Windows Phone Thoughts: Microsoft and Qualcomm to integrate WM into Qualcomm Chipsets

"QUALCOMM Incorporated and Microsoft Corp. today jointly announced a collaboration to enable the porting of the Microsoft® Windows Mobile® operating system to QUALCOMM’s Mobile Station Modem (MSM) chipsets. The companies’ collaboration will enable device manufacturers to develop affordable, feature-rich and attractive Windows Mobile-powered phones with MSM chipsets while shortening their product development times. Support for the Windows Mobile platform on QUALCOMM’s highly integrated MSM solutions also gives users extended battery life while running a wide variety of business and entertainment applications, such as Microsoft Office Mobile and Windows Media® Player Mobile, along with third-party offerings...QUALCOMM is expected to begin offering support for Windows Mobile 5.0 on Convergence Platform MSM chipsets in the second half of 2006. In addition, Microsoft will incorporate a new Board Support Package and Radio Interface Layer for QUALCOMM’s Convergence Platform solutions into future distributions of the Windows Mobile platform. Phones leveraging MSM solutions supporting the Windows Mobile platform are forecasted to be available in 2007."

This could eventually be huge news for the Windows Mobile platform in North America -- virtually all CDMA phone vendors (excepting Nokia and a few others) use Qualcomm's chipsets, so this will make it much simpler and cheaper for phone vendors to sell Windows Mobile devices. Having used several Verizon WM devices, I can easily say I won't go back to a non-syncing phone, so I'm looking forward to having more options! :D