Windows Phone Thoughts: Embedding photos in contacts?

With my original Pocket PC 2000 device, I tried synching contacts that had images embedded in the Outlook notes field. It seemed like a neat feature - having a photo of the person you were going to meet, etc. Yet when I did a sync, none of the photos would come across. I assumed that this meant Contacts on the Pocket PC didn't support rich data, because you can't see HTML content in the notes field as well.

I was checking the Pocket PC newsgroup tonight, and Beverly Howard made an interesting post claiming that it was possible to get images in the notes field. Curious, I began some experimentation of my own. The results? I was able to get an image 100 x 100 into the contact, but the results were not pretty (well, my beautiful wife is pretty, but the way my Pocket PC is displaying her is not):



That was the result of a direct clipboard copy/paste of a 16-bit colour JPEG image. I thought if I did a manual dithering down to 8-bit colour it might look better, but the resulting pasted image didn't appear at all. If you try to attach a photo to the contact, that won't work either.

What gives? It seems like there's SOME functionality here, but not enough to be truly useful. Are these hooks Microsoft will enhance in the future, or an attempt at something that didn't work very well?