Smartphone 2002 - Stick a fork in it, it's done.

[Ed Hansberry]

<a href="http://www.infoworld.com/articles/hn/xml/02/07/10/020710hnmssmartphone.xml">http://www.infoworld.com/articles/hn/xml/02/07/10/020710hnmssmartphone.xml</a><br /><br />Smartphone 2002 software is getting those last tweaks and will go gold in days or a few weeks. "After repeated delays, Microsoft is finally ready to ship its Windows Powered Smartphone 2002 software, formerly code-named Stinger, in the coming weeks but mobile phones based on the software may not appear for up to six months after its release, a company executive said here Tuesday. Among the hardware makers readying phones based on Windows Powered Smartphone 2002 are Compal Communications of Taipei and Sendo Holdings of Birmingham, England."<br /><br />The biggest issues that have plagued Microsoft have come from demands by carriers and the GPRS hardware.

[ARW]

Maybe they will...maybe thry won't.

http://theregister.co.uk/content/54/26091.html

Either way, it's all GSM which won't have much of an impact for those of us in the US. In the mean time I'll probably have to give the new Kyocera a go.

[vetteguy]

I had pretty much given up on waiting for these devices. By the time they do finish the OS and then hardware manufacturers have time to develop with it, another year will have passed and there will be other new phones. I had been holding off on my next phone waiting, but I don't know how much longer I can wait.

[Scott R]

Notable quote:
The focus on producing smart phones for GPRS networks has delayed the launch of these products. "If we decided two years ago to ship on GSM, you would have had Stinger for a long time by now," Cazzaro says.

Indeed, GSM technology is likely adequate for many of the applications that Microsoft has envisioned for smart phones, such as synchronizing e-mail, contact, and calendar information.

"I can synchronize my e-mail over 9.6 kbps almost as well as I can synchronize it over GPRS," he says. "I can synchronize in 3 minutes most of my e-mail and [with] GPRS it takes a minute and a half. Realistically, that difference is not going to change my life."
Right, the difference between 1.5 minutes and 3 minutes is no big deal to a consumer, but it's because even 1.5 minutes is way too slow.
The promise of GPRS was a big scam. You have to pay tons more for the privilege, but you still don't get nearly enough bandwidth to support more feature-rich services. With what GPRS offers and costs right now, I'd much rather use regular old digital for data via Verizon (at no extra charge) and get 9.6K-14.4K. Once again, here's where Palm's web-clipping concept proves superior. I'd prefer to get my email messages in 10 seconds rather than wait 3 minutes just so I can get whatever multimedia bloat it plans on sending with the message.

Scott

[innersky]

but mobile phones based on the software may not appear for up to six months after its release

You're kidding, right?