No Zune Phone, Yes Zune Phone, What is the Zune Phone!

December 11th, 2008 by Alfred @ Zune MAX

I’m kinda tired of this but once again Gizmodo has the scoop on the Zune Phone. Every once in awhile it would be cool if a Zune site was the one with a scoop like that but apparently Zune team only reads the big boys and they therefore they get all the good tips.

Rumor Smash: No Zune Phone at CES

Sorry dudes. Just it first hand from Brian Seitz, Group Manager of Zune: “No Zune phone at CES.”

Anyway as I suspected there will be no Zune Phone at CES in January. Steve Ballmer will use the keynote address to talk about how much he misses Bill and they have a video retrospective planned that will take us all back to the days when he and Bill single handedly invented the technology industry with DOS. This year its more about what Microsoft has done and not so much about what they are doing to remain relevant. Right? Wrong!

I agree with MG Seigler from Venture Beat. It’s a matter of semantics.

Not a ZunePhone: The big stink over “Pink” » VentureBeat

the question for some people is whether they’re playing a semantic game. While there may be no “Zune Phone” at CES, there is still very much a chance that we’ll see something that Microsoft has codenamed “Pink” or “Project Pink.”

There will be no Zune Phone which by definition is a hardware device designed in house and manufactured by Microsoft. I agree with Brian Lam at Gizmodo that Google can get away with a GPhone and no hardware because they have never manufactured hardware but Microsoft has a track record producing their own and we expect them to on a Zune Phone and especially considering they paid 500 million for Sidekick maker Danger a few months back.

Running the Zune software on someone else’s phone would not be the same thing for many and may not be considered a Zune Phone by some but maybe they’re thinking about the existing Zune software and not about something else, something much larger. What is it? I don’t know but the Pink and Purple projects are supposed to integrate a set of premium mobile services including Zune into the Windows Mobile OS. That seems rather simple really if you think they are just installing Zune software on some phones but when you consider that the Pink project team has been at work for a whole year you to have to wonder what they have been doing right?

What takes that long to integrate into Windows Mobile? It can’t just be software that took a year to integrate. There has to be much more than some extended software services involved in a year long project. Project Pink is more than Zune software on Windows Mobile and it’s more than just a Zune Phone. Think about what they have done with the New Xbox Experience and then add Zune to that equation.

I think Project Pink and Purple, or Rouge as it may be, is the Zune Live Experience and mobile extensions of the combined Xbox and Zune Experience to Windows Mobile. “Connected Entertainment” is coming to a smartphone near you in 2009. We’ll be playing Zune tunes and Zune Games on Windows Mobile 7 devices. We’ll have community developed XNA games for Xbox with Zune ports of the same games that we can play at home and on the go. We’ll carry our social network with us and have access to our online friends from MSN, Xbox and Zune on our Windows Mobile Smartphones by 2010.

Now the real question is will that be enough to even bother Apple and the iPhone behemoth?

Written by Alfred @ Zune MAX - Check out my Zune Card in the Zune forums now!

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