ram, sold for around 80 dollars brand new. These thing could run Debian armed, much useful than real laptop in 2007
It was sold in the US, in fact, in a slightly altered form as the Timex Sinclair 1000, with 2K of RAM. Also sold in a different case with 16K as the TS1500. The TS1500 had a chiclet keyboard, and bore a passing resemblance to the Commodore 116. Anyway, the TS machines didn't fare very well, but often got bought cheaply ($49 by the end of its run) and used to trade-in against a C64 for a $100 rebate.
@@MarkTheMorose thank you. I did wonder how Sir Clive Sinclair's bits sold overseas. He was a quintessentially British eccentric. 2Kb of RAM? Lucky sods, we got 1Kb to start with, with a 16Kb plug in pack coming later, and wobbled far too much, resetting everything. Did you get the Vic20 over there too? I'd assume so, Commodore is/was a US company.
@@foznoth I'm in the UK too. ;) The VIC-20 was very successful in the US, the first computer to sell 1 million units, I believe. I think it actually first launched in Japan, oddly, before the US and then Europe. Some of its earliest games were written in Japan. I think Commodore was originally founded in Canada, but had various headquarters in different countries, possibly for tax (evasion?!) purposes. Trying to market the black-and-white, mute ZX81 in the US against something like the VIC was never likely to succeed, and really, none of the British micros did well over there, as Sinclair, Acorn, and Amstrad all discovered.
You know what's even worse? Its predecessor, the ZX80. It not only had the worst keyboard ever made, but it also had no dedicated input chip or video processor. Meaning that when you typed something, it couldn't display the screen.
I was wanting to collect one of these for a while and just not seeing one cheap enough on eBay relative to how cheap is was even new, but then I found a no-brand GPS device at a thrift store that is literally a Windows CE tablet complete with desktop. Remarkably, it claims to be a Windows CE 6.00 build *from 2014* when CE 6 was already only in extended support.
Hi, Back in the day i purchased 3 of them - one for me and 1 for each child We all have yahoo mail , it even came with a cut down word and excel. There was a option which was supplied free with a unix install and android install on SD card 2 work, the 3rd actually does but has a cracked screen - i turn them on every 6 months just to see if they still work ( batteries are dead or possibly only runs for 5 minutes ) I may be confusing a feature with a old HP 102 mini, but i think if they have a SD card i just boot regular dos of it ( i know the HP102 does as it has Linux Puppy on the hard drive
You also need to power them on once per year because flash memory is DRAM with 1 year refresh rate. So try to read the whole flash (scandisk, fsck or whatever, or at least run it 5 minutes) to permit it to perform wear levelling/rewrite itself, else the data fade away and so erase itself (the newer type/more memory, the faster they die).
Back then, I bought a fully generic version of this running android off Ebay for $85. I was just a kid, and had to save up money for MONTHS. I did use it for a number of years, though, before android being the steaming pile of garbage it is slowed down to an unusable speed. And there was no point in refreshing it as most apps had moved on and wouldn't be reinstallable. A few years later, after I got more seriously into computers, I tried to install Linux on it, and did end up accidentally installing Windows CE instead, and found the experience equally terrible :P A part of me is a little sad I wiped out all those years I had in those android apps. But then I remember how slow it had become in the end.
@@InfernosReaper Basically, I had tried a whole bunch of stuff to try to install linux, and none of it had worked so far, so I just went "screw it" and downloaded every OS installer relating to this machine I could find, and just tried writing each one to a card and trying to boot it. Well, it turns out the WIndows CE installer doesn't ask any questions; If you boot it, it just takes over and automatically flashes to internal memory.
These were also sold over in the UK by Maplins, except they used a custom Linux install from the factory. Picked one up as a note taking netbook, but the things limited battery life made it a poor option compared to a Psion 5MX. WiFi on it wasn't able to do the better security system that I'd switched my WiFi over to so mostly used it on ethernet myself. Oh, and watch out, it's REALLY voltage sensitive. Blew mine out by using the wrong charger that was off by 3 volts?
Modern electronics barely survive more than 0.5V overvoltage (unless it is very high resistance) because chips pull it down by an internal zener diode (against ESD etc.) that burns if fed with high current at slightly higher voltage.
just like doom, first ever linux needed a 32-bit processor like a 386 to be able to run in the first place. I'd rather not talk about the performance though :D
I think Linux actually does require at least a 16-bit CPU with an MMU (or an emulated MMU) for it to be ported to it. But yes, pretty much any computer of the last 30 years can handle Linux.
I remember seeing these devices in stores and wanting one just to mess with it. Windows CE devices were always so weird and interesting to me at the time.
I'm glad I got a real Netbook that ran actual Windows XP, played external DVDs, recognised my external backup HDD, and did everything else my desktop did, Plus, it was very sturdy and kept on running for many years. My model cost about 500 DM (at that time about $1000) in 1990's money at my local electronics shop, but I got a special deal through my cellphone carrier. That Netbook accompanied me everywhere, and I might still have it today if I hadn't given it to a friend (after upgrading it to Windows 7) whose laptop had been stolen. The Surface I bought after that wasn't as capable, despite being newer.
I have one of these too and that Wi-Fi adapter also gets burning hot inside. It's funny that the PCB was clearly made to have a USB connector soldered onto it, almost like they repurposed parts for a USB Wi-Fi dongle.
