The Windows CE kernel
Microsoft Windows CE is designed to support a much wider range of hardware. There are no fewer than four different versions of the Windows CE kernel for various different CPU's (NEC MIPS and its variants, Intel/AMD X86, Hitachi SH-3 and SH4, Intel StrongARM) along with other vendor-specific versions of Windows CE to handle different kinds of screens, keyboards, modems and peripheral devices. It is fair to say there is only ONE version of Palm OS, where Windows CE is compiled specifically for the machine that it is being designed to run on.

Is it a tuxedo or a jogging suit?
It is this fundamental difference in kernel design which is both the main weakness and strength of each respective operating system. Palm OS is optimized and compiled for a very specific kind of machine, and thus its performance and function is highly tweaked. By the same token, it can also be said that Palm OS is also quite limited as to what it can do.

Windows CE, on the other hand, is a general-purpose operating system designed to support a lot of different kinds of hardware, has a modular design and is very expandable. In fact, unlike Palm OS, it's a lot more like the operating system that runs on your PC. Windows CE isn't just used for PDA's, it's been adapted to computers for your car (such as the Clarion AutoPC), Windows Terminals and ultra light notebook PC's. Again, this strength is also its weakness, because while it's designed to be a jack-of-all-trades, its not really optimized for a specific hardware platform, and applications designed to run on all of these different computer types reflect this "one size fits all" approach.

To use an analogy, Palm OS is like a custom tuxedo that looks great and fits perfectly for one particular person. Windows CE is more like an army fatigue or a jogging outfit, which doesn't necessarily fit everyone perfectly but can be used for more things than going to a wedding or a cocktail party.

Knowing your limitations
In our original article, we talked about the maximum addressable memory capabilities of the Nino's PR31700 RISC processor and the Palm III's Dragonball, both of which can theoretically address up to 4GB. The reality, however, is that there's a huge gap between what Windows CE and Palm OS can do as far as memory allocation is concerned.

While Microsoft and Palm Computing keep much of the details about the inner workings of both operating systems confidential, we do know that Windows CE is far more robust in terms of total memory allocation. While there is no limit to the size of a Palm OS application, there is no way for Palm OS 3.x to address more than 12MB RAM, a fact which was discovered by engineers at TRG during the development of an experimental 16MB SuperPilot Memory Board which never saw actual production. The new Windows CE HP/PC Pro "Jupiter" machines are expandable to 32MB of base RAM (such as on the Vadem Clio and the HP Jornada 820) and also have the ability to store data on 32Mb hot-pluggable CompactFlash cards.