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So Many Windows Phone Rumors, So Little Truth

imageThere have been so many Windows Phone rumors over the past week and on this site we’ve been mostly silent about them, and that’s intentional. Some of them are just silly, most of them have no facts to back them up and most are a waste of time.

For example, the Sony Windows Phone stood no chance at bearing fruit. The version of OS it was running was nearly a year old and since then Sony had inked a deal with Android. It would also require Microsoft and their Xbox to play nicely with Sony and its PlayStation and it’s not happening while Microsoft is trying to build an ecosystem. Of course, PlayStation doesn’t use XNA either. Well none of this matters as this one has already been debunked.

Then we get the rumor that Mango isn’t going to be released until 2012. “Mango will be finalized by the end of 2011, and while Microsoft recently promised to ship this release to customers by the end of the year as well, my sources tell me that schedule is a near impossibility.” Well it’s not impossible to believe that rumor to be true, it just doesn’t line up with other rumors and beyond that, Microsoft has been showing off Mango for some time. They had the thing on stage a month ago running IE9 and multitasking already. Say what you want about the speed they move at, but it cannot take a year to move from its current state to the actual devices. I’m dismissing this one using simple logic.

How about the $1b spent on Nokia? Well we know in the past that Elop said “In fact the value transferred to Nokia is measured in B’s not M’s”.” He’s noted that it’s not just cash but it’s intellectual property and shared ecosystems. But $1b? Crazy, right? Well what is Nokia paying for the deal? Well they need to kill their entire stream of revenue from Symbian, sell off Qt and essentially wind down their business. At the same time they need to share their navigational data, ad revenue and marketplaces with Microsoft. So maybe they’re paying Microsoft by providing so much IP. It’s likely that for the property that Nokia is giving to Microsoft, Microsoft is giving them a lot of free WP7 licenses, but I wouldn’t get overly worked up over a fixed number from either side. Both companies are taking a big risk and spending a lot of money on this deal – some in cash and some in other forms. In the end, maybe a big number that sounds lie a big deal but it’s unlucky to be a single number that puts the entire (un-inked) deal into perspective.

OK and what about the rumor that tomorrow the Focus gets the preNoDo and the NoDo update? It could happen, right? No US carrier even has the pre-NoDo update and considering that Samsung has the worst track record of getting updates internationally it’s hard to imagine that it’s the first device/carrier to get NoDo. So fingers crossed but really, I’m seriously doubting this one.

Rumors make great bait for clicks and I know you can get away with blog posts without fancy things like facts, but let’s try to stay closer to being journalists and further away from rumor mills…

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