Pocket PC 2000

Pocket PC 2000

A version of the Windows Mobile operating system
Pocket PC 2000 today screen.
Developer	Microsoft
Source model	Closed source
Released to manufacturing	April 19, 2000
Succeeded by	Pocket PC 2002
Support status
Unsupported as of September 10, 2007

Pocket PC 2000, originally codenamed "Rapier",^[1] was released on April 19, 2000, and was based on Windows CE 3.0. It was the debut of what was later dubbed the Windows Mobile operating system, and meant to be a successor to the operating system aboard Palm-Size PCs. Backwards compatibility was retained with such Palm-Size PC applications. Pocket PC 2000 was intended mainly for Pocket PC devices, however several Palm-Size PC devices had the ability to be updated also. Further, several Pocket PC 2000 phones were released, however Microsoft's "Smartphone" hardware platform was not yet created. The only resolution supported by this release was 240 x 320 (QVGA). Removable storage card formats that were supported were CompactFlash and MultiMediaCard. At this time Pocket PC devices had not been standardized with a specific CPU architecture. As a result, Pocket PC 2000 was released on multiple CPU architectures; SH-3, MIPS, and ARM. Infrared (IR) File beaming capability was among the original hardware features.

The original Pocket PC operating system had similar appearance to Windows 98, Windows Me, and Windows 2000 operating systems. Pocket PC 2000 is unsupported as of September 10, 2007.

This initial release had multiple built-in applications,^[2] many of them similarly branded to match their desktop counterparts; such as Microsoft Reader, Microsoft Money, Pocket Internet Explorer and Windows Media Player. A version of Microsoft Office called Pocket Office was also bundled and included Pocket Word, Pocket Excel and Pocket Outlook. Notes, a note-taking app saw its first release and would be supported by most later versions of Windows Mobile. Intelligent character recognition support allowed Notes to distinguish styles of handwriting to be learned by the OS during processing to improve accuracy and recognition levels.

References

1. De Herrera, Chris. Windows CE/Windows Mobile Versions. pocketpcfaq.com. Retrieved September 6, 2007.
2. De Herrera, Chris. More Than a PDA!. Pocket PC Magazine. Retrieved September 14, 2007.