Microsoft confirms ‘chassis’ concept for Windows Mobile 7, names Acer as WM7 OEM

James McCarthy, Microsoft’s business marketing manager, has confirmed in a ITPro article that Microsoft is specifying certain strong minimum specs for Windows Mobile 7 devices to ensure the new mobile OS runs well and gives a good consumer experience.

Said McCarthy “In the future, we are looking to deepen our development work with a handful of key OEMs at the hardware design phase, with much more carefully defined hardware specifications to match software requirements, which in turn will deliver even more powerful mobile experiences for our customers.

This has led to this chassis’ concept that is familiar to the work Microsoft does with hardware partners in the PC industry to create high quality products.”

According to earlier leaks there will be at least 2 “Chassis” specifications, describing pretty high end devices. Chassis 1 specs is said to be as below:

WM7 Chassis 1 Specification

Core requirements:
Processor: ARM v6+, L2 Cache, VFP, Open GL ES 2.0 graphics HW (QCOM 8k, Nvidia “Tegra” AP15/16* and TI 3430 all meet spec)
Memory: 256MB+ DRAM, 1G+ Flash (at least 512MB fast flash – 5MB/s unbuffered read @4K block size)
Display:  WVGA (800×480) or FWVGA (854×480) 3.5” or greater diagonal
Touch: Multi-touch required
Battery: Sufficient to meet Days of Use LTK requirements.
Controls: Start, Back, Send and End are required (soft controls allowed as long as they are always present).

Peripherals:
Camera: 3MP+, flash optional, 2nd camera optional (VGA resolution sufficient)
GPS: aGPS required
Sensors required: Light Sensor, Compass (3 axis, 5 degrees, 100 Hz sample rate), Accelerometer (3 axis, 2mg resolution, 100 Hz sample rate)
USB: High speed required, 20 MB/s transfer rate.
BlueTooth: BT2.1 required, must run MSFT BT stack, CSR BlueCore6 or later recommended.
Wi-Fi: 802.11B/G required, must run MSFT Native Wi-Fi stack, Atheros 6002 or Broadcomm 4325 recommended.
Connectors: Micro USB and 3.5mm Audio required.

Options:
FM tuner:  If tuner HW is present it will be detected and supported by the Media application.
Haptics
SD Card (Micro SD recommended)
DPAD, qwerty or 12/20 key keyboards all optional

McCarthy also names HTC and Acer specifically as Windows Phone 7 OEMs.

“So Microsoft will not be creating its own smartphone using Windows Phone 7, but will work more closely with OEMs such as HTC and Acer to create the hardware that will incorporate Windows Phone 7 as a key factor in the phone’s design.” he said.

McCarthy was however unwilling to give a timescale for the arrival of Windows Mobile 7.

“Steve Ballmer has mentioned publicly that Windows Mobile 7 is slated for release in 2010 and we’re always working with our key OEM and operator partners on future products, although we have nothing formal to announce for now.”

Read the full ITPro article here.