The New Handheld PC 2000

When Microsoft released the Pocket PC in April of 2000, there was a lot of media praise for the new "Windows Powered" platform. But there was also speculation that we'd seen the last of the Handheld PC. The original H/PC was never that popular with end-users, and individual consumers hardly knew it existed. Of the eight original manufacturers, three had dropped the H/PC completely and only two, Hewlett-Packard and NEC, seemed to be doing well with their H/PC lines.

But Microsoft had put a lot of effort into improving the Handheld PC since its release in 1997, and its previous release, the "Handheld PC Professional Edition," was well received as an enterprise solution. In addition, Hewlett-Packard's Jornada 680 and 690 remained popular with users wanting a smaller, "pocketable" Handheld PC. So when the Pocket PC and Windows CE 3.0 were released last April, H/PC users and the companies that still made them began demanding an upgrade to the Handheld PC. Microsoft's response was the release of the Handheld PC 2000, which includes the improved Windows CE 3.0 operating system along with three additional programs to the suite of built-in Microsoft software.

A "Windows Powered" Handheld PC

One of the biggest, but least outwardly visible changes is to the operating system. The H/PC 2000 is a "Windows Powered" device. That's Microsoft's way of saying that it uses the latest version of the Windows CE OS, 3.0. Microsoft spent a lot of time upgrading CE from 2.11 to 3.0 prior to the release of the Pocket PC. The H/PC 2000 version of Windows CE 3.0 has many of the same improvements, including:

• More efficient memory management
• Faster multitasking
• Faster connectivity
• Faster program execution
• Support of direct download/installation of app's from Web