We picked up a story today out of Taiwan that said Windows Mobile 6.0 (WM), which is aimed at smartphones, is due to ship by late Spring -07.  The report comes on the heels of Vodaphone (Newbury, England) announcing it will add the current 5.0 version of Windows Mobile in a Samsung handset.   Vodaphone’s current smartphone offerings use the Symbian (S60) and open source Linux-based operating systems. 

Steve Sechrist
Senior Analyst and Editor
Projection Monthly

So why is this important?  Because Microsoft thinks WM 6.0 will become a mainstream O/S on smartphones by the second half of 2008.

Now just because Microsoft says it will be so, doesn’t mean it will happen of course.  In fact, some think the company’s bifurcated smartphone strategy is not so smart - and may even be schizophrenic.  This strategy has a lot of baggage with it that harbors back to the Windows for Pen Computing days - when cell phones looked, weighed, and cost about as much as a bar of solid gold. 

The emerging PDA market of that day did much to prove that “syncing” to your primary information source - the PC, and taking it on the road was “killer-app” enough to justify a market niche.  No justification was needed on the cell phone side as everybody simply wanted one.

Since then, the PDA and cell phone markets independently pushed the development envelope in areas of display resolution, battery life, memory and processing power.  Add to this, wireless G3 developing high speed data bandwidth delivery schemes in the form of CDMA’s EV-DO, GSM’s EDGE and the PC wireless network in the form of WiFi hot spots, all pushing wireless Mbps download rates.  The hardware and delivery mechanism stars aligned for the perfect converged device, dubbed the “Smartphone.”

With its eye on the ball, Microsoft is making big plans for this space.  Eddie Wu, Microsoft’s senior director of device solutions sales, Asia and worldwide ODM ecosystems, believes his 6.0 platform will become the mainstream during the second half of 2008 (typically about 6 months after the first model is introduced).

Wu pointed out that Microsoft currently has partnered with 115 companies and 47 handset makers that have rolled previous versions of the Windows Mobile O/S.  And that number doesn’t count the PDA market.  But given the genesis of Windows Mobile O/S and many incompatibilities with its PDA cousin Pocket PC, the company has some things to fix.  A recent “web-rant” went on to ask Microsoft why the current version of WM doesn’t include Office Mobile (no editing functions).  Why no upgrade path for the two systems (or from WM v.3.1 to v.5.0 for crying out loud) and more recently, Why Windows Mobile users can’t use Zune Marketplace and share content over Wi-Fi with Zune owners (really good question). 

Suffice it to say, love em, or hate em, M/S is going to be in this space, and guaranteed, if it will make money, they will get it right (OK, at least they will get it to the point we are so conditioned that we think it’s right). 

But if (when) Apple gets in this space with iPhone featuring a super cool user interface and its dominance in the MP3 space, it’s going to be a different game.  Or will it? 

In the PC war with Microsoft, the Achilles heel for Apple was also its cash cow -the closed box model that allowed Apple to over-charge its customers but stifled innovation and diminished the 3rd party development industry.  Microsoft used this against the company by adopting an open-box model that eventually crushed Apple’s PC business - rendering the company to the self-proclaimed “BMW” niche player in the market.

Microsoft faces another closed system approach with the iPod.  The so-called “walled-garden” prevents users from sharing songs and limits porting. Will Microsoft again exploit this weakness? Only time will tell.