Sometimes you look so hard in the back alleys for leaks on something that you miss it when it's right in front of you.
In this case, lets flash back to October 2009 at the Microsoft San Francisco Dev Camp (we covered it here). A traveling, nerdy roadshow, the Dev Camp was meant to get developers to attend presentations on programming and working with WM6.5 as well as a chance to meet with and ask questions members of the WinMo development team.
In other words, pretty technical and dry. Unless some questions on Windows Mobile 7 and prospects of Zune phones get brought up...and answered.
Thanks to forum member Interframe, who watched the nearly 3 hr video, he caught some major gems that we all missed.
For example, at the 2hr mark, we get this exchange:
Q: (roughly translated): "So Steve Ballmer went out and recently said "Windows Mobile 6.1 wasn't what we wanted it to be, neither was 6.5", so with that in mind, when is 7 coming out?".....(The WM7 developer added to what the others from the WM team had to say about the question).....A: "I can give you a little inside information there Mike. I'm not gonna give you anymore than Loke gave you, but I can give you some context. My day job, is working on Windows Mobile 7. I own the calendar feature in fact. I had to try really really hard to convince my manager to let me come down here in San Fransisco and take a day off. All day long, working on 7, staying focused. Its on track (Ed. cough, cough)The reason its been delayed and you haven't heard much about it is cause we had to go back to the drawing board with our strategy. Change things a little bit to be more competitive when we come out the door, so were not laughed at. We wanna make the same kind of impact the Zune HD made, if you look at Engadget and the blogosphere, people were very impressed with the Zune HD in many ways except for the lack of an app store.We wanna put out something that we're all proud of, which is competitive on day one, we don't wanna wait any longer."
But there's more.
- There won't be an OTA update feature in WM6.5 (which should be obvious at this point) but they are serious about it for WM7
- Definitely no Zune phone, but they are most certainly aware of trying to emulate that success with their new OS
- Better graphics support in the OS and for developers too
Read Interframe's word-for-word transcript here and check out the whole video here for yourself. The video is chock full of little tid-bits and we encourage you folks to watch it from 1hr 58mins and forward for the Q&A. Either way, next year, when we're all gawking at our WM7 calendar, I want you to think of "blue shirt guy".
(And note, in case that video disappears, we have the whole thing on our HDD ready to be re-posted).
