$1 Billions Dollars!!!  Great, so where is my phone?  This really surprised me that there is not a whole stream of developer phones out there yet to coincide with the push to get developers to start building for the windows 7 mobile platform.  Google put out free phone and people started messing with it right off.  Better, they had TONS of feedback on what to fix and upgrade on the next OS release.  Samsung KINDA did the same thing.  They release a  bunch of free phones and the dev meet ups, see my rant here on why they over crippled the Samsung phone, and that kinda started people talking.  I remember comparing the Samsung screen to the iphone4 screen with @scoble and finding the Samsung was better!  I pretty excited to play with this as a phone only to find it was so crippled that I lost interst.

So now Microsoft is getting ready for its big push into the phone market, getting dev’s to download the skd,  but still, no phones!  From what I heard its because they are backlogged on production.  Ok, fair enough, but trying to build hype and having a bunch of dev sitting in a room talking about what you ‘could’ do with the phone if you had it does not really fly.  And telling people, ‘oh, but the SDK is JUST LIKE the phone’.  No its not.  I’m building on my desktop and trying to see how the app works on my desktop.  Its not the same as loading on the phone, taking it out with me, letting my friends try it out and see if my idea feels right.

I think Microsoft does plan to give dev’s and writers phones at some point, but its been pretty unclear how this is going to play out, but at $1B, I fully expect it.  Also, I think MS is expecting that 85% of the people who will write app will be porting existing applications to the platform.  I’m not so sure that is going to be the case though, because I think many of the people are going to write for windows are already .NET and C++ people who most likely have not written for Android much less iPhone.

Still, that’s a lot of money and Microsoft has shown that its willing to throw money at things, so we should see phones and ‘hopefully’ a free SDK.  Please?