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Comment by seanmcdirmid | Hacker News Reader

Just that I heard at the time when I was working at Microsoft in China. You can probably google up the terms for sources; eg https://www.cnet.com/tech/mobile/shanzhai-ji-all-you-need-to...

> 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).

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I think something must have been lost in translation then, most Shanzhai phones were heavily modified and skinned featurephones, not smartphones.

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

I’m not sure what a heavily skinned feature phone OS would have been at the time, maybe Symbian. It was easier to take the mediatek chip and throw WinCE on whatever, even if you didn’t add many smart phone features.

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.

I believe it was some MediaTek demo code that could run directly on the modem for a 1-chip GSM featurephone or in a AP+BP 2-chip 3G configuration. Wasn't Symbian, nor CE nor Linux, more like a giant Arduino sketch. There were a lot more giant Arduino sketches / baremetal library-based big main loop RTOS in the '00s.

Wonderful to see embrace, extend and extinguish happen in reverse! Nothing personal, but Microsoft was evil since the beginning

http://xahlee.info/comp/TRON_operating_system_and_encoding.h... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yYfoCe6q28A

Full motion video on a 286!

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