RSSMicrosoft Inks Large Windows Mobile Deal
By the Betanews Staff | Published April 5, 2006, 3:30 PM
Microsoft on Wednesday won its largest contract to date for smartphones using its Windows Mobile operating system. The U.S. Census Bureau has requested a half-million phones through manufacturer HTC that would be used for the 2010 Census. According to press reports, the deal was one of the largest ever covering smartphones.
The agency has made the move in order to speed up the data collection process. Previously, employees would digitize the paper forms filed out by the Census Bureau's workers in the field. The contract was part of a larger $600 million deal with Harris, a company that is working to automate the entire census-taking process.
Idiotic and/or grifting bureaucrats. All they had to do was call up UPS for some sound advice.
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|Why not wait a few years? 2010 is eons in the technology world. Smartphones may not be the best thing around.
I highly doubt it will take 4 years to develop an app to count the people of the country.
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|You'd be surprised that 4 years is probably just about the correct timeframe for something of this scale. There's a need for proper design & testing, manufacturing (which includes sourcing of materials, etc.), procurement and distribution. These things take time and someone somewhere WILL screw up. So they need some buffer as well.
And it seems like the deal does not state which version of Windows Mobile that they are going to use. They may very well use the next generation WM OS which is still in MS lab.
I cant say WM is stable or robust enough for any real life application yet. But it's about the best for at least a few years to come. Symbian, Linux, PalmOS, etc. are still lagging behind, especially in the area where ease of developing complex applications is important.
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|We'll, were all going to hell. Leave it to the government to use Windows for the accounting of 200 million+ people. I can just see it now...
Mr. Johnson, how many people live in your home?
umm, I think about 3.
Okay, Sir, your going to have to slow down, my smartphone crashed and i'm still waiting for the error message to appear, seems to be processing something... oh, wait, nope, that was my instant messenger on the fritz, oh, now here were go. Now how many people was that?
3.
Shoot, I hit the wrong button! This thing wants to install a user-friendly enhancement...... 199,999,998 people to go.
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|Have you ever actually used a smartphone? Somehow I doubt it.
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|wait .....
after this i can only assume "someone" will sue MS for having their OS included in the phone ... and probably force them to release a version of the phone without any of MS on it ....
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