/dev/amro

Full disclosure, although I have friends at both MS and Danger, I don’t have any sort of inside information so this post is purely speculation on my part.  Usually when MS starts a division to delve into some reasonably new-to-them arena (xbox? zune?), it takes a while for them to get it right.

It seems natural for MS to buy a company, like Danger, who already has big customers like T-Mobile and already has the expertise to get a product like a Microsoft-branded phone off the ground quickly.  It also seems, on one hand, like MS is playing catch-up with Apple and their iPhone. On the other hand, the iPhone is pretty limited in its capabilities (currently, anyway.

I’ll have to review Apple’s SDK for it when it hits later this month) whereas the slightly-less-polished Windows Mobile platform already has all of the basic features that I assumed the iPhone would have (better bluetooth support for say, A2DP, file transfers, connection tethering, bluetooth GPS support, video recording, etc.).  It’ll be interesting to see where they take it from here given that both Danger and Microsoft have successful (maybe not Symbian successful but very successful) mobile platforms based on totally different technologies (Danger’s Hiptop OS is Java-based, as I understand it).