Engadget is running a story today about good and bad news for Windows Mobile devices. The good news is a new version of Microsoft Reader with memory leak fixes and support for landscape mode in Windows Mobile 2003 SE models.
I’m a little dissapointed at their reporting of the bad news though:
And that brings us to the bad news, clearly a sign of the end of the line for PDAs (well, not really, but hey, everyone is saying it)— According to InfoSync World, Dell and HP are not going to have WindowsMobile 2003 Second Edition updates for their devices. This is of course crummy news, in fact, the only way to get it might be to buy a new device. We understand there is some low-level stuff going on in WindowsMobile 2003 SE, like rotating the screen, and Dell and HP needs to sell some new devices, but this might be the last dance if people think they can never upgrade.
Would you expect the manufacturer of your desktop or laptop to send you a copy of Longhorn when it comes out? Of course not. I’m exaggerating, but you get the picture. I’m not exactly expecting a free upgrade to Windows Mobile Next (whatever the next version of Windows Mobile based on CE 5.0 is) for my X30.
Things are a bit quirky in the handheld device market, and a device that you buy today is in no way guaranteed to work with future operating systems for future devices. It’s sort of a known unknown. I’m sure that if it were feasable in both an economic and technical sense to offer free or for-cost upgrades to Windows Mobile 2003 devices they would have done it. But it’s not, so they can’t. Yes, it’s unfortunate, but it’s in no way unexpected.
Update:
I don’t know about the X3 and X5, but Dell has been supporting the Windows Mobile 2003 SE-based X30 quite well. Just a few days ago I spoke about the X30 ROM update. It works great and I’m pretty sure has ironed out some weirdness in Wi-Fi with WPA that was bugging me.