No, no, no, no. An E-cigarette will NOT help you live a healthier life as a smoker. It's an absolute shame to see AR advertising an addictive product. We just can't let UA-camrs get away with these sponsored lies. The NordVPN privacy claim bs was enough but this even tops it.
Vaping is way healthier than smoking. You must be ignorant of all the crap that's in a cigarette. Vape juice is basically just the stuff from an asthma inhaler + nicotine, and nicotine on its own is not dangerous unless you overdose.
Go to TryFum.com/ACTIONRETRO or scan the QR code and use code ACTIONRETRO to get your free FÜM Base when you order your Journey Pack today!
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I never comment on creator's sponsors, but this one is weird.
I chose this sponsor because, as a former heavy smoker, this kind of thing can really help quitting. I like it a lot for that reason.
2:30 minutes of ads is wild... anything above 1 minute is already bad enough. I'm really happy about Sponsorskip these days...
Nevermind quitting smoking (though that is important), using it to help get off of snacks is really quite interesting haha. Never would've thought of that
I bought one of these for $89 in December 2010 and made a video about it at the time. It also happened to be the last thing I ever bought at a Kmart store.
Do you still have it by any chance? Would be interesting to see your take on it revisiting it nowadays
@@Connie_TinuityErrorno I think he got rid of it years ago
And now no one knows what a blue light special is.
Kmart left SW VA and NE TN first. :(
I can't remember the exact last thing I bought at a k-mart in general but I definitely remember visiting them in the mid-late 2010s specifically out of pity and wanting to get a last glimpse as they were dying.
I don't think you can count on one hand the amount left in the entire 6-state area of New England if there are any at all.
Ah, Windows CE. Reminds me of my favorite joke. "Have you heard of the latest Windows OS, it's a merging of previous systems. CE ME NT, hard as a rock, dumb as a brick."
Someone's been working on a Windows CE compatibility layer for modern Windows, so Windows CEMENT is real now lol
I heard someone joke calling Windows ME "mistake edition"
@@gusty7153 The Japanese "Troubled Windows" flash animation called it "Miserable Edition"
@@fnjesusfreak hah
Win CE makes you Wince.
"Yeah this is fine" while playing tiny Doom CE is very much a vibe.
Ok
"Probably the only good piece of software on this entire machine."
Doom co-creator John Romero wrote a WinCE game called Hyperspace Delivery Boy. Might want to give that a go.
At least through 2015, Chevy was still using Windows CE to run their in-car entertainment systems.
This is one of the laundry list of reasons that people don't trust the quality of US automakers' vehicles anymore.
Oh, that's why they sucked...
@@longbottlechevy has sucked for a long time though, at least ford has sorta held up but it’s not like they’re not going downhill too.
Ford used it up until 2014 when they replaced it with QNX
@@theformerkaiser9391thankfully. MyFord Touch was horrible.
"So... Zip drives! I guess they're unreliable!"
*laughs in 1999 click-of-death*
the internal ones seemed to be better; also the later models were a lot worse than the earlier ones, guess they made em more cheaply or something.
was that your personal red ring of death
The clicks of death were due to a failing power brick, not the internal mechanism.
@@YoshiNoir well then i guess that explains why the internal ones were reliable lol
the USB Ones are very unreliable
From a developer perspective, windows CE was low key great. It allowed you to “roll your own” OS where you can select exactly what packages, libraries, and drivers to include into an OS deploy, for embedded systems etc. You could make Windows code run in 1MB of RAM!
stuff like this is why Windows used to be great cuz stuff like that is just so fucking impressive although it's kind of hilarious how janky they did some shit back then which is now affected us for decades because of insistence on backwards compatibility in this weird spaghetti code mess......but hey at least it's not all held together by a fucking coconut
This, again. Windows CE was universally reviled only when Microsoft and their partners tried to sell it in a laptop-like form factor (that is, the "Handheld PC" and "WebPad" form factors). Turns out that when people buy a laptop-like device with the Windows logo on it, they expect Windows compatibility. Microsoft made the same mistake of selling Windows-without-Windows-compatibility again with Windows RT (which despite being Windows NT-based, didn't run Windows desktop apps).
Like Linux?
@@GeistInTheMachine With the difference Windows CE had a graphical OS image builder (where you could pick from factor and what you want to include/exclude), came with a pre-configured UI, and Microsoft offered a source license where you could make modifications without having to release your changes to everyone (like the GPLv2 mandates). As long as you paid the per-device OS license, Microsoft was happy.
well, compared to the real time OS the Blackberry phones used, WinCE architectually did have a lot of weird constraints, but it was great that could customize it to roll exactly what one wanted - and the AutoPC variant supported voice commands (is what I worked with to build a turn-by-turn navigation systems for vehicles back in 2000. Combined with an ATT wireless data packet network (to sync email and local traffic info) and GPS, it was possible to build a working navigation system in 2000 that wouldn't show up on smartphones until many years later.
I was always amused that it was literally called 'wince'.
Windows CE still refuses to die. I've got clients that are still using their Windows CE inventory keeping apps, we run them as virtual machines in Azure and then they access them through Android based handheld scanners. If it didn't work so well I would be a lot more interested in finding a replacement, but everything we've demoed so far just sucks.
Sounds like VB6😊
Inventory management software 😊
My local supermarket uses Windows CE for their price checking machines. (One of them was on the Windows desktop last time I went.)
Another reason that old software sticks around, it was just made better back then.
