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Ballmer at MWC: "Microsoft will drop Mobile. But not WinMo."

The main reason Steve Ballmer came to Barcelona yesterday was not to announce a couple of HTC phones. Nor was it to set up an application store online. It wasn't even to disclose a method of backing up 200 megabytes of phone data onto the Internet. It was to reassure Windows developers.

This time, Ballmer didn't bounce around the stage like a chimp, crying "Developers, developers, developers...!" - he was immaculate in following his script which scrolled by behind my head - but the message was the same. Whatever you may have read, he was signalling that Microsoft won't - can't! - drop Windows Mobile.

Except in one sense: it's going to be called Windows in future. "It's a bit of a mouthful, a 'Windows-mobile-phone' and it's easier to call them Windows phones," he offered.

HTC's Peter Chou joined Ballmer on stage to announce - and display - two new phones. And Ballmer also summoned Andy Lees, head of mobile, to demonstrate Windows Mobile 6.5 and to confirm that yes, obviously, this meant that there would be a version 7.0.

But not necessarily launched together with Windows 7.0, they all hastened to add.

My Phone, a web based service derived from the Portguese Mobicom acquisition last year, offers to make sure that all your cameraphone data is stored safely, so that if you drop the device down the drain, you can simply plug it into the cloud and suck all the info back down again. Nice - useful, even - but hardly worth a journey from Seattle to Spain for Mr Ballmer.

The application store - you can develop a product, and stick it up on a Microsoft web site. The only sensible question to ask about it would be "what on earth stopped you doing it before?"

Windows Mobile 6.5 - frankly, late. Well... that's not unusual, and certainly not a reason for Ballmer to cross the Atlantic, either.

What Ballmer was doing in Barcelona was simple: he was silencing those voices inside his own company, who think Microsoft isn't winning the mobile platform race, and should quit.

Those voices reached the outside world when an old-time PC journalist, Robert X Cringeley, burst into print in the middle of 2008, offering an unexpected expertise in mobile platforms. He trashed them all, basically, but reserved his special venom for WinMo.

Cringeley doesn't make things up - his sources inside Redmond are far too good to need guesswork. When he goes public with a story, it's because his sources assure him it's sound. And with Google Android growing like a dark cloud, and Symbian going open source, and Apple re-writing the rules of the Mobile World without asking Congress's permission, you can see why Cringeley's sources were anxious.

From Ballmer, the message is, simply: "Don't imagine we're quitting."

At the end of the message, however, the questions remain. Can Windows work on a mobile phone exactly like it does on a desktop? If it can, can it work efficiently, without killing the battery in minutes?

And even more seriously: "If you can make Windows perform on a small ARM chip as if it were on a quad-core desktop, what on earth is wrong with Windows itself?"