Not so much by the software itself, but by the fact that they crammed so much of it into a 16-MB ROM chip. It's been said that Microsoft gets it right the third time, and since this is version three of the Windows CE operating system, the adage may hold true once again. CE 3.0 is available for 180 different CPUs in 12 families and runs in 10 languages. It has improved capabilities in all areas over the previous versions. The kernel has undergone a transformation to make it much more responsive to real-time hardware needs.
Programs consist of processes and threads, and they can be synchronized and prioritized.
The user interface consists of the display and touch screen, the various buttons and sound output. The audio and video capabilities include the Windows Media Player, which can play WAV and MP3 files as well as show MPEG movies. There's a tiny keyboard onscreen similar to that of the Palm, but CE has better handwriting recognition. Windows CE 3.0 contains much better communication capabilities than its predecessors. For the developer, CE also supports COM and DCOM, MSMQ, the Microsoft Foundation Classes and the Visual Basic run-time engine.