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Sidekick phone: iZune's to the rescue?

The "Microsoft iPhone" may happen, after all. Ever since Microsoft bought cult mobile phone company Danger back in February, the cellular business has been wondering just what it intends to do with it. Probably few of us took the idea of a Microsoft Zune-with-a-phone seriously than - but maybe we should?

The main reason to take it seriously, would be the sudden requirement by European mobile networks for an alternative to the iPhone, for those operators who don't have the real thing.

According to Jim Goldman, the word you want to search for is "Pink"  - code-name for the Zune music player update project.

The Danger phone is largely invisible to European mobile pundits. There's a reason for this: it has to do with network traffic levels in North America, vs more established mobile data markets over the other side of the Atlantic.

The Hiptop, sold as the Sidekick by T-Mobile US, is the ultimate "cloud computing" device. It stores almost no data on the phone itself. Even photographs grabbed by users are immediately transmitted to the Danger server farms, along with all the contacts, SMS archive, and any other user generated info.

Result: if you drop your Hiptop down the toilet, you can be back online with all your data intact as soon as they rush your replacement phone. Nothing should have been lost.

The drawback: it placed a lot of data onto the mobile networks. In North America, the GPRS data capacity was huge compared with the usage, and all this traffic was given away to users; in Europe, however, operators really couldn't afford to do this for nothing, and most avoided the Danger machine. Even Orange, which put capital into the company at startup, refused to carry the device.

That perception - that data is too precious to give away - has been re-assessed by operators since the arrival of the iPhone, and now, they'll be interested in a music player that works over the air and over WiFi.

But where the Hiptop was the ultimate consumer cult device (Paris Hilton famously had her data hacked from one) other Windows Mobile devices have been very corporate in their impact on the market. So up to now, Microsoft has not been able to cash in on the music/phone business.

The irony of seeing both Apple and Microsoft selling music players and phones, and of Apple storming away with both markets while Microsoft struggles, has ruined morale in Redmond, where there are suggestions that senior management just wants to dump the phone business and leave it to phone makers.

Goldman hinted today that part of the reason for these rumours may have been Microsoft's inability to hire Danger top staff: 

Danger's co-founder, Andy Rubin, took a job at Google and he was the driving force behind that company's Android mobile operating system, now powering that new G1 phone from T-Mobile,

he reported. And back in October, James Holland passed on Steve Ballmer's forecast that "instead of getting a Zune handset, we’ll see the Zune’s software, and music store, on Windows Mobile instead." 

"The Zune software will also be ported, and be more important not just with the hardware but on the PC, on Windows Mobile devices, etc." Making the Zune store available to Windows Mobile phones would put the handsets on a level playing field with the iPhone, which already allows Wi-Fi access to iTunes"

reported Holland for Electric Pig. But there's been nothing on this line from the official Microsoft sources.

Only last week, the official line clattered into life - but was restricted to announcing that "the Zune Pass subscription service currently gives consumers on-demand access to millions of tracks for $14.99 per month. Starting today subscribers will also get to select 10 tracks per month to keep and add them to their permanent collection (an estimated $10 value)."

But Microsoft is ages away from launching a concerted attack on the consumer market. Today, the Zune store web site is only available in North America, there is no hardware, and the earliest a new product could even be announced would be January at the Consumer Electronics Show or February at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.

By the time the iZune might be ready to ship, the iPhone will probably have proliferated into three ranges, including a low-price series, and a business-oriented device.