Rumors drifting around the Internets Jan. 12 suggest that Windows Mobile 7 will be delayed until 2011. These seem to have originated from Bright Side of News, a site that I hadn't heard of before, which said this:

We spoke with representatives from Microsoft, Lenovo, Qualcomm, TI, Nokia, nVidia, HTC and many more and they all had just one message--Windows Mobile 7 is delayed until 2011 and the focus is shifting to Google Android and even Chrome OS.

Those representatives went unnamed, but it sounded like pretty gosh-darn big news, and certainly something that other news sites were quoting from, so I decided to do a little digging on my own. First I approached Microsoft, which sent me a standard-issue (and wholly unsurprising) statement through a spokesperson:

We have steadily delivered on our commitment to ship additional features and services through a regular stream of exciting new devices. We are not talking about future generations of Windows phones at this time.

I then talked to a Nokia representative, Joseph Gallo, who offered me this:

Per our policy, we do not comment on competitor announcements, rumors or speculation. As Windows Mobile is not our smartphone operating system of choice, we are not able to comment.

I currently have feelers out to sources at Lenovo, HTC and other companies to see if they have some sort of perspective on that Bright Side of News article (which one spokesperson, speaking on background, called "strange"), and I'll update as that information comes in. I also reached out to Theo Valich, author of the original Bright Side of News piece, but have heard nothing back yet.

In the meantime, let's look at what's actually on the record. In a news conference at last week's International Consumer Electronics Show, held Jan. 7 to 10, Robbie Bach, president of Microsoft's entertainment and devices division, fielded a question about the timing of Mobile 7's introduction to the marketplace. From the transcript on the Microsoft site:

"We are going to have some new things that we'll talk about at Mobile World Congress [in Barcelona in February]," Bach said, adding: "I have the luxury of having seen it, [was] able to look at it and played with it a little bit, but I'm certainly confident people are going to see it as something that's differentiated and something that really does move the bar forward, not in an evolutionary way from where we are today, but it's something that feels, looks, acts and performs completely [differently]."

I assume that the "it" to which Bach refers in that second quote is the Mobile 7 user interface. In any case, the word "2011" never comes up in Bach's talk.

The WindowsForDevices.com site, meanwhile, mentions this little tidbit about an upcoming Sony Ericsson smartphone:

Sony Ericsson says its second Windows phone, the high-end Xperia X2, will soon be available in the U.S. Apparently featuring the new Windows Mobile 6.5.3, the device features a 3.2-inch touchscreen with 800 x 4800 resolution ...

We can reasonably infer that Mobile 7 won't come out until after Mobile 6.5.3, which according to sources such as Engadget is mostly a cosmetic or UI improvement. Now, if Mobile 6.5.3 was delayed until, say, fourth-quarter 2010 (in other words, not "soon"), then you could start to think that maybe Mobile 7 wasn't coming out until 2011. But there's nothing circulating out there to suggest that's the case. Are you impressed by my mad Sherlock Holmes skills yet?

Unless one of my still-outstanding sources comes back to suggest that Mobile 7 is indeed due in 2011, I'm going to stick with expecting the new mobile operating system to roll out sometime in 2010. The bigger question will be whether it'll help Microsoft save its smartphone OS market share from its precipitous erosion.