Best portable sat nav 713

On 03 Oct 2006 10:09:49 GMT, Adrian

I've posted here before that the Pocket PC phones were heavily pushed in Italy (remember that these were sold originally bearing the Microsoft "WinCE" label which will become very appropriate in a few seconds.) One of the journalists responsible for the hype actually had one.

He broke his leg while skiing off-piste and tried to call for help using his phone. Every time he dialled 112 or 114 for buttistance the phone BSOD'd. He had to lie in agony until another skier came within yelling range.

I wrote a paper on why WinCE phones are crap several years ago. In essence, compared to Symbian WIDs, WinCE phonbes are built upside down. Telephony on WinCE is an application running on top of the OS. If the OS crashes telephony is lost, if telephony crashes it is lost, indeed if any one of hundreds of applications crashes you lose telephony. The implementation can only be very flaky indeed.

Symbian installed telephony as a driver running below the majority of the OS, exactly like networking or mouse drivers (on well designed OSen, obviously we're not talking Windows here). Hence it's very difficult for telephony to crash on any Symbian WID. Hence it simply works reliably.