Hello.
So, for anyone who doesn't know about the braille note, the braille sense, or the braille plus, I will post an article on Wikipedia and a synopsis of a DM that I received on twitter about them. Here we go.
Link To The Braille Note Wikipedia Article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BrailleNote
The Braille Sense, I will say, was first heard of in the US thanks to Gw Micro. Hims and Gw Micro struck a distribution agreement, and thus, Gw Micro was the official US distributer of the Hims products. Gw and Hims worked together on a lot of the English translation. Eventually, though, Hims and Gw broke up with no hard feelings whatsoever as Hims opened a US office in Austin. So the Braille Sense Classic and Plus were distributed through Gw, and the On-hand later became the first product distributed by Hims themselves in the US. The Braille Plus? Well, there were two twin products, that is the Braille Plus Mobile Manager from Aph and the Levelstar Icon. Both products had nearly identical feature-sets, ran Linux, and whatnot. The Braille Plus 18 was a collaboration between Aph and Levelstar, later discontinued somewhere around 2016.
Now, for the question I had. Lets compare these devices. These devices share similarities, but I'll be talking about 1 difference, which nobody has asked about. Look at the operating systems these braille devices run on. The braille note and the braille sense both ran Windows CE, while the braille plus ran Linux. My question is, why? Why did Humanware and Hims not use Linux too? Linux is open sourced and easy to update, while windows CE is closed and could only be updated by Microsoft. What was the obsession with Windows CE. Also, why didn't APH keep updating the braille plus's operating system, why did they have to rewrite the whole thing in Android? It would have been easy to update things without taring it down and rebuilding the whole thing from scratch. I'm not sure if anyone could answer the question, but I would like to have theories on why this might be. Any answer would be appreciated.