Microsoft has taken heat over decisions it made about how its mobile platforms worked. The first platform that had any sort of retail presence was Windows CE, released in the latter half of the 1990's. It looked exactly like Windows 95, even when on a tiny three inch screen.

When the Pocket PC was launched in 2000, the user interface was cleaned up quite a bit, but it still had that Windows start menu, application menus, and several other design elements that were lifted from the PC.