Two new point-of-sale products running an operating system based on Windows Embedded CE 6.0 components will be released in early 2007 by Micros Systems Inc. in Columbia, Md., said Kyle Kurdle, vice president of hardware development at the manufacturer. The company has been beta-testing Version 6.0 since about June, he said.

"We're very excited about it," Kurdle said. "The main feature is that there's a whole new memory architecture in it, which opens up new options for us as far as the size of databases and capabilities of our devices, and yet it maintains the same small footprint."

Micros sells to a number of retailers, including restaurants that might, for instance, keep enormous inventories of wine, he said. "The retailers potentially need access to larger databases," which will be easier to access via 6.0's larger virtual memory. With earlier versions of Windows Embedded CE, searches simply didn't work, Kurdle said.

Having more memory "allows us to free up programmers to be a little less concerned about tight memory management," he said.

The Shared Source kernel will also allow Micros to expand operating system functionality and then have access to it for troubleshooting its designs, Kurdle said. "This makes Microsoft a stronger competitor to Linux, which is obviously what they're targeting," he said.