LG's been getting cozy with Microsoft lately on the Windows Mobile front, and it looks like one of the most significant fruits of that labor to date might find a home on AT&T -- eventually. This brassy little number is the LG "Monaco," which is apparently also known as the "Pico" to some folks; what it'll eventually be called at retail is anyone's guess, but the big news is the feature list: 3.6Mbps HSDPA, a 3.2-inch WVGA display, 5 megapixel AF cam, microSD expansion, an add-on pico projector of some sort, and Windows Mobile 7. Though the screen is 0.3 inches smaller diagonally than the alleged minimum specified by Microsoft's "Chassis 1" guidelines, everything else here would work (and look) great as a next-gen device -- and the accessory projector's a pretty nifty selling point, too. At one point, AT&T had a crazy idea that they'd have this puppy on shelves by September of this year, but seeing we'll be lucky to have 6.5 devices in our hands by then, this date has undoubtedly slipped since the slide was made. And yes, we'll admit -- we're intrigued by the gold accents. Is that so wrong? Follow the break for a better view of the phone.

Our initial reaction to the all-too-brief shots of mobile devices in this slick, high-gloss marketing video provided by Microsoft was that the company had thrown together some totally meaningless mockups to help get their point across about bridging the communication gap across diverse platforms and technologies. A closer look, though, revealed something interesting (low-key Rickroll notwithstanding): the captures show off a UI layout suspiciously similar to some of the supposedly leaked screenshots of WinMo 7 we saw a couple weeks back. Is this all indicative of Redmond's direction for its next-gen mobile platform, a fluke, or somewhere in between? We'll probably be waiting a few months -- maybe as much as a year or so -- to find out, so we've got plenty of time to speculate.

[Thanks, Gabriel]

Gallery: Microsoft Software-plus-Services marketing vid teases Windows Mobile 7?

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The past few days have seen the alleged leaks of a couple batches of Windows Mobile 7 screenshots, suggesting Microsoft's already hard at work on the successor to 6.5 -- something we've heard in the past, and given the state of 6.x, a rumor that isn't difficult to believe. To say the leaks look sketchy, though, would be an understatement; most prominently, none of them match, with different styling elements applied to every capture. Best case, we figure these are mockups -- not functional shots from an actual device or an emulator, but early, off-the-cuff stabs at a design language from a usability expert's late-night Illustrator session somewhere deep within Redmond. We like some of what we're seeing -- there are definitely at least a few elements here that look thoroughly modern -- but if there's any basis in reality to these, we're worried about the ill-conceived idea of putting battery strength and volume (or signal strength, depending on the shot) at the bottom of the display. Needless to say, there are very good reasons that kind of information gets consolidated to the top, not the least of which is that your thumbs aren't transparent. At least ours aren't, and if yours are, you should probably get that looked at.

Read - First batch
Read - Second batch

Chatter over Windows Mobile 6.5 has grown into a deafening din the past few weeks, strongly suggesting we'll all be treated to the next WinMo release at MWC in a couple weeks -- but how does that translate a device that we can hold in our own two hands, exactly? We'd previously heard Microsoft was targeting the third quarter of 2009, and "sources" of ZDNet's Mary-Jo Foley are right in line. In a nutshell, she's saying manufacturers will have access to the gold code in April and the first 6.5 devices will hit the market in September (okay, tail end of the third quarter, but that's how the cookie crumbles), but she doesn't stop there -- she goes on to say that beta Windows Mobile 7 code will be in the wild in November of this year, with the first handsets following on in April of 2010. That's a long-ass time from now, yes -- but on the flipside, that's a record for releasing two major WinMo versions in rapid succession. Can't blame us for trying to find the silver lining.

Not long after spinning off from former corporate parent O2, Windows Mobile purveyor MWg is moving out of its Asian comfort zone to attempt to sell its wares over in Europe with a splashy press conference to kick things off -- and if the aggressive roadmap they're pursuing for the next year or so holds true, they might just have a fighting chance at making a splash up there. First up are the official European intros of the Atom V and Zinc II, HSDPA-equipped handsets that have been kicking around for a while now, but that's not even close to the interesting part. Looking deeper into '08 reveals a handful of HTC Diamond competitors, devices that are sporting a respectable 7.2Mbps down and 5.2Mbps up, and looking still deeper into the fourth quarter suggests that MWg intends to release its first Windows Mobile 7-powered device -- the Flame II -- with GPS, a 3.2 megapixel camera, and "multimedia features" on board. That seems a little far-fetched considering that 7 hasn't been officially shown off and 6.1 isn't even in broad distribution to users yet, but we appreciate MWg's motivation here. We also see a Shift killer in the wings with Vista and a 3G data connection toward the end of the year, so all told, the future's looking bright for these cats if they can actually execute.

We've got a quick glance at what's in store for the next couple of major versions of Windows Mobile over at Engadget. Come on, it doesn't matter if you're the most vehement hater -- you know you want to know what's up with one of the world's most prolific mobile platforms. Go ahead, take a look!