RumourMill: Windows Mobile 6.5 images leaked + new Internet Explorer for mobiles

This time the leak wasn’t Nokia’s, it was Microsoft’s turn with the new mobile OS and also an emulator for IE 6 shows up.

The website Smartphonefrance has managed to obtain the first images of the upcoming OS, first uttered from the lips of Steve Ballmer at an Australian press conference on the tail end of last week.

From first impressions, it looks a lot different to version 6.1 that we’re using today. Other sites have drawn a comparison to the Zune in its appearance. Perhaps Microsoft are again standardising on a single OS view for all operating systems and upcoming releases, it would make sense after all.

We’re now wondering how they’re going to launch the mobile OS. For Windows Mobile 6.1 they announced it to the press on Aprils Fools day at the Comedy Store. I think we’re still waiting to get the joke; what’s the punch line Microsoft?

The other MS story almost falls on the coat tails of the Opera Mini 4.2 beta release, with news of an emulator now being available on Internet Explorer Mobile 6.

It was unveiled to an unsuspecting public at Microsoft’s EMEA TechEd developers conference in Spain.

Improvements have apparently been made around feature sets such as, text wrap, adobe flash integration, touch screen support, zoom levels and others too.

We couldn’t really get a complete feel for how it’s changed, as we didn’t have access to a previous emulator, which made it difficult to fairly gauge on the improvements.

Although it does look like an improvement as to what we’ve seen on current shipping handsets, with a much dated version of IE.

For more on the IE emulator see here, and for more on Smartphonefrance leaked images see here for a roughly translated English version