@@jnharton When everything didn't have to be connected 100% of the time there were just a lot less things that could go wrong with software.
I love how on shutdown the machine says "Benign"
Oh God, this bloody thing!
My Aunt bought one of these from eBay for my cousin over a decade ago, she bought it because it was cheep and she always shops to get the "best" deals. I remember her telling the specs over the phone and I told her not to get it but she went ahead and then the shenanigans happened!
It wasn't this exact model, she had a black unbranded one which had 2GB of storage and I think 128MB of RAM with some ARM CPU running WinCE. This thing had a fault whereby the WinCE image would corrupt itself ever 2~3 days and you had to reflash it from an SD card, I'm not sure if it was a bad image or something hardware related. She only got this solution because the seller knew this was a common fault and said this was the fix.
When it was "working", the thing couldn't go browse to sites that was more than text otherwise IE would crash. I get that this version of IE wasn't designed for that but most people who had this would have tried the full Facebook/Twitter/UA-cam etc... sites, the mobile ones did work bit not as well when compared to the browsers in iOS and Android at the time. The UA-cam app did work surprisingly well however I'm sure whatever URL/API it was using has long since been killed by Google, I think all the other web shortcuts were affiliate links, at least that's what I'm seeing in that URL when Sean tried them.
When she came to the realisation that this was just trash, she tried to send it back for a refund. Unfortunately, she made the rookie mistake of contacting the seller directly as opposed to via eBay. The seller gave her some random address in China which was initially rejected and then another address which I think took in the package. The seller claimed that the package wasn't received and refused the refund, she tried to issue one via eBay but I think the refund window had expired and she couldn't log a case because of the aforementioned contact mistake. Ultimately she accepted that she had lost the money and always listened to me when giving computer purchasing advise since.
I seem to recall the early Android model ones had a similar issue.
So frustrating when you give people advice from a place of knowledge, they ignore your advice, and then they get ripped off.
I remember (in Germany) TV reports were warning against these pseudo-laptops, because the browser simply got stuck (and locked up the whole OS?) when loading many web pages by lack RAM and CPU power to handle modern stuff full of scripts (dynamically resizing pages etc.), and also video ran with 3fps or also crashed if too large or in newer formats.
VWestlife did a video on this machine 13 years ago if anyone wants another take on this.. uh, enthralling subject...
Remember watching it back then
That explains why the laggy WiFi applet was so familiar to me xD
That video showed that the UA-cam application was very lackluster back then, only being able to play videos in a small size (as having it fullscreen would make it lag).
7:06 "Would you believe that 100% of the ZIP drives I have been hoarding, are dead?" Why, yes. yes. I would.
I wouldn't only believe it, I'd bet on it.
I have about a dozen in a shoebox with a pair of drives, one internal, one USB. All of them worked fine when I went through them to check their contents a couple months ago. (Now watch them all be dead the next time I check them.)
I had used a Windows CE device for flight navigation back in the day. That was the beginning of the "electronic flight bag" era, and it had GPS-referenced approach plates and charts. It was pretty snappy, but it was the only thing I was running on it.
Ah yes, the 99$ CVS/Walgreens Sylvania Windows CE Netbook Used to see those pop up right at the Holiday season and a month later eBay would be flooded with them once everyone found out they were terrible. Fun times lol
Unless you lived in SW VA or NE TN in which CVS and Walgreens didn't even have them. Fuck my area. Fuck my childhood. #TheWorstChildhood
#WorstChildhoodEver
Windows CE is still alive, it's used in HP's enterprise printers. They still pay for support from Microsoft.
Source: I was a developer at HP in 2019, and all enterprise devices still ran CE 6 under the hood, albeit with a new modern UI. We were limited to programming with .NET 2.0 Compact which was greeeaaaattt (sarcasm)
The UA-cam app might work if you can fool it into connecting to a YT2009 instance instead of the UA-cam legacy API.
These laptops were made by a company called WonderMedia, and many of them also run Android.
Many of these don't use blobs or MSATA cards for storage, instead using USB flash drives soldered to the main board
Yeah thé thing that look like a M.2 IS a wif slot
Are we talking eMMC or literally a usb drive glued in place?
Yeah the second one💀@Slay1337pl
@@Slay1337plBasically an internal USB drive.
Some WiFi backup storage devices used the same tech...
I tried installing Android on mine, but I never succeeded.
I did get Arch Linux running though, without a GUI, once I tried getting a GUI it broke the system lol.
Windows CE on this thing runs DOS software though.
"...world's worst keyboard"? No. The flat membrane keyboards (Atari 400 as an example) were pure hell to type on. Anything with any degree of travel (even typing on a touchscreen) are vast improvements.
I beg to disagree. The price for the worst keyboard belongs the the (original) OLPC XO-1.
Are we adding those rolling flexible keyboards on the fighters lineup too or are they a league of their own?
How about those keyboards where you had to press a certain key and then a letter to get statement like print, for, etc.? I am thinking the calculator like keyboard on a Bally Astrocade.
@@alexandershendi7428 corrona leaf springs... they are so scrachy and are so stiff that they literally give you rsi after a year. At least you can get some response time and dont have to feel the scratchy and extreme mush of corona leaf springs
The Apple IIc keyboard gotta clock in as one of the worst ever too typing on one is excruciating
You just unlocked a childhood memory, I remember biking to my local CVS and wandering through the electronics section and seeing these!
