Pocket PC Takes on Palm

Taking another run at the handheld computing market, Microsoft used New York’s Grand Central Station, the symbol of the American commuter, as the launch point for its new Pocket PC platform. Designed to run on palm-sized devices, the Pocket PC runs the latest version of Windows CE and offers much stronger multimedia support than its chief rival, Palm Computing’s Palm operating system. Microsoft is gambling that tweaking these and other features in the Pocket PC will be enough to finally tempt customers away from Palm’s Spartan, monochrome interface.

Major Features

The Pocket PC’s operating system is Windows CE 3.0, code-named Rapier. Sleeker than its predecessors, and with a simplified interface, it offers powerful media-handling capabilities, such as streaming and downloaded audio and audio and text versions of books, the latter using ClearType, a technology that substantially improves the display of text on small LCD screens. Microsoft will port the latest version of the Windows Media Player to the Pocket PC later this year, adding video playback capabilities.