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Even Microsoft itself may be admitting Windows Mobile 6.5 - due later this year - is a stopgap solution on the way to the more radical release 7.0, but the company is doing its best to polish up 6.5 and make it gleam alongside iPhone and the rest. Last week, it confirmed rumors that the operating system would support a new widgets system, Windows Mobile Widgets, providing a more modern look and feel based around web services, and closer to those of the iPhone, Palm Pre, Nokia Widsets and so on.

Microsoft may well have learned some lessons from some of its Windows Mobile OEMs, which have increasingly been adding their own widgets-based interfaces to provide an overlay to the classic Windows UI. The most prominent have been the 'panes' of the Sony Ericsson Xperia X1 plus innovations from Samsung and LG. Once frowned upon by Microsoft, these 'non-Windows' interfaces have now been embraced as a way to make the OS more in step with the mobile web, and attract developers from the web community rather than just the PC Windows platform.

However, the main influence seems to have been Nokia and its Series 60 Widsets technology - like that, Windows Mobile Widgets can be designed so that users do not realize they are widgets but retain the look and feel of a fully blown native appp. In a Windows world where some users still remain loyal because they want their traditional user environment, this could be an important option.

"A good way to think of a Windows Mobile Widget is as a 'portable chunk of the web' or just basically a rich internet application," wrote Microsoft software engineer Jorge Peraza on the Windows Mobile Team Blog. The widgets - or tiny, reusable apps - can be written using JavaScript, Ajax, HTML and CSS, and access Flash plus Microsoft ActiveX controls like MediaPlayer. Microsoft will support the latest draft of the emerging mobile widget apps standard from the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), plus work underway on new Windows XML HTTP Request object standards. It is not clear whether widgets will run on older Windows Mobile versions.

Meanwhile, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, speaking at last week's McGraw-Hill media conference, took another chance to take aim at Apple, particularly hitting at the pricing of the iPhone. "No-one's going to pay $500 more for a logo," reported The Register. "We want to provide vendors with the ability to make Windows phones up and down the price scale. Windows Mobile 6.4 has touch on it. The way Apple does touch drives costs. The way they do it on the iPhone is not an inexpensive component. We'll do it in a way that you can afford to do it on most phones." Ballmer said the sweet spot for smartphones is now $150 to $200.

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