CVS in SW VA and NE TN was ALL DRUGS and medical SHIT during my childhood. No electronics.
Windows CE was absolutely amazing. It ran multitasking applications with gui on very low power risc cpus, very little memory, and had a full network stack and usb plug&play.
I used a couple of HTC windows mobile smartphones for almost a decade before moving to android. Some people got in earlier than that with windows PDAs.
I was scammed by CVS and Sylvania
Join the club!
@@agy234 oh no you too
Yep, I bought one and couldn't even get it to turn on. Think I still have most of the pieces somewhere.
I was scammed by CVS in Gate City VA in 2011.
You maybe eligible for compensation. 😂
The company I work for still manufactures equipment that uses Windows CE. It seems like they're going to keep at it until the very end of extended support, which I think is in 2028.
I can't find anything that says extended support for CE is still going, it seems like it ended alresdy
Zip drives were unreliable when they were *new* I can't imagine more than 5% of them working at this point, 20+ years on...
I have a decent CRT TV from Sylvania. I’ve also seen other electronics made by Sylvania in thrift stores. They’re quite an interesting company, and I hope to see more of Sylvania on your channel, soon.
those unused pads on the board are actually for mini pcie, sort of a cousin / predecessor to nvme. it ended up getting phased out in favor of nvme. if those pads were populated you could theoretically hook up a gpu to the tiny machine, albeit limited to one lane
Netbooks mostly used the mini-PCIe slots for WiFi modules IIRC. Mass storage was typically flash chips soldered directly to the motherboard.
This was a birthday present for me when I was younger... If only they knew how useless it was, even then... Finding programs for Windows CE was in itself nearly impossible back in the day, barely managing to source a working version of 7-zip (which would forget its installed every time because of the *volatile system partition*). The manual wasn't even for the device in question, stating that it needs clearance on the bottom for the fan that doesn't exist, and showing a different version of Windows in the documentation as well.
I can confirm, getting it when it was still being sold new, that it could not browse websites even of the time. It was unusable in netbook terms, and not being able to run anything else I was familiar with made it a paperweight before it even broke. What was I supposed to do, tell my parents to take back my useless birthday present? No happy memories with this machine...
PDA software often could be installed on these, but different screen resolution makes trouble because most apps did not scale at all.
_"volatile system partition"_ The Eee 701 was similar with its Xandros OS (Debian Linux based) using volatile (temporary) directories overlay mounted over /usr, etc. Any changes to system files would disappear next time it was booted. One had to jump through hoops to permanently modify the system.
@@alexhajnal107 It was easiest to install additional software on the external SD card if it had a slot for it.
@@cyberyogicowindler2448 I forget exactly how I dealt with that. Pretty sure that I only ran software installed via apt. Getting write access to the underlying system mounts wasn't too difficult though IIRC.
I mostly used the SD card slot for a bootable XP install. For user data I soldered a 32GB flash drive (bare circuit board) to the unused USB pins on the mini-PCIe slot. I put a switch on its power rail since IIRC XP got very confused if it was present at boot time.
I can't believe you released a video on this little idiot! I just got one of these from Goodwill for $10 last week and I'm absolutely in love with it. I couldn't find a power adapter for it, so I modded it with USB-C charging! I'm currently getting Debian installed on it so I can use it as a teeny tiny SSH client to manage my big server. For some reason, I'm really amused by the idea of using this dumb little trash netbook to do Real Serious Work remotely on my servers.
And yeah, that wifi adapter is awful, I don't understand why it gets so hot. I'm absolutely certain it was an off the shelf USB adapter that they ripped the board out of and just soldered wires to. It should be as simple as finding a modern USB wifi adapter with a driver supported by the OS and replacing it.
The big mystery blob chip is probably actually the keyboard controller. The WM8505 module has its own flash storage for the main system drive. I've seen other versions of this board which have no flash on the module, but use a hacked-up USB flash drive instead. Probably this board would have supported M.2 instead of the onboard flash.
Turning shitbooks like this into old style dumb terminals like that actually is kinda neat.
Righteous hack indeed. Best of luck on that!
Goodwill Tenneva doesn't allow computers. If you see one of their trucks and you look at the "We are Unable to Accept the Following", you will see "Computers/Monitors" on the list. I hate SW VA/NE TN. If I had the money, I would leave the area in an instant. Unfortunately, my parents don't wanna go with me if I do so. Why is Goodwill Tenneva the only one like this? Why are their "Unnacepted Items" rules segregated?
They were still putting Windows CE in FIIO music players up to 2016 at least.
What model
@@lenOwOo The X5 gen 2 does for sure.
Iriver were using CE until at least 2010 as well
Iriver still exists? @@jonathandenton6160
I used to have a Siemens WinCE tablet ("Simpad") and a NEC WinCE "notebook" MobilePro 900 back in the early 2000s. They were usable, but software was scarce. The NEC had, however, one very strong point: preinstalled MS Office, including Word, Excel and Access. I could edit files on the go and then transfer them easily to my main PC. In fact there were even hardware buttons to launch these programs and they launched almost instantly (were they in ROM?), which wasn't the case for most computers these days. I still have lots of downloaded apps in the WinCE format on my PC, like Foxit PDF reader, iSilo ebook reader, MiniStumbler (WiFi sniffer) and many more.
