Windows Mobile 6.5 or Android? What next for Auto-ID Operating Systems?

Posted on 14 March 2011

All tier 1 manufacturers in the Auto-ID industry, e.g. Motorola, Intermec, Honeywell, etc., promote their products with Windows Mobile 6 or 6.5 as the de-facto Operating System (OS), but are times changing?

The Smartphone market has split into four camps, Microsoft’s Windows Phone 7, Apple’s iOS, HP’s Palm Web OS and Google’s Android, with the last three promoting themselves as more of a platform than just an OS. Apple’s App Store claims over 350,000 applications, Android’s Market has around 200,000 and HP’s Palm App Catalog claims thousands of applications. HP have just announced that Web OS (a new desktop PC operating system version) is to be sold on all new HP PCs, which assuming purchasers use the new OS, will add over 50 million users to the HP cause each year.

As a mobile solution specialist and software development company, Codegate has been developing applications for the Windows Mobile environment for many years and throughout this time there has been very little demand for any other OS. Now, we’re being asked about iOS and Android developments! Yet none of the tier 1 manufacturers listed above have launched rugged hand-held devices with anything other than Windows Mobile OS installed. This however is a situation which I believe is about to change…

Microsoft’s product road map is making 6.5.3 the last version of the Windows Mobile offering (formerly Windows Embedded CE), but with Windows Phone 7 they have made the OS demonstratively different to that of Windows Mobile 6.5, aligning it more towards consumer orientated smartphone and tablet devices. Does this leave our Auto-ID industry with a void which needs to be filled? Rugged hand-held devices running remote worker specific applications are unlikely to be best suited to an OS geared to appeal to consumers.

Motorola, Intermec and Honeywell will need to research utilising other OS platforms in future products or, where product life cycles permit, release variants of existing models with a different OS. Apple’s iOS would be excluded as it only runs on Apple hardware, HP’s Palm Web OS could be a contender but licencing and proprietary Intellectual Property (IP) issues may make this an expensive option. This leaves Google’s Android as the most likely contender for three main reasons:

1. It’s open source and free of IP or royalty issues
2. Each manufacturer can use it to develop their own USP features
3. It comes with a large experienced developer community

It’s surprising that none of the manufacturers in our sector have yet declared their intention to incorporate an alternative OS, although all of them are privately discussing the advantages of moving to an open source OS. Indeed Motorola is one of the founding companies to form the Open Handset Alliance in 2007. The Open Handset Alliance launched their first product in November 2007 – Android, a mobile device platform developed from a Linux kernel. Android remains a trademark of Google.

I’d be very interested in your thoughts of when the Auto-ID manufacturers will adopt a different OS, so please feel free to leave a comment below. Or, alternatively if you’d like to discuss a possible deployment of a solution for your business, drop me an email or call the office on +44 (0)845 345 0808