Windows Mobile Naming Scheme

With each major release of Windows Mobile, Microsoft has been changing the names of different flavors of the base OS.

Pocket PC 2002 was used in PDAs with touch screen support. Smartphone 2002 was for mobile phones with no touch screen support. Navigation in Smartphone is possible only with keys on the phone keypad.

When Pocket PC 2003 was released, it was renamed to Windows Mobile 2003. This time there were 3 editions, Windows Mobile 2003 (PDA only), Windows Mobile 2003 Phone Edition (PDA with phone) and Windows Mobile 2003 Smartphone Edition.

With Windows Mobile 2005 same naming scheme continued. Probably this time the person responsible for changing names was on vacation :).

Now the latest version is Windows Mobile 6.0. The names were changed again and “Smartphone” is out of the lot. See below the new names:

This name change, according to Microsoft, was due to confusions people had between Smartphone and Pocket PC Phone Edition. The new naming policy will hopefully fix that problem.

Note: Windows Mobile 6.0 is not based on Windows CE 6.0. WM 6 is almost on the same lines as WM 5 which was based on CE 5.0. Now this is confusing people who are involved in working with both CE and WM products. Not sure why Microsoft didn’t call it WM 5.5 instead of 6.0.