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Over 75% of cameraphone users "have never transferred pix off handset." - MS

Danger, inventor of the cult Hiptop phone (the "Sidekick" beloved by Paris Hilton) was taken over by Microsoft a year ago. This year, Microsoft announced a Web system, MyPhone, to automatically store your phone pix on the web, just like the Sidekick does. "No connection," said Microsoft today.

The Sidekick has always stored all the pictures it took on permanent servers, owned by Danger (now, owned by Microsoft), making it unique among cameraphones. Executives said that most phone owners had never worked out how to use the device, except as a picture book, taking 3 megapixel images and displaying them on two-inch screens.

But the My Phone invention has nothing to do with the Danger system.

Instead, it was made clear, the 200 megabyte data store was a software product, one acquired back in June 2008, when Microsoft bought mobile backup firm Mobicomp

At the time of the takeover, Mobicomp was described as "a company that helped pioneer technologies allowing the backup and restoration of mobile data and mobile posting of social content to Web sites such as Facebook."

Senior MS executives shuffled their feet and changed the subject when quizzed on "Whatever happened to the Danger acquisition?" and insisted that "we can't talk about it, but... something will happen!"

Apparently, Danger is seen as a marketing wizard with its hand on the throat of the consumer - a trick Microsoft has been utterly unable to imitate with hand-helds so far. Analysts insist that by far the bulk of WinMo devices are sold to corporate buyers, aiming to find a non-Blackberry solution to mobile email.

In that market, Microsoft's ownership of Exchange, Outlook and the mobile version of Outlook gives powerful leverage with IT equipment buyers. Clearly, My Phone isn't mainly aimed at that market.

However, one of the promises made by Steve Ballmer, CEO, in his keynote yesterday, was that "consumers don't want one phone for work, and one for home. They want a single device which will serve both purposes." Does that mean that we're going to see a Business Danger phone?

"I love the Danger phones!" said one senior Microsoftie. "But if I said anything at all about what we love about it, I'd be giving away too much."

Nonetheless, when you see the Extreme Gurly phone [image top right] which Sidekick II can morph into, it does raise interesting questions about how Microsoft might reconcile Extreme Business with that sort of design

Will we know what Danger brings to Winmo this year? before Xmas? "Erm, probably, but I didn't say that. And don't use my name!"