Windows Phone 7 Series Has Three Chassis Designs?

windows-phone-7-series-home-thumb

Last week, Microsoft reinvented itself in the phone by announcing its Windows Phone 7 Series, due out for the holidays this year. Part of the news included a loose set of hardware requirements for a supported chassis. Series in the product name implies more than one device type and the “Frankly Speaking” podcast might have tipped information about other chassis requirements. Mary Jo Foley gave the show a listen as did I. The podcast offers Michael Kordahi and Andrew Coates chatting — both are Microsoft Australia developer evangelists — they state we’ll see three main chassis designs from Microsoft. And three is the perfect number for both chassis designs and for the Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch — any more and Microsoft risks an explosion of too many designs beyond control.

Obviously, the first is the one that was already announced and shown off as a prototype — a “big screen” touch device with no physical keyboard, 1 GHz processor and dedicated graphics chip. Chassis number two is expected to offer a sliding QWERTY keyboard along with a touchscreen and while the third chassis isn’t specified, both hosts predict a candy bar style device. Since boys from down under only hit the varying form factors, my hope is that the required guts don’t change much across the chassis designs. By creating a common minimum specification set, Microsoft can nearly guarantee the user experience and performance across the entire series. How carriers will differentiate these designs is another good question, though.

While the hardware requirements for other chassis designs are still murky, some think it’s clear that Microsoft still needs to woo developers or the level of success will be tempered. I noted the importance of the development community just this morning when looking at the 2009 smartphone market share numbers, but I think Microsoft is actually in good shape here. Mobile Tech World says that apps for Windows Phone 7 Series are built on Silverlight, XNA and .Net Compact Framework, so these aren’t brand new tools that devs have to learn from scratch. We’ll know more for sure in a few weeks — Microsoft’s MIX10 event for devs takes place from March 13 through 15.

Image credit: Microsoft Windows Phone 7 Series

Related research on GigaOM Pro (sub req’d):

As Windows Mobile Stumbles, Which Smartphone OS Will Seize the Lead?

loading

Comments have been disabled for this post