Has Windows Mobile become a CES wallflower?

If you go down the list of what you've been dazzled by so far from CES this week, just how many of those items have any association with the Windows Mobile operating system? Don't think we haven't noticed, either.

Let's be honest: What attendees expect to see from the Consumer Electronics Show every year is what's new -- what they hadn't seen before. If they wanted to know a status report of what's existing, or what's 30% further down the road than it was last month, they'd stay home and read Betanews.

But the news from the Windows Mobile team at Microsoft isn't what it might have been had Windows Mobile 7 been closer to ready. As it turned out, the much anticipated WM7 was delayed last September, in a move that Microsoft informed its smartphone partners about before anyone else. Supporting phone manufacturers such as HTC with its TouchHD, Sony Ericsson with its Xperia X1, and Samsung with its Omnia, are preparing to settle for Windows Mobile 6.1, while WM7 languishes in what seems on the outside to be an indeterminate netherworld.

From product manager Greg Sullivan's point of view, however, "there's tremendous momentum behind Windows Mobile." Sullivan's no stranger to operating system delays, having served as program manager during the troubled times of Longhorn's, and then Vista's, initial delays. This week, in a video produced for CES, Sullivan showed off features from those three phones -- features that Microsoft allows the manufacturers to add to Windows Mobile, as part of their own branding efforts. Such extensions have never been offered to PC manufacturers.

The Sony Ericsson Xperia X1, a key Microsoft partner for Windows Mobile at CES 2008...and this year too, it appears.

Yet we've seen these features before -- scrolling through pages to find the one you want, or turning the camera lens around to make the smartphone automatically apply a panorama. At the end of the video, Sullivan promised a new version of Internet Explorer for Mobile for later this year, whose principal feature will be built-in Flash capabilities, allowing the most common format for Web video, including YouTube.

Apparently those least satisfied with the prospects of waiting as long as the second half of next year to see so much as the next generation Web browser, are members of the Windows Mobile development team themselves. Last Monday for CES week, they actually posted a hands-on review of other Web browsers that had beaten the next IE for Mobile to the punch with Flash, including Skyfire -- which uses Mozilla's Gekko rendering engine -- Opera Mobile, and a Windows Mobile-based rendition of Mozilla Labs' Fennec experiment. In the blog post, WM documentation developer Jim Causey (not a Microsoft employee) goes so far as to praise the community of developers outside of Microsoft for providing users with "a number of options other than Microsoft's Internet Explorer Mobile."

When the message being relayed by WM's own development team to Sullivan is, "We can't wait either," just exactly who or what is causing the delay?

Betanews' frequent contributor and AR Communications Senior Vice President Carmi Levy sees the message coming out of Microsoft as something of a smokescreen. "The WinMo-focused messages that are coming out are relatively trivial. Like an automaker forced to market a car at the end of its product cycle, the messages tend to focus more on window dressing than anything else," Levy told Betanews. "So by making it easier for hardware vendors to flavor the OS to their particular needs, Microsoft and its partners create reasons -- however trivial -- for consumers to pay attention for a few more months before they have real news to report.

"It's not a long-term strategy by any stretch of the imagination," he continued, "and it's not one that Microsoft pursues willingly or happily. But when your development cycles are delayed, you do what you can to keep everything in the air until the next version is fully baked."

So the ding signifying something's ready and fresh from the oven, isn't coming from Microsoft this year. In fact, it's actually from Palm...and who would have guessed? Just when you thought WM's real platform competition would come from Symbian and Android.

"The longer it takes for Microsoft to ship a competitive OS, the greater the risk that the company - and by extension, each of its hardware partners -- becomes marginalized as a fringe player in a fast-shifting market," remarked Levy. "Ideally, when Windows Mobile 7 finally ships, Microsoft won't have to rely on vendor-created customizations to generate buzz. The underlying OS should be sufficiently solid to generate headlines all on its own. And if it isn't, then Microsoft's prospects in the mobile space will dim significantly because the company is already falling behind in its ability to stay ahead of market trends. Going back to the drawing board at this late point in time is no longer an option for any company, even a resource-capable one like Microsoft."