Honeywell is purchasing Metrologic, adding to the purchase of Hand Held Products.  It's too early to know how the two groups will be integrated, if at all.  Metrologic makes a line of hand held scanners, and a few mobile computers.  Only one is Windows CE based, the SP5700.

At the Embedded Systems Conference today, Microsoft announced plans to rename Windows CE along with other products.  The new name for Windows CE, starting with what would have been CE 7, will be Windows Embedded Compact.  This release is scheduled for 2009.

The April 2008 ITScriptNet Product and Sales Training is underway in Orlando.  If you were unable to attend, we will post links to the training materials in the next few days.

We've been informed that a firmware update is available for the Symbol MC35 that upgrades it to Windows Mobile 6.  Note that there is a fee for upgrading from Windows Mobile 5 to 6.  Contact your Symbol Rep for more detail.  We'll upgrade our device to make sure that the Windows Mobile 5 client for ITScriptNet continues to work.

Do you remember when we mentioned that the US Census Bereau was using a Windows Mobile device for collecting the 2010 census data?  Well it turns out the project has not gone well, and will be scrapped.  Its too bad - its an interesting application with biometrics, wireless communication, etc.

Today at CTIA, Microsoft announced Windows Mobile 6.1.  This version is still built on top of Windows CE 5.0, not CE 6.0.  As far as we can tell, the primary update is improvement in integration with System Center Mobile Device Manager.  There doesn't seem to be much that will matter for data collection devices.

We've discussed Windows Mobile 6.1 before.