Interview: can Windows Mobile keep up with the iPhone & Android?

That has seven individual processors on one piece of silicon; one for Wi-Fi, one for Bluetooth, one for acceleration, sound, GPS, the main processor, it's got the radio stack and so on. In terms of volume and price, because it's an integrated chipset, Moore's law accelerates faster on phones than on PCs.

Even with IE 6 on Windows Mobile, doesn't the size of the screen mean that mobile browsing will still be a limited experience?

People want to do different things. Some people want one handed phones, some want touch, others want larger screens or smaller devices. We think having a good browser experience for everything on the Web is a good catch-all. We also believe there will be a bunch of rich applications.

We're putting Silverlight on Windows Mobile and even on Nokia and having Silverlight across a range of mobile handsets enables you to develop a very rich set of apps. And with Windows Mobile you can also develop rich clients.

We're going to have more diversity in the user experience - so you're not spending all your time panning and zooming, so you have an experience that's really designed to maximise what you're doing.

With more browsing and applications on more powerful smartphones, how can you make it easier to transfer information and keep things in sync, so you can go from one device to another seamlessly?

At PDC in the fall, we'll be talking to developers about how they can target not just mobile devices or PCs or Web apps but how those three come together and how you can create experiences that span across those in very easy ways.

These will be three main things we'll end up designing for. Firstly, there's the on-phone experience, with slightly different screen sizes, square screens and slider screens so there's some work to do but it's minor.

Then, there's the PC and Web experience where you have a certain size of screen, you have a mouse and keyboard so people will design the user interface for that.

And then there's the 10-foot user interface on things such as Media Center and TVs.

The experiences you create need to flow across those. Uniquely, by having Windows Mobile and Windows Live and Vista and Xbox, we can really help to make those scenarios make sense.

So can you explain all the hints about 'sync' that Ray Ozzie was dropping at MIX 08?

You will see some dramatic things happen in the next 12 to 18 months that are going to make all these things make more sense together. We have a roadmap around Windows Mobile and a roadmap around Windows to help users and developers experience things that will just make sense across mobile, the PC, the Web and the 10-foot interface.

There's tremendous momentum we have on Windows Mobile. The operators we have relationships with represent more than a billion subscribers.

Four of the top five handset makers are designing on Windows Mobile. Windows Mobile 6.1 and business tools like System Centre Mobile Device Manager are important milestones on our journey but that journey is about to explode over the next 12 to 18 months and you'll see a whole bunch of things come through.

There's a bunch of very deep technology work happening to make all of that make sense. We're not in a position to communicate that without having all the pieces in place, until the PDC.

Doing Internet Explorer 6 on Windows Mobile 6.1 is a signal for the longer term about how we're going to make these experiences happen from consumer through to business - there's a bigger story here too.