Still running Windows Mobile?
Then you are in good company, and we are not going to tell you off about it. We ran a fleet of more than fifty Windows Mobile devices ourselves, on rental, right through to the end of 2024 — years after we knew better.
This page is what replaces what, what the move actually costs, and where the money goes that nobody warns you about.
Find the one you have.
Zebra kept the shape and the job the same across every generation, so the device that replaces yours will feel familiar to the operator who has been using the old one for a decade. The gun grip is still a gun grip. The keypad is still a keypad.
If you have been told the answer is an MC55 or an MC67, that was true once. The upgrade path inside this family ran MC50 → MC55 → MC67, and then MC67NA and MC67ND. Every one of them is long out of production, so all four now land in the same place. If a search told you otherwise, it found a page written a decade ago.
All of the devices above are Windows Mobile, so everything in the next section about rebuilding the application applies to them.
Already on Android?
Not everybody reading this is facing the hard version, and it would be convenient for us not to mention that.
Your application probably survives. Because these are already Android, there is no rebuild from nothing. An app written for Android 5 may need work to run on Android 13 — that is a service call, not starting again. This is aging hardware and a security-update cycle running out, which is a much cheaper problem than the one above.
Not on any list here? The MC75, and the older MC3000 and MC9000, have successors too. Read us the model off the back and we will tell you what it maps to — including whether it is worth moving at all this year.
The hardware is the easy part.
Your application has to be rebuilt, not moved
This is the part that catches people, and it is worth knowing before you price anything. Windows Mobile software does not run on Android. There is no converter and no compatibility layer worth having. Whatever your terminals do today — picking, receiving, stocktaking, a green screen over telnet — has to be built again. Sometimes that is a week. Sometimes it is the reason the project stalled in 2018.
A green screen is the cheap case
If your terminals are running a telnet or TN5250 session into an AS/400, SAP or Pronto, you are in the best position of anyone reading this. That session is a terminal emulator, and there is a modern one for Android. The host system does not change at all.
Wifi is usually the surprise
Devices from that era speak an older wireless standard, and a site that has been running them happily has often kept old access points alive to suit. New devices want current wifi, and occasionally the upgrade you thought you were buying turns out to include the network. Better to find that out now than on go-live weekend.
Sometimes the answer is to wait
If the fleet works, the spares cupboard is full and nothing in the business is changing this year, that is a legitimate answer and we will give it. What is not legitimate is finding out in the middle of a stocktake that the last working battery has died and nobody makes them any more.
We were eight years late ourselves.
At a conference in 2016 Zebra said it plainly: Windows Mobile was finished, end of life was set for 2020, and Android was the future. They were right, and we did not move.
Rebuilding our own stocktake software for Android was expensive and would have taken months, so instead we kept more than fifty Windows Mobile rental devices alive and ran them to the end of 2024. It worked for longer than it had any right to. But the hardware got old, spares got expensive, repairs stopped being worth it, and customers who needed a modern answer went elsewhere because we did not have one.
Being late cost us customers, and there is no version of that story where it was somebody else's fault. Which is why, when we tell you what this migration actually involves, it is not a sales pitch — it is a receipt.
What is on the back of yours?
Read us the model number and roughly how many you have. We will tell you what replaces it, what has to be rewritten, and whether it is worth doing this year.