Will never forget this, that was my first computer with Internet. My parents bought it for me on a Sunday when they saw it on sale in the paper. It was hideous red and the UA-cam app never worked right. Thank you for bringing back Great memories.
thank you so much for making this video!
i found one of these for very cheap in a local thrift (?) shop a few months ago.
it was under the "nativa" brand (the name was written in the vaio font). it had no charger and came with a spanish keyboard.
i bought it immediately but couldn't for the life of me find any information about it online.
since i saw the battery on mine was spicy as well and couldn't plug it in, i sorta assumed/pretended it was dead and didn't try to look inside it much further.
i figured i could eventually just stick a raspberry pi inside it and say that was the plan all along!
now that i know someone else has done it, the thought of running linux on it as-is is gonna hold a large portion of my brain hostage for a while. and i have a lot more information to go off on. i just need to find a compatile power adaptor....
My experience with CE was a never ending trail of tears, from not only a user perspective, but also software development and board bring-up perspective.
Trying to make a mobile solution that was actually usable was an exercise in being repeatedly kicked in the balls while on a trapeze, due to the infinitely random and crippling compromises of processing power, RAM, and networking hardware support, to say nothing of the wildly differing UIs that were mostly terrible. (with the UI from Palm being the best by a mile; their hardware was extremely underpowered.)
it didn't support M.2 SSD's it was for probably a slotable wireless card which came in the same form factors
I had this thing under the Meteroite brand running Android and I absolutely hated it! It deleted all the data and broke the Android installation all the time. And the fact that this ran Android 2.2 which was very much not optimized for it to be used in landscape orientation made it even worse, especially when the touchpad wouldn’t rotate.
Until a few years ago at my job, the scanning devices we used for taking inventory ran a version of Windows CE. They were the worst manmade devices I have ever had the displeasure of using. They crashed about once per day, could never connect to the network, were slow as molasses, and for some reason they would work especially poorly for me specifically. They gave us new ones using android a year ago and despite running the same web-service, I no longer wish to jump out the break room window every time I make a minor mistake navigating the UI
That actually looked like a decent sized battery considering how little power PDAs running windows CE used to use.
Yes, my brother brought it (German counterpart branded “jaytech” but the FW was identical) from the “friend” with claim that “UA-cam works fine there”
It wasn’t
1:36 OMG that "NO DISASSEMBLE" flag is just too much 😂
8:39 Whoa, a Sony Spressa! I had one of those at work circa 2000. CD-ROM via USB 1.1! The horror! XD
At least it has a UI designed for a screen that small. Most netbooks running windows proper has like 5 pixels of usable height.
back when I had a netbook the only OS that ran reasonably was a lightweight linux job called Crunchbang
The shell of this thing looks like a first model Nintendo DS scaled up slightly
This looks like a prime candidate for a hardware mod with a new system board with a Raspberry Pi CM4.
Absolutely, but then what would happen to this beautiful piece of shitty computing history?
I wonder how the hardware would handle a lightweight distro of Linux? Might be able to squeeze a bit of extra performance and battery life out of this thing
@@Steyr6500 I ran Linux on mine. It was just about running with no GUI, as soon as I tried getting a GUI, the system crashed.
Truly Retro: my HP Jornada 420 with WinCE 2
Got one of these bad boys for the cheap about a decade ago now. Wired up the UART to get the U-boot splashes, thought I don't think I was able to interrupt it on this one for some odd reason. I remember a neat feature was that you could just run whatever from the SD card on boot, so you could have one OS installed on the thing (In my case WinCE and a few games), while having a separate SD card with Debian when you wanted to go full Hackerman. 😆
Windows CE laptops in the 90s was definitely a thing. I remember watching the Computer Chronicles doing a spot on them and wanting one. Better battery life as a full laptop, thinner and lighter, and used ROM instead of a HDD. In the age of netbooks they were worthless but they had their day.
back in 2000 became expert on WinCE in its AutoPC incarnation. It was designed to go in an auto center console and could accept a vocabulary of voice commands for hands free use.
In those days ATT had a wireless packet data service so we could get email access and traffic information delivered to the console.
And then the company I worked for had a visual turn by turn navigation app that ran on WinCE. Went about navigating a major metroplex using this system in 2000 to test it. Many years before such things were finally a reality as mapping apps on smart phones.
This got shown in a joint Microsoft and Yagisaki demo using a BMW at a major auto tradeshow but the company failed to get adequaete funding so I moved on.
Microsoft could have been ruling this space years ahead of others if it had kicked a few million toward this company - and WinCE would have had a niche to justify its existence outside of PDA market - with cellular modem of packet data and gps it had all the ingerdients of the smart phone we would see later on.
My work was using Windows CE Panel PCs for displays for our industrial controllers up until last year. I should steal one and see what I can do with it.
You'll be arrested if you try it in SW VA or NE TN. :(
Windows CE variants lived on in Windows thin-terminals for a number of years after. I preferred them to the Windows 7 (and higher) embedded systems because they were far simpler and easier to manage in some ways.
I had this exact WiFi card back in the days. It was an OEM module sold readily in china and mounted in some PC cases. It was quite unreliable and drivers were extremely unstable under both Windows and Linux. It was always hot, to a point of finger-burning-hot, so nothing wrong with your unit ;)
The price checker kiosks at places like Macy’s still run Windows CE.
If I only still had a Macy's in my third world SW VA/NE TN. #IHateMyArea
i still remember that i had a builtin satnav on a vw golf running windows ce crashing midway on a road trip long time ago
Yes please, more shenanigans. I will watch all the Action Retro shenanigans.
