Let’s face it: Windows Mobile is not a success story. Most of the world doesn’t know it exists, and a good chunk of the people who do have major issues with it. Heck, Blackberry and Palm — which hasn’t updated its OS in over 5 years — have bigger user bases, and I won’t even go there where the iPhone is concerned.

Windows Mobile 6.1 was released at the start of this month. The population at large responded, "Meh."

I’m pretty sure the Windows Mobile Development Team exists. (I think.) And I’m pretty sure they’re trying very hard to make WM a market power instead of an also-ran. Word on the street has it that WM 7 is looking seriously cool:

picture from Gizmodo, from images released in January

…but it’s supposedly got a release date of mid/late 2009. If MS is planning to compete with the iPhone, they ought to be thinking in dog years, so that puts them about a decade behind. On the other hand, MS has one huge problem that Apple, RIM, and Palm don’t: someone else makes their hardware. As Giz puts it:

And it’s not like Microsoft can do anything about it. After they finish the OS, they have to send it out to OEMs and carriers and third-party companies in order to test and embed and develop on it. That’s the problem with creating only an OS, instead of making an all-in-one OS and hardware product.

Here’s the kicker: Microsoft has just acquired Danger, the makers of the T-Mobile Sidekick, and the press release doesn’t quite add up. It focuses on Danger’s software, which is consumer-targeted and "fun," but Danger will be integrated into the interestingly-named Premium Mobile Experiences team. Plus, the PMX VP came from the Entertainment and Devices Division Labs where she presumably picked up some hardware experience working on the Zune.

If my tingling spidey-sense is right, what Microsoft isn’t telling us is that WM 7 will come on MS-made hardware.

via Gizmodo