Anybody remember the Great HTC Leak of 2009, in which we learned about the likes of the Snap line, the Touch Diamond 2 and Touch Pro 2 revisions as well as a slew of Android fare? It's time for the 2010 sequel, folks, courtesy of XDA Developers guru B3ler3fonte [via BGR]. This is all gleaned from an October presentation in Switzerland, apparently.

On the Windows Mobile side, we're looking at a smaller, less powerful version of the HD2 form factor, an updated front-facing QWERTY, and another version of the Touch Pro 2. (Check out our pals at Android Central for that end of the leak).

Join us after the break for the whole WinMo breakdown.

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No, there won't be a Zune Phone, as we've said before and will surely have to say again. But “J Allard comments on how the Zune's features and interfaces will eventually make their way into Windows Mobile, thereby vindicating our own speculation” just doesn't seem like a very pithy headline.

Over at the New York Times Bits Blog, Saul Hansell got a chance to corner J Allard, who is in charge of Zunes these days and maybe kinda sorta has something to do with Windows Mobile. Hansell put up some of Allard's comments (really just the highlights), and they're interesting. One - the iPhone is a good phone but a mediocre iPod - since you have to look at the thing to interact with it. Allard also joins us in giving Mobile Safari its due.

More interesting to us, though, is the stuff on Windows Mobile. 1st: the iPhone is good for Windows Mobile because it's made some space for innovation by pushing carriers out of the way. 2nd: Allard on the Zune's interface with regards to Windows Mobile:

The phone will be one part entertainment…. What you will see from us is more of these signature experiences. When you see the Zune, you’ll say say, I want my music experience on the phone to be like that. Hey, I want my telecommunication experience on the phone to be more like that.

Read: New York Times Blog

Sound familiar? It should, because we totally told you so:

The Zune isn't doing all that well in the market of MP3 players (and that's not too surprising), but what if Microsoft doesn't care? What if they're using the Zune to build up their “interface chops” and using what few buyers they've gained as secret beta testers? We know that we won't see a “Zune Phone”, but we also know that the Zune and Windows Mobile share the CE Platform underpinnings.

The Unwired shows us details from a recent patent application from Microsoft. Normally, the right reaction to patent applications is to shrug, perhaps engage in some wishful thinking, and then move on. One can rarely tell whether or not a given patent represents actual plans for devices or just a company covering its bases when an employee has an interesting idea.

This one, though, I believe is a sign of things to come. It's reminiscent of the recent Vodafone interface put on top of the Treo 500v, which is basically a "carousel" of functions. If you want to send an email, you just rotate to email and choose send. That same carousel lets you do other bits like view your calendar. In other words, details like this from the patent sound very familiar:

a list centered around a user's current day can include items corresponding to meetings scheduled for that day using a calendar application, E-Mail received on that day through an E-Mail application, and a weather forecast for the day provided by a weather service application.

Basically, it lets you think "what do I want to do right now" instead of "what do I want to do right now, what application do I need to open to do it, and how to I interact with that particular application." I dearly hope we'll see the fruits of this patent in Photon, the next version of Windows Mobile.

After the break, more patent drawing fun.

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I'm talking to my Windows Mobile peeps here: the gauntlet has been thrown down and thrown down hard. Everybody's atwitter about the iPod announcements yesterday and here's what I think it means for WM:

First - that iPod Touch, if Apple ever decides to get serious about adding PDA functionality, is serious competition for the non-smartphone PDA market. It's a market that's been shrinking fast (one of the reasons we here at WMExperts basically avoid it altogether) and I foresee it shrinking faster.

Second, and most importantly, I'll let Mike at Phone different have a word here from his "Phone different: 8GB iPhone: $399, Ringtones" article:

Holy smokes! Apple has put a $200 price cut on the 8 GB iPhone, and dropped the 4GB version altogether. That's right, the 8GB iPhone is now $399. Where do I line up for my $200 check? I'm equal parts filled with rage for paying a $200 early adopter fee, and equal parts filled with glee for a $200 price cut. I'm glad that it makes the iPhone that much more accessible for everyone else. I just feel a little sore when I sit, that's all.

Holy smokes indeed. I'd like to crow about how the price drop means the iPhone hasn't been moving as well as Apple hoped, but I don't really think that's the case. Instead, I think that it clearly means that Apple is serious about bare-knuckled fighting in the smartphone space¹. I also think it means that we can expect a hardware update to the iPhone sooner than we may have previously expected - mayhap price drop to clear inventory?

In other words, Microsoft knew the iPhone was a threat before, now Apple's made it a big, spiky threat. I know this will ramp up the recent rumors of a Zune Phone, but I'm still of the opinion that Windows Mobile 7 / Photon will feature radically improved media (and browser, pretty please) functionality. Windows Mobile will absorb Zune functionality, not the other way around.

¹ Yes, I'll admit it's basically a smartphone, at least it is now that you can hack it to get native apps. It's no true SDK, but I suppose it's enough. Yes, that's a turnabout. No, I don't want any to hear any guff about it.

Ars Technica is reporting that there's now a Linux-based browser plugin for Microsoft's Silverlight. Silverlight is a cross platform "media plugin" that looks to be positioned as a very nice Flash competitor. With all the brouhaha about YouTube not working so well on WM phones (er, not working at all except on a select few, like the HTC Touch in my pocket, Nyah Nyah!), Silverlight's cross-platform abilities could make it a real competitor in internet multimedia. There was already a great demo of a Baseball app on Windows Mobile that looks really slick.

Anyhow, the good news here is that Microsoft made the necessary tools available for Silverlight to work cross-platform and somebody got it working on Linux. There are big players on board (hello streaming movies on Netflix!) so I'm hopeful that we're going to see some really dynamic, media rich stuff on mobile phones soon.

Actually, what I'm really hoping is that Photon (the next version of Windows Mobile, also known as "The Second Coming") is going to sport a Silverlight-based UI. That would add a lot of fancy graphical features without much overhead and help Windows Mobile have the speed and eye-candy of a certain other mobile phone that you may have heard of.

After 20 days of "intense" programming, Novell's Mono development team has successfully produced a functioning prototype of Moonlight, an open-source Mono-based implementation of Microsoft's Silverlight rich-media application development framework

Read: Mono Silverlight implementation emerges after epic hackathon

In our first WM6 Mega-Roundup (there's also Mega-Roundup 2), I noted that Windows Mobile 6 supports 320x320 resolution (gee, who would want that?). Over at the WM Team Blog, Mike Calligaro goes into a little more detail on the whys and hows. I'm glad to see it, I'll be even gladder when Windows Mobile is fully resolution-independent, by which I mean fully scalable to any resolution without so much effort on the part of developers. Photon, I'm looking at you.

This is why that previous entry didn’t tell you what we were planning to do in the future.  It’s also why the comments are full of me saying things like, “This is something we can do, it’ll just take a lot of work.”  (Incidentally, that “a lot of work” bit was definitely true.  We barely finished 320x320 support in time for WM6 to ship.)

Read: Windows Mobile Team Blog : 320x320 Revisited