A number of midrange ($5-20K) oscilloscopes sold today still run on Windows CE (like the Keysight 3000G and 4000G series, and the LeCroy WaveSurfer 3000Z and 4000HD series). Keysight has been migrating its WinCE products to Linux (like the 1000 series), but LeCroy is kinda stuck, since their entire software stack is super tightly dependent on the Windows APIs, so they may end up needing to migrate even their lower-end models to Windows Embedded (like their more expensive scopes have done for years and years already).
May be they used WinCE because it is more realtime-capable (just like DOS) than regular MS Windows. But for sure there are also Linux versions suited for this purpose.
I had bought one of these units back in the day for fun. The interesting thing was the company that was selling this one specifically had a skin overtop of WindowsCE and you couldn't get to the regular desktop. Except, once the unit booted to the regular desktop. Just once. After that it was stuck at that silly skin. It was fun to tool around with but I never considered it to be a serious computer.
I just became a member. I appreciate your joyful style and that you keep things clean. Keep it up 🙂
These are also available in other parts of the world under different names. One such example is the Blaze Chie Netbook.
Windows CE is one of my all time favorite operating systems. Everybody forgets that back in the 90's and 2000's the only alternatives handheld junkies like myself had were things like PalmOS, GEM and QNX. WinCE felt like you were carrying a piece of your desktop with you. I have a Newton and an eMate, but I don't enjoy playing with them nearly as much as I do with my old Windows Palmtops (20 years late and I'm still not calling them HPCs, take a hike Ballmer).
The first Windows CE laptop was the Psion Netbook Pro (I own one), which was a very serious and expensive device for special (industrial and business) purposes, because it had 8h battery life when any regular x86 PC laptop only had about up to 2h. To install a driver, you will need to put it on SD card, but it will be hard to find existing drivers for these anyway. Later Win CE "netbooks" were mostly scam-like trash. Famous was the brand "Q-Book".
PalmOS was _really_ nice. Best mobile device I've ever used was the 8MB Handspring Visor Deluxe (mono version, not the color Prism).
@alexhajnal107 I have a colour version of Visor Prism. Bad is the internal battery, that is likely dead now by lack of charging.
@@cyberyogicowindler2448 Yea, I have one too. Never liked the built-in battery, especially with the colour screen drawing a lot more power. The earlier Visors used AAA cells, could just carry a couple of spares for when they ran down. (To this day I avoid built-in batteries whenever possible.)
Someone mentioned Psion, albeit one of their CE devices, but Psion was a pretty significant handheld player in the UK, maybe also Europe, throughout the 1990s. The Series 3 set them up pretty well, and the ergonomics of the Series 5 were rated well enough for Planet Computers to collaborate with one of the original designers to do their Gemini device in 2018. Psion's EPOC operating system eventually became Symbian OS and was rather more widely used.
these windows ce things always seemed cool because it made me think i could run older pc games on it and multitask. but it could only run special windows ce programs that nobody actually made .and you couldn't even multi task so you may as well use windows 1.0 or any of the other mobile systems that existed back then
Woah this threw me back in time. I remember seeing this, an odd Sylvania Android tablet, and some other Interesting... electronics back in the day at CVS
13:49 for a brief moment I was thinking he is going snap it in half.
I too worked at a CVS in 2011. If I recall, this sat behind the counter near the cigarettes. A few folks came in and asked about it after seeing it in the Sunday flier (along with the 10/$10 albacore tuna). I would tell them to not spend their money on this. It just looked so sad.
Not in SW VA or NE TN.
Windows CE is like older mainframe systems that operate banking systems. I think that in decades to come we will still see devices running this still going. So many devices running CE that people don't realise.
Yeah I remember when these things showed up in drugstores. I’ve always wanted to know what the weird Windows CE OS was like since that thing was different on like every device. At the time $99 was above my “buy weird crap” threshold and I’ve regretted not buying one so thanks for the video - looks like it was just as awkward and weird as I imagined.
Unless you're in my SW VA or NE TN. #IHateMyArea
Finally someone does a proper video on one of these devices. This brought back huge nostalgia for me as someone who used to tinker with these Sylvania / Craig UMPCs. At one point I had quite a bit of software including a few decent albeit older games running on them, such as Duke Nukem 3D and an rpg game that I think must've been Elder Scrolls Daggerfall or something. That was fun, but the actual productivity of the device felt super limited. Then I remember getting an early version of Android to work on the device and it was pretty snazzy though janky since there was no proper touchscreen.
The M2 Port is likely just Wifi (like in many Laptops), but they decided to go for a much cheaper USB(compatible) thingy.
Windows CE still exists today in some devices in the retail shopping world. I used to use a scan gun that had Windows CE on it to run inventory checks a few years ago. Another place you can find it (if you know how to spot it) is on self-shopping devices at some supermarket chains.
Oh my god, I had one of these as a kid but I completely forgot about it. I think I bought it from CVS for like $100 with birthday money, but it was so useless I ended up returning it.
It's not as weird as it sounds that a Zip Drive worked. Most USB Zip Drives present as a normal generic mass storage device, and will work on any device that supports flash drives. Even my car's headunit can play media off of Zip Disks.
I thought I was hoarding zip drives at 3. I was very wrong.
