Now, somewhere in the back of my mind I'd always thought "Windows CE is gone, fool, it's been replaced by Windows Mobile" whenever I saw a reference to CE. Thanks be to Mikehall, whose blog is a treasure trove of Windows CE knowledge. Turns out that Windows CE is just a set of building blocks with which you can create an OS, like Windows Mobile.

A very common question that perhaps needs some explanation is the difference between Windows Mobile 5.0 and Windows Embedded CE 6.0 - so here's the explanation.

Windows Embedded CE is a hard real-time, componentized operating system that can be used by developers to build a wide range of embedded devices - you can think of the operating system as a box of Lego blocks, with CE 6.0 there are approximately 700 components (or Lego blocks) that make up the operating system, a developer gets to pick and choose which components or technologies they put into their embedded operating system design

Read: Mikehall's Embedded WEblog : Windows Mobile and Windows Embedded CE - what's the difference ?