Written clean-slate by people who hadn't written an OS before. And boy, it showed!
Naive implementations of timers, interrupt handling, network management etc abounded. We had a license for source and spent a lot of time fixing it.
Of course, Microsoft didn't want most of our fixes. Too proud or arrogant. They would just deny there was a problem etc, re-releasing broken code again and again. We would apply our fixes to our copy each release and continue on our merry way.
The promise of the first version of WinCE were so great as it was a complete 32 bit operating system written from scratch without any legacy issues, but the slowness of the machines, even as they could run on a pair of AA batteries, lack of software library and wireless infrared communications never really taking off for internet usage hampered the machines. Also, the 5 different CPU architectures became an issue for the touch screen devices before ARM processors became the norm.
My favorite non ARM device was the wonderfully customizable Be-300 which had a few dedicated websites to hacking it. As a reminder all of these devices wince mainline operating systems came with handwriting recognition built in from the same people who built the software recognition for the Apple Newton.
Naive implementations of timers, interrupt handling, network management etc abounded. We had a license for source and spent a lot of time fixing it.
Of course, Microsoft didn't want most of our fixes. Too proud or arrogant. They would just deny there was a problem etc, re-releasing broken code again and again. We would apply our fixes to our copy each release and continue on our merry way.