Engadget reports the following about them:

…Microsoft’s Albert Shum — one of WP7S’ chief designers who we had the pleasure of meeting back at MWC — just confirmed the accuracy of those leaks in a session here at MIX10. Discussing the reboot of the WinMo 7 program that happened inside Microsoft about a year ago …

So: who of you prefers the design above? I sure as hell do…

Unfortunately, various limitations of the platform were disclosed at the same time. The bullet-point list of horror contains further information:

• No user-exchangeable memory (aka no MicroSD cards)
• No real multitasking
• No way to install apps except for the marketplace
• Ultra-strict hardware guidelines: if you have 5 buttons, no WM7 for you

Not much to add here…

Engadget captured the two slides below, which explain the concept further:

Cutting a long story short: businessmen and power users are no longer interesting. Of course, this makes sense – for most of us, sticking to our smartphones for an extra year would not be a real issue (read: we are difficult to sell to).

Life Maximisers, on the other hand, usually don’t have smartphones yet – and don’t really care about good keyboards either…

First of all, a look at the vendors on an OEM level – this figure includes both dumbphones and smartphones alike:

Another classic metric is the one showing the platforms – here is ComScore’s take on this matter:

Further information can be had via the URL below:
http://www.comscore.com/index.php/layout/set/ …

The image below has been circulating for some time:

An xda-developer user has now stated the following:

Just had a dinner with a friend of mine who is the main distributor for HTC in Europe, and he informed that they will receive the first shipment of Touch Pro3’s this summer and they will be on sale in Europe third quarter of this year. This is my main contact for HTC devices and he arranges a Touch Pro2 for me 4 months before it was officially released…He told me that the device will be much smaller and thinner, and soon he will provide me with the evidence including the full specifications Do you guys think this would be something you would purchase or would you rather wait for the Windows Phone 7?

Given the current rumors (400×240 screen), I am not too sure what to make of it – stay tuned for further info as we get it…

Mobile Business Briefing now reports the following:

LG, the world’s third-largest handset vendor, yesterday launched a smartphone based on Google’s Android operating system in South Korea, its home market. The model LG-KH5200, which will be sold by the country’s second-largest mobile operator KT, will compete against Motorola’s Android-based smartphone MOTOROI launched earlier this year through top carrier SK Telecom. LG plans to boost its smartphone offerings with some 20 models this year, half of which will be based on Android.

Is it just me, or isn’t Microsoft’s game plan as great as they thought it was? Hmm…

A xda-developers member has now created a skin, which is now in beta stage. The video below shows further information:

All those of you who can’t resist the urge can get the file via the URL below:
http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?p=5868312

Shawn Hargreaves now disclosed further information which should be interesting to both users and developers:

The phone features an image scaler which allows games to render to any size backbuffer they like, and have it automatically stretched to fill the display, with black bars along the edges if the backbuffer and display have different aspect ratios (an idea that will be familiar to Xbox developers). This scaling is handled by dedicated hardware, so does not consume any GPU resources, and it uses a high quality image filter that gives much better results than bilinear filtering like you would get if you did this yourself on the GPU. The scaler is important for two reasons:

* At launch, all phones will have a 480×800 (WVGA) display resolution, but we will add 320×480 (HVGA) in a future update. Of course you can detect the native resolution and program your game to adapt to this if you want, but the scaler allows games to pick just one resolution, always render at that fixed size, and still run correctly on phones with different native screen sizes. For bonus points, we automatically scale touch input to match your chosen resolution.

* 480×800 is a lot of pixels! This is a great resolution for displaying text, browsing the web, etc, but it can be a challenge for intensive 3D games to render so much data at a good framerate. To boost performance, some games may prefer to render at a lower resolution, then scale up to fill the display.

Not much to add here…

JoyStiq asked a Microsoft employee whether games for Windows Phone 7 would be able to benefit from specific hardware features of individual phones. The answer was:

What you’ll see is that we really want to drive consistency. What we’re doing is trying to make sure people try and focus on what’s guaranteed to be there. We certainly want to see an ecosystem where someone can say “hey, that’s a really cool game, I’d really like to get that,” and no matter what type of Windows Phone 7 Series device I have, I can have that same experience. That’s a very core value.

For me, this is a very bad sign – it means that the Windows Mobile ecosystem as we know it is all but dead. From now on, its specific hardware features only – device diversity is dead…

CNet now got a clarification:

… he emphasized that Windows Phone 7 Series will indeed include the equivalent of a Zune HD in every phone, he also said that Microsoft is “all systems go” on Zune HD production in the U.S. The company still plans to release a Zune HD firmware update this spring with some interesting new features, … Microsoft won’t encourage amateur developers to make games for the Zune HD, but it might port (or allow developers to port) some popular Windows Phone 7 games back to the Zune HD.

This is obvious to some extent – why not continue to sell the HD if it makes money? However, I don’t think that the device will be around for much longer (and/ or that new hardware will be released) lest it irritates partners too much…

What do you think?