Errr
>WinCE was never intended to be used on ipad-like devices, just PDAs, phones etc.
So when is a PDA not a tablet? When you remove the keyboard? I've had WinCE based PDAs (not through choice) and they were universally crap. With or without a keyboard, they've been junk. I don't see how screen size (which afterall is the only difference between a PDA and a tablet) would make that piece of junk any better or worse.
WinCE really is a terrible operating system. It's nasty to develop for. Ever tried putting it on your own hardware? And it gets so many things so very badly wrong. Even simple things like Time-of-Day it can't get right, or even consistent, especially when considering alarms in other daylight savings zones. Admittedly other OSes have had some problems, but at least in their case it's bugs not the actual design that causes the problems.
If MS put half the effort they applied to Win7 into WinCE it would be much better. The new Win Phone7 does look nicer (very nice actually, I think), but it's still WinCE under the hood with all it's terrible, terrible nasties. They've a lot to do before WinCE becomes anything like halfway decent. Perhaps even MS have finally decided that WinCE is inevitably junk and that a port of Win7 is the only sensible thing to do?
>Real Windows won't be coming to cell phones etc any time soon.
What do you mean by 'real windows'? Sure, you're not going to get a full Win7 desktop on a phone, the screen is too small. But if they took the guts of Win7, stripped them down to only that which is necessary to support a phone GUI (i.e. kernel. some essential services, etc) then I think that MS would have the foundations of a very good and varied offering. Especially if they can point to commonality across mobile, desktop and server running on intel and arm.
Other commentators have said that this can only be good news for ARM. It certainly is! Who really needs the hulking great performance of an intel chip on their desktop? Gamers do, maybe a few scientists, but that's about it. It may be that everyone else is quite content with a quad core 1GHz ARM based desktop running Windows 7 consuming 5Watts. Server operators will likely be quite content with a low power CPU coupled to the same IO hardware running their software stack - likely to save them an absolute bundle in electricity bills.
It is indeed bad news for Intel. Atom hasn't taken off anything like as they'd hoped. They're still many Watts short of breaking in to the phone market. It's especially embarrassing for them considering that they voluntarily **SOLD** their ARM development line to Marvell at a low-ish price, who must surely be rubbing their hands in glee. Intel had the opportunity to define and lead a new PC standard based on ARM, but didn't. Sounds like MS are going to do it for them.