Microsoft’s Smartphone Project not in the Pink of Health

Submitted by lalit on October 9, 2009 - 12:34pm.

Earlier this week, Mobile Crunch reported that Microsoft’s smartphone project codenamed “Pink” is near death and probably will be canceled. According to Mobile Crunch, the whole project is in disarray as Microsoft has fired much of the Danger/Sidekick team, there is no third party application support on cards, most of the employees hate the product, the Turtle prototype is almost unusable and Microsoft engineers are struggling to replicate the UI concept.

AppleInsider today added more fuel to the Pink fire, the website has published a letter send to them by a source that worked on the Pink project. According to the source:

  • Microsoft intentionally leaked the photos of “Pure” and “Turtle”, but the new details about Pink project partners and the dirty laundry about dissent at Danger are clearly the work of an extremely disgruntled former or current employee.
  • The source suspects that it has already caused irreparable damages to Microsoft’s relationship with a number of key partners. Both Microsoft’s hardware partners and mobile operators are likely unhappy with the Pink situation.
  • Microsoft tried to build both UMTS and CDMA versions of both the phones, resulting in added complexity involved in coding to support two different radio modules on two different devices.
  • At some point the UMTS project was placed on the back burner, which would have definitely made T-Mobile unhappy, who has been a loyal partner of Danger and Sidekick platform.
  • The source says that Pink was a skunkworks project kept completely secret from both the WinMo and Zune teams, which led to much frustration and duplication of effort.

We don’t know if any of the above mentioned information about Microsoft Pink project is true. But as more information is emerging it is becoming clearer that the Pink project is in trouble. Information and images of the Pink phones were revealed last month and the phones received not a good response from the blogosphere. In fact, we wrote, “If these are the two phones that Microsoft will use to start their fight against the iPhone they have already lost the battle.” Now it looks like Microsoft won’t even start the fight.