14 DAY TRIAL // Apple did what they wanted to do for a long time: they released a communication device and they had their moment. Apparently, Google is also working on such a project and we already had seen some "leaked photos" of what the product of their work will look like.
Given these facts and knowing how competitive Microsoft is, the next logical step for them is to release their own device with integrated wireless communication capabilities. If they succeed in doing that only time will tell.
But, for now, all we have are rumors because nothing related to such an enterprise hasn't come from Microsoft. So, until the moment they will come clean about it (and if they actually have the intention of making such a device) the only thing we can do is try to figure out what they could come up with, and "leak" photos of an yet unborn and unseen handset, made by the ones with Photoshop skills living among us.
So, what will the ZunePhone be capable of if it will be launched on the mobile market to compete with its older brothers from Apple, LG and, supposedly, Google? For starters, if we were to trust the common sense of Microsoft software engineers, the ZunePhone should be capable of sharing music wirelessly and socially as its music player sibling is.
If you don't have the opportunity to be able to use a 3G enabled wireless carrier and you fear the dark future of a ZunePhone stripped of its music sharing capabilities, you shouldn't because Microsoft has already thought about such a situation and has filed for two patents that would allow the transfer of media content from a handset by using other means of transport than the conventional ones.
Microsoft has conceived a system of transferring data with the help of the DTMF signals (Dual-tone multi-frequency signals used for signaling over voice channels on telephones). Wondering how this will be possible?
Let's hear it from the inventor of this new technology: "the standard DTMF signals for numbers 0 through 7 can be mapped to the corresponding three-bit binary representations of those numbers. The arbitrary data can be placed in a container with meta-data indicating the start and end of the data, the type of data, the amount of data, error correction/detection information, etc. The receiver can prevent the DTMF signals from being converted to audio signals to spare any human listeners from hearing the DTMF signals".
What else would the ZunePhone feature? Most probably, it will use a very similar interface to the one that Zune uses at the moment and it will run a Windows Mobile operating system (I'm 99% sure it will be Crossbow or at least it will be based on the features the next Windows Mobile OS offers).
The rest of the spec sheet remains to be filled up by the Microsoft developing team and to be published so we can all find out what the ZunePhone is capable of.
Release date? No, no one knows when it will be launched but, again, rumors say it will end up on the shelves sometime during the 2007 holidays. Just in time for Santa to grab a couple of million units to make a bunch of cellphone geeks happy all across the world :D.