Windows Phone 7 Series - But does it run NT?

Microsoft have been screwed for the past three years in the mobile space. Ever since the iPhone kick-started the consumer smartphone market, the Redmond giant has continuously lost market share to not only Apple, but to Android as well. Why is this? Although Apple can sell anything on the hype machine alone, Google doesn't have the same with Android. Even though both Android and Windows Mobile are cross-manufacturer, Android has pulled away and left WinMo in its wake.

Why?


Well, even though it is rarely spoken of, iPhone OS and Android have a common ancestor: UNIX. What does that mean? Well, it means that the bulk of innovation of all kinds on all hardware is easy transferred to them, from advancements originally created for TOP500 supercomputers all the way down to the increased efficiency caused by pushing UNIX derivatives into smaller and smaller embedded devices. Oh, and one other thing? iPhone OS and Android are extremely closely tied with the desktop OSes that developers have used for decades now, so developers can use their experience and favourite tools just as they would on a deskop when developing for mobile.

But isn't that the case with WinMo? Windows is the most popular OS in the world! Millions of developers know how to write for Windows!

Wrong.

Okay, a brief history lesson here:
Windows was originally a shell for MS-DOS, which would be used with the command prompt. Due to the fact that it translated mouse pointer clicks into text commands, it was not particularly efficient in what it did, so in 1993 Microsoft released something called Windows NT. NT was designed to be more like the UNIX-based OSes that dominated the mainframe business, with proper multi-tasking and multiple users, all targeted at the enterprise market. In 2001, the most popular OS ever, Windows XP, was released, all based upon this new NT kernel and also simultaneously marketed to consumers and enterprise. Every release of Windows after XP was based on NT, from Windows Server 2003 all the way to Windows 7.

Windows Mobile, on the other hand, is completely different. Instead of the NT kernel, it uses something called Windows CE. WinCE is Microsoft's attempt at conquering the embedded systems market and is still the only version of Windows available for processor architectures other than x86 or x86-64 (although Windows Server is available for IA-64 [Itanium] and the NT kernel was originally available for PowerPC and ALPHA as well. Interesting fact: even though the PowerPC port was abandoned officially due to the impossibility of Microsoft Office being released for it, the PowerPC port lives on in the XBOX 360 which uses a custom Xenon PowerPC CPU.) WinCE is terrible. It is extremely outdated from a kernel viewpoint, since it still does not support 64 bit in any way nor even multi-core CPUs, and it does not have the familiarity and power that iPhone OS and Android developers enjoy. It does not have the same level of 3D graphics capability, nor does it employ the technologies that developers know like OpenGL or OpenAL.

Microsoft have said little about the technical details of WinMo 7, but we can only hope it runs NT.