Over on Engadget, Michael Gartenberg says Happy 10th Birthday to the Pocket PC; the first mobile device that combined a mobile office with the ability to play games, music, movies and even eBooks. Gartenberg was quoted in the original press release and actually attended the April 19th, 2000 Grand Central event that launched the first 4 Pocket PCs of the time.

Back then of course, Microsoft had its targets set on the old Palm OS devices which mainly had single-tasking capabilities, grayscale screens, and required you learn a special language in order to input text. The Pocket PC offered a huge advantage with full multi-tasking, full color video and music playback, full HTML web browsing, a real version of Microsoft Office for editing documents, and your choice of on-screen keyboards, handwriting recognition, or character recognition.