Project Pink dead? Well, I never liked it in any case.

MobileCrunch reports on a hot tip from a supposed anonymous Microsoft employee which spilled the beans on the rumoured Project pink.

According to him, Project Pink appears to be a hive of chaos and incompetence:

• Much of the Danger/Sidekick team has left or been fired since the 2008 acquisition. According to our source, there is “no braintrust that understands how to build a product” left on the Pink team.
• If a product does ship, it will lack the third party application support/store that rumors have indicated it would have – the remaining team members simply don’t know how to get it done.
• Amongst remaining employees, dissent is high. Much of the team uses iPhones around the office, or their old Sidekick handsets. Employees “hate the product” internally, many feeling that the division exists only to “challenge [the Windows Mobile 7 team] and upset them into competing.” Our source outright indicated that they felt the product was never intended to ship.
• At this point, the project is roughly 2 years behind schedule. In order to continue moving forward toward some undefined launch date, basics such as a calendar application have already ended up on the cutting room floor.
• On the “Turtle” (the smaller of the two devices): The touchscreen is unusable, as there are too many elements on screen at one time. “Your finger covers 50% of the screen”, says the source. The unit was designed “on the fly”, with a design drawn up and then sent to Sharp for verbatim manufacturing. Our source says this backwards design process has lead to a “near disastrous” battery life. “Designers forced Sharp to build to sketch and not ‘worry about that stuff.’”
• The UI concept work was originally done by an outside party, and Microsoft engineers have been “struggling to replicate it ever since”.

In short, according to the tipster, Project Pink “is near death and probably will be cancelled.”

Now of course, looking at those awful renderings we saw, we are not going to lose any tears over a Microsoft dumb phone. At least the tip indicated Windows Mobile 7 is separate from this monstrosity. However if Project Pink is such a disaster, one can only wonder if Roz Ho, its head, will be cancelled with the project.

Read more at MobileCrunch here.