As we knew that Windows Mobile 7 is coming next week at MWC, but the Wall Street Journal has a piece up confirming the announcement, along with a few other interesting details.
The WSJ has confirmed that Mic will introduce their newest mobile phone OS on Monday at the Mobile World Conference in Barcelona. WinMo 6.5 is dead; long live Windows Phone 7.
Announcement will almost certainly come during Steve Ballmer’s Windows Phone press conference, scheduled for 3pm local time. According to the WSJ, Windows Phone 7 will have an entirely new user interface that closely resembles that of Zune. This backs up what we’d heard from a tipster last month.
Apparently, Windows Phone 7 will look to fix the mistakes of WinMos past by working more closely with OEMs:
With Windows Mobile 7, similarly, Microsoft has gotten more involved in hardware design by creating detailed plans for a small number of handset “chassis” on top of which hardware manufactures can build their devices, people familiar with the effort said. The idea behind the plan, these people said, is to limit the wild variation in quality of Windows phones and to make it easier for independent application developers to write software that runs well on them.
The Journal’s source says the plan is to “limit the wild variation” that’s typically been the hallmark of Windows Mobile. The WSJ also says that the long-rumored Pink project is a separate phone designed to replace the Sidekick which we also basically knew but that it won’t make an appearance at MWC at all.
Source:engadget.com, gizmodo.com
