The WSJ has confirmed that Mic will introduce their newest mobile phone OS on Monday at the Mobile World Conference in Barcelona. WinMo 6.5 is dead; long live Windows Phone 7.
The announcement will almost certainly come during Steve Ballmer's Windows Phone press conference, scheduled for 3pm local time. According to the WSJ, Windows Phone 7 will have an entirely new user interface that closely resembles that of Zune. This backs up what we'd heard from a tipster last month.
Apparently, Windows Phone 7 will look to fix the mistakes of WinMos past by working more closely with OEMs:
With Windows Mobile 7, similarly, Microsoft has gotten more involved in hardware design by creating detailed plans for a small number of handset "chassis" on top of which hardware manufactures can build their devices, people familiar with the effort said. The idea behind the plan, these people said, is to limit the wild variation in quality of Windows phones and to make it easier for independent application developers to write software that runs well on them.
One of those devices to run off of Windows Phone 7 is expected to be Microsoft's Project Pink/Zune phone, although that handset's considered unlikely to be part of next week's announcement.
It's still going to be some time before we see any Windows Phone 7 devices on the market, but it's good to see Microsoft getting in gear to replace the inexcusable WinMo 6.5. [WSJ]


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