IT Pro runs a story where it has more information about Microsoft's upcoming Windows Mobile 7 plans. While nothing is confirmed yet, James McCarthy, Microsoft's Business Marketing Manager, is quoted that in future, Microsoft is looking to deepen its development work with a handful of key OEMs in the hardware design phase. Back in February, Steve Ballmer has mentioned or better confirmed that Windows Mobile 7 is on its way for a 2010 release and McCarthy now confirmed that Microsoft is (already) "working with our key OEM and operator partners on future products, although we have nothing formal to announce for now."

McCarthy follows up and said that, with Windows Mobile 7, Microsoft will work with its ODMs "much more carefully on defined hardware specifications to match software requirements, which in turn will deliver even more powerful mobile experiences for our customers." And he indeed confirmed that Windows Mobile 7 will comes with a chassis concept (as speculated earlier): "This has led to this chassis' concept that is familiar to the work Microsoft does with hardware partners in the PC industry to create high quality products."

If the chassis concept becomes real, it would mean that Microsoft would take a step back into the rearly days of Windows Mobile (when it was called Pocket PC). As a matter of fact, for the first Generation of Pocket PCs, Microsoft defined the hardware requirements even stronger than it does today.
And even today, Microsoft defines hardware requirements for the PC industry. Take the Netbook where Microsoft defines the CPU speed, RAM and screen size to still take benefit from Windows XP. If we transfer this to Windows Mobile 6.5 and Windows Mobile 7, which are expected to be market and offered in parallel, it would mean that Microsoft defines a minimum of hardware requirements for Windows Mobile 7 devices. Everything else, which doesn't match this requirements, wouldn't be allowed to run Windows Mobile 7 but has to use Windows Mobile 6.5 (Second Edition?) instead.

Cheers ~ Arne