On Monday, December 9, 2013 10:39:33 PM UTC, Martin Gregorie wrote:

As nobody has announced ot released anything that uses the Win 7 or 8
equivalents of WM6, I guess that M$ either don't support satnavs or have
priced their software too high for this market. I haven't so far heard of
or seen any Android based replacements, so it could be that we've seen
the end of commodity PNAs and will be expected to run our navigation
systems on Android-based smartphones or tablets.


As Richard mentions, the low-end satnavs usually run 'Core' (bare-bones) Windows CE 6, which has been around since 2006. I think CE6 licenses are still available, and I suspect the diminishing number of standalone GPS navigators is due to the state of the market rather than software availability. I don't know how dependent soaring-specific Windows CE hardware is on the availability of new mainstream GPS devices.


Consequently, sooner or later XCSoar, LK8000, Oudie and equivalents will
no longer be supported on devices running WM 6.

As far as 'sooner' goes, it's relatively straightforward to maintain the version of XCSoar for Windows CE at the moment, so there should be no pressing need to discontinue support for existing Windows CE devices even if new hardware becomes unavailable.

(XCSoar uses the same codebase for all supported devices. This means the majority of changes don't have to be duplicated for each different type of hardware, eg. Android, various Linux devices, Windows CE.)

I don't think any of the active XCSoar developers use Windows CE devices other than for basic testing though, so it will remain important that people report bugs as soon as possible via http://bugs.xcsoar.org/newticket - it's likely that even apparently obvious bugs will be missed otherwise.

Long term, it's my understanding that the most recent version of CE (Windows Embedded Compact 2013) breaks binary compatibility with earlier versions, meaning existing compilers won't generate program files that will work on CE2013. If the take up of CE2013 is anything like as weak as CE7, it may be irrelevant.