Wednesday, April 17, 2002
Brown says: Give me Windows CE please.
Posted by Ed Hansberry in "ARTICLE" @ 05:18 AM
http://www.computerworld.com/storyba/0,4125,NAV47_STO70133,00.html
UPS has signed a $50-$100 million deal with Symbol to build a wireless communicator and handheld computer for its fleet of drivers. Rather than going with the Pocket PC operating system, they chose Windows CE, which makes some sense. First, I am sure they will use CE .NET, which is more advanced than the CE 3.0 underpinnings of today's Pocket PC and second, they will likely have some custom app that will provide the user interface totally obscuring whatever either Pocket PC or Windows CE provides natively.
Update: Notice the before and after shots of the UPS truck as a result of switching to Windows CE in their handhelds. ;-)
"Craig Mathias, an analyst at Farpoint Group in Ashland, Mass., called the UPS decision to use a Microsoft operating system instead of Palm Inc.'s Palm OS an example of how "Windows CE is going to beat Palm" in the enterprise environment. Mathias said enterprise users are increasingly choosing either Windows CE or Pocket PC because those operating systems are "more tightly coupled with the Microsoft desktop," which predominates in corporate IT environments."
I don't know the specifics of this deal. Few do in fact. Both Symbol and 'Brown' are keeping quit about it, but I suspect the choice of Windows CE has little to do with desktop integration in this case. Last time I checked, UPS drivers didn't have destkops. :-) I think this is more a case of having an operating system that can walk and chew gum at the same time (GPS tracking, route updates to and from the base office, truck inventory, etc.) and integrates with Microsoft's backoffice products, such as SQL Server.
Thanks to Peter West for delivering this article to us.
UPS has signed a $50-$100 million deal with Symbol to build a wireless communicator and handheld computer for its fleet of drivers. Rather than going with the Pocket PC operating system, they chose Windows CE, which makes some sense. First, I am sure they will use CE .NET, which is more advanced than the CE 3.0 underpinnings of today's Pocket PC and second, they will likely have some custom app that will provide the user interface totally obscuring whatever either Pocket PC or Windows CE provides natively.
Update: Notice the before and after shots of the UPS truck as a result of switching to Windows CE in their handhelds. ;-)
"Craig Mathias, an analyst at Farpoint Group in Ashland, Mass., called the UPS decision to use a Microsoft operating system instead of Palm Inc.'s Palm OS an example of how "Windows CE is going to beat Palm" in the enterprise environment. Mathias said enterprise users are increasingly choosing either Windows CE or Pocket PC because those operating systems are "more tightly coupled with the Microsoft desktop," which predominates in corporate IT environments."
I don't know the specifics of this deal. Few do in fact. Both Symbol and 'Brown' are keeping quit about it, but I suspect the choice of Windows CE has little to do with desktop integration in this case. Last time I checked, UPS drivers didn't have destkops. :-) I think this is more a case of having an operating system that can walk and chew gum at the same time (GPS tracking, route updates to and from the base office, truck inventory, etc.) and integrates with Microsoft's backoffice products, such as SQL Server.
Thanks to Peter West for delivering this article to us.
