Next Gen Microsoft Phones Make Cameos On Twitter

Rumours about Microsoft’s mobile plan are evolving, weirdly! Today, we’ve got duelling speculation: from Twitter, evidence of new “Danger” hardware; from Microsoft, mention of “the next generation of Windows Phone”. It’s mystery meat, this stuff, but at least it’s juicy.

Engadget spent the better part of their morning piecing together a puzzle’s worth of cryptic, oddly tagged tweets from unknown Twitter users. What was so interesting about these Tweets? See if you can tell:

DANGER. Lots of DANGER. This is the company that made the Sidekick, and that Microsoft absorbed. It’s also the division variously implicated in the exclusive Pink phone documents leaked to us back in September, which may or may not actually represent Microsoft’s next phone play, rather than a straightforward Windows Mobile X evolution. The kicker? Sidekick devices don’t tag their tweets “Danger”, and these tweets have been ramping up very quickly in the past week. So!

Microsoft’s been giving more direct clues as well, by way of their MIX 10 conference site. MIX is an annual developers’ conference held by Microsoft in March, just after Mobile World Congress, where Microsoft is almost definitely making some kind of mobile announcement. Peek the schedule, and you’ll find this:

The next generation of Windows Mobile phones. Sounds like a bit of an overstatement for an incremental update like Windows Mobile 6.5.3/6.6/whatever, and why would developers need new guidance for developing on a platform built on the same codebase, anyway? Again: delicious mystery meat.

The wild, scattershot nature of these rumours is actually what keep them interesting, I think. There’s evidence that we’re soon going to see Pink, and that we’re soon going to see Windows Mobile 7. The obvious conclusion, if not a particularly descriptive one, is that we’re going to see a new thing – a single new thing – that’s the product of all the wild rumours we’ve heard so far, changing nomenclature aside. And, fingers crossed, it may actually be awesome. [Engadget, MobileTechWorld]