Back when I was working in a budget department store across the pond as a late-teen (nearly 15 years ago now) my department got a delivery of similar netbooks to these (I think the brand was Zoostorm?) with WindowsCE and an ARM Based CPU on it, think it sold for £100 at the time. None of us had any idea what ARM was at the time and found it curious... All the apps on the netbook had 'For Arm' listed on their shortcuts, which we also found wierd.
We advertised the crap out of them, but the store didn't sell too many of them and they ended up being returned a lot due to the public finding out that x86 applications wouldn't run on them. When the store closed down for good, they were still in storage. I was tempted to buy one for univeristy... but I bought a MSI Wind when they came out.
Definately a nostalgia trip watching a video on these things again...
Oh man, The Core Pocket Media Player. Halcyon days indeed. TCPMP was *the* way all of us in the Pocket PC and Palm communities watched our media files. Loading your giant 1GB SD card up with 512x384 xvid episodes of The Next Generation.
I have been trying to figure out what this laptop was that I saw in a display case in big lots when I was a kid, cannot believe you finally found it this is awesome
imagine if we slap a raspberry into dis thing, like completely mod into something else we actually can use for light web browsing, media player, or as a back up system
i actually remember seeing one of these things at my local bowling alley. It was in one of those arcade games where you have to try and cut a string and let the prize fall to the bottom.
Where can I get your .sit happens shirt? I LOVE it
It's from the Mac84 shop, I have it and I'm wearing it right now LOL 😂
@@charliesretrocomputing Say less!
My mom owned one of these! She actually really liked it, but unfortunately, it died within six months. I think it was just low-quality eMMC storage that was never designed to last.
I remember those laptops making a resurgence in 2012 / 2013 online, this time running Android (either 2.2 or 2.3). They usually had the exact same internals, so if you really wanted to, you could just put Windows CE on a SD card and run that. They ran terribly, but I really wanted one for some reason, it was so cool in my teenage mind. Some people ported Debian on them, so it made them kinda useful, but it used a horribly outdated version of the Linux kernel (the one found in Android 2), so it must be extremely unusable nowadays.
So this time ce stood for crappy enclair?
He mentions Debian at the end
The Mini PCIe slot only has USB wired up to it and it seems like those USB traces are also connected to the Wi-Fi module in the screen. So it was intended for a USB Mini "PCIe" form-factor Wi-Fi adapter. It can't be for a 3G module since there is no place for a SIM card slot.
The blob chip isn't the flash storage, it's the keyboard controller. The flash storage is soldered onto the SoM (System on Module) that has the WonderMedia CPU on it.
I remember seeing those and knowing it’s a potato but I still wanted one
I bought a Sharp Mobilion TriPad back when they were blowing them out for some ridiculously inexpensive price. Came with Windows CE and a PCMCIA slot that supported about 5 compatible devices. The actual device was for its' time amazing, just there was zero compatibility beyond what came out of the box and a couple of 3rd party devices. CE was weird yes - just a bit badly timed methinks.
Thanks for the blast from the past...
I remember seeing these at Kmart around 2011 and yeah they never sold
If only Kmart hadn't left SW VA and NE TN for stupid U-Haul before the rest of the fucking US. If only everybody knew about how magical adult adoption was so I could get out of my communist hellhole. #IHateMyArea #AdultAdoption
Not sure if this was mentioned, but it’s possible to use the LG burner as a USB drive by holding down the eject button for three seconds while the tray is open and connected to a USB port. 6:32
Bought a version of this at Kmart in 2010 ... Worked great for the time... I attemped a Android 2.2 upgrade and it bombed. Went back to CE... Attempted to upgrade to CE version 7, bricked the device....
I can only imagine all the children's Christmases and birthdays that were ruined due to this laptop.
They should be for it not being in SW VA or NE TN.
Christmas 2006 or 2007 thanks Mom... That brick is still around in the basement i think
@@only.pfusch STOP FUCKING IGNORING ME!!!
There used to have a lot of these things advertised as “laptop” in china in around the year I believe 2007, equipped arm926ejs with 64mb ram, sold for around 80 dollars brand new. These thing could run Debian armed, much useful than real laptop in 2007
Worst keyboard ever? I bring your attention to the Sinclair ZX81, my first ever computer. I don't think they were that popular in the USA though.
It was sold in the US, in fact, in a slightly altered form as the Timex Sinclair 1000, with 2K of RAM. Also sold in a different case with 16K as the TS1500. The TS1500 had a chiclet keyboard, and bore a passing resemblance to the Commodore 116. Anyway, the TS machines didn't fare very well, but often got bought cheaply ($49 by the end of its run) and used to trade-in against a C64 for a $100 rebate.
@@MarkTheMorose thank you. I did wonder how Sir Clive Sinclair's bits sold overseas. He was a quintessentially British eccentric.
2Kb of RAM? Lucky sods, we got 1Kb to start with, with a 16Kb plug in pack coming later, and wobbled far too much, resetting everything.
Did you get the Vic20 over there too? I'd assume so, Commodore is/was a US company.
@@foznothYes.
@@foznoth I'm in the UK too. ;) The VIC-20 was very successful in the US, the first computer to sell 1 million units, I believe. I think it actually first launched in Japan, oddly, before the US and then Europe. Some of its earliest games were written in Japan. I think Commodore was originally founded in Canada, but had various headquarters in different countries, possibly for tax (evasion?!) purposes. Trying to market the black-and-white, mute ZX81 in the US against something like the VIC was never likely to succeed, and really, none of the British micros did well over there, as Sinclair, Acorn, and Amstrad all discovered.
