"'This news, together with the previous one about the next big update for WP7 not coming until the fall of next year, has left me puzzled about Microsoft’s strategy when it comes to WP7."

As soon as I came to that sentence, I thought to myself this must be written by the drama queen rush24 again. I scrolled up and voila! lol. I think you are drawing too much (and wrong) conclusion from Mary-Joe's article. MS has said a compelling update is coming very very soon. I highly doubt that they were talking about the SL and HTML5 update in August 2011.

Looks like they saw my post. Since then 85 new apps suddenly popped up. :D

There have been about 100 new apps every weekday for several weeks and it seems to have pretty much stopped growing this week. Is there some bottleneck in the app approval process or are we kind of done with the initial batch of apps that were in