Pirated WinCE?? Do you have any source that those MediaTek software were CE based? I thought they were something more primitive, something like FreeRTOS.
> Part of the reason for this is the low investment in new technology by Shanzhai phone makers and their dependence on cheap and freely available chipsets from companies like MediaTek and Huawei running pirated operating systems, like Windows Mobile. Industry analysts believe the near future won't deliver a dramatic improvement of the usability of the pirate phones.
There really was no other option before android came out, since Symbian was never pirated (I think).
If that was understanding within MS China, I wonder whether that had an impact on MS' strategic decisions - whether they thought CE/WM has great market penetration in China and required changes from existing platform to WP is minimal...
1: https://www.mobile01.com/topicdetail.php?f=165&t=1691816 2: https://ascii.jp/elem/000/000/963/963878/img.html
It definitely made for a lot of jokes, but I don’t think the executives, at least on the MS china side where I was working, took it as a good omen at all. These were junk phones, and the iPhone at the time clearly wasn’t junk. That WinMo was shortly thereafter abandoned makes me think Redmond thought so as well.
Microsoft also locked down WP, so it wasn’t pirate-able, and since Android was already out a couple of years later when Wp was done and was basically free (no need to pirate!), well, everyone lost interest in whatever Microsoft was doing with mobile.
http://xahlee.info/comp/TRON_operating_system_and_encoding.h... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yYfoCe6q28A
Full motion video on a 286!