You know what's even worse? Its predecessor, the ZX80. It not only had the worst keyboard ever made, but it also had no dedicated input chip or video processor. Meaning that when you typed something, it couldn't display the screen.
I was wanting to collect one of these for a while and just not seeing one cheap enough on eBay relative to how cheap is was even new, but then I found a no-brand GPS device at a thrift store that is literally a Windows CE tablet complete with desktop. Remarkably, it claims to be a Windows CE 6.00 build *from 2014* when CE 6 was already only in extended support.
Hi, Back in the day i purchased 3 of them - one for me and 1 for each child
We all have yahoo mail , it even came with a cut down word and excel.
There was a option which was supplied free with a unix install and android install on SD card
2 work, the 3rd actually does but has a cracked screen - i turn them on every 6 months just to see if they still work ( batteries are dead or possibly only runs for 5 minutes )
I may be confusing a feature with a old HP 102 mini, but i think if they have a SD card i just boot regular dos of it ( i know the HP102 does as it has Linux Puppy on the hard drive
You also need to power them on once per year because flash memory is DRAM with 1 year refresh rate. So try to read the whole flash (scandisk, fsck or whatever, or at least run it 5 minutes) to permit it to perform wear levelling/rewrite itself, else the data fade away and so erase itself (the newer type/more memory, the faster they die).
Windows ce is still kicking, you just don’t know it, for many decades pretty much every head unit ran it in some form
Back then, I bought a fully generic version of this running android off Ebay for $85. I was just a kid, and had to save up money for MONTHS. I did use it for a number of years, though, before android being the steaming pile of garbage it is slowed down to an unusable speed. And there was no point in refreshing it as most apps had moved on and wouldn't be reinstallable.
A few years later, after I got more seriously into computers, I tried to install Linux on it, and did end up accidentally installing Windows CE instead, and found the experience equally terrible :P
A part of me is a little sad I wiped out all those years I had in those android apps. But then I remember how slow it had become in the end.
How do you *accidentally* instead Windows CE?
@@InfernosReaper Basically, I had tried a whole bunch of stuff to try to install linux, and none of it had worked so far, so I just went "screw it" and downloaded every OS installer relating to this machine I could find, and just tried writing each one to a card and trying to boot it. Well, it turns out the WIndows CE installer doesn't ask any questions; If you boot it, it just takes over and automatically flashes to internal memory.
@@drobot190dclass4 That makes sense, especially given what we know about the machine now
These were also sold over in the UK by Maplins, except they used a custom Linux install from the factory.
Picked one up as a note taking netbook, but the things limited battery life made it a poor option compared to a Psion 5MX.
WiFi on it wasn't able to do the better security system that I'd switched my WiFi over to so mostly used it on ethernet myself.
Oh, and watch out, it's REALLY voltage sensitive. Blew mine out by using the wrong charger that was off by 3 volts?
Modern electronics barely survive more than 0.5V overvoltage (unless it is very high resistance) because chips pull it down by an internal zener diode (against ESD etc.) that burns if fed with high current at slightly higher voltage.
Linux is like Doom. If the thing has CPU, RAM and display, Linux will run on it.
just like doom, first ever linux needed a 32-bit processor like a 386 to be able to run in the first place. I'd rather not talk about the performance though :D
Linux is designed for an 80486 or better. If you're on a 68k, Unices designed for that will be faster.
I think Linux actually does require at least a 16-bit CPU with an MMU (or an emulated MMU) for it to be ported to it. But yes, pretty much any computer of the last 30 years can handle Linux.
@@proCaylak They have ported a sort-of Doom even to Atari 8-Bit, although with more RAM than a standard 800XL.
I remember seeing these devices in stores and wanting one just to mess with it. Windows CE devices were always so weird and interesting to me at the time.
There's a reason Windows CE was commonly known as WinCE
There are several pieces of laboratory kit still sold and manufactured that run Windows CE versions from the late 90s/early 00s.
Windows CE stands for Windows Convoluted Edition.
I thought it was Windows Crap Edition
It's not a real Windows, it's more of genuine Microsoft fake Windows lookalike. That's why it's super lightweight and useless
I'm glad I got a real Netbook that ran actual Windows XP, played external DVDs, recognised my external backup HDD, and did everything else my desktop did, Plus, it was very sturdy and kept on running for many years. My model cost about 500 DM (at that time about $1000) in 1990's money at my local electronics shop, but I got a special deal through my cellphone carrier. That Netbook accompanied me everywhere, and I might still have it today if I hadn't given it to a friend (after upgrading it to Windows 7) whose laptop had been stolen. The Surface I bought after that wasn't as capable, despite being newer.
Next video with Linux on that thing.
I have one of these too and that Wi-Fi adapter also gets burning hot inside. It's funny that the PCB was clearly made to have a USB connector soldered onto it, almost like they repurposed parts for a USB Wi-Fi dongle.
No, no, no, no. An E-cigarette will NOT help you live a healthier life as a smoker. It's an absolute shame to see AR advertising an addictive product. We just can't let UA-camrs get away with these sponsored lies. The NordVPN privacy claim bs was enough but this even tops it.
Vaping is way healthier than smoking.
You must be ignorant of all the crap that's in a cigarette.
Vape juice is basically just the stuff from an asthma inhaler + nicotine, and nicotine on its own is not dangerous unless you overdose.