Windows Phone Thoughts: Windows Phone 7 As Early As October

"One thing developers will like: in July they get access to test phones. "That's the number one question I get," Watson told us. "Where is my device?" And what about the rest of us? It's still holiday 2010, and for the benefit of those of us outside the US, he narrows that down as "between October and New Year"."

Mary Branscombe offers up an interesting column on TechRadar today that quotes Brandon Watson, Microsoft's director of developer experience for Windows Mobile basically confirming a few things that we've seen elsewhere and also assumed (But it's never bad to hear it again). October is the earliest you'll see a Win Phone 7 device, developers will see it earlier, and Copy & Paste will return triumphantly at some point in the future. Quite frankly with all of the device information we're seeing leak out about possible WP7 units nearing production, I'd guess we may even see one hit in September - or am I being optimistic to the extreme?