Easy, now! I’m just reporting what I saw and nothing more. Do not shoot the messenger.

Friday night while shopping at the Apple Store in San Jose at the Valley Fair shopping center, I noticed a young Apple employee in fatigue shorts, black Apple shirt, and Elvis Costello-like glasses asking customers if they were paying for their purchases via credit card. When he came up to me and took my product and credit card, I watched closely. He was using a Symbol PPT8800 to perform my transaction. I mean it makes sense, the Apple Stores use the PD8500 at the cash registers for credit and debit transactions, so why not stick with Symbol for roaming transactions? But while the PD8500 is a mere slave and doesn’t require a full out operating system, the PPT8800 does. And while the program used to make the transaction completely covers up what lays beneath it, I knew what was there. Microsoft!

Folks, sad to say, the PPT8800 portable unit uses, as does all Symbol units, Windows CE or Windows Mobile. Yup, what the Pocket PC is made of. In fact, most Symbol units just run the plain-Jane Pocket PC 2003 SE (or now Windows Mobile 5.0) with its specific software running on top of it as a mere application. Shocking enough, the main Apple Store, just 10 minutes away from the Cupertino headquarters of Apple, is using a Microsoft product to help the holiday traffic get through. Stunning, no?

You know, in all fairness, I think this shows Apple’s pretty big that it can overlook this fact to get customers out of the store faster. It really takes a “big man” to do something like this and I respect them for it. But still, a bit surprising.

I bet the Elvis dude had no clue what he was scanning my Visa on. ;)

Tags: windows, microsoft, mobile, apple store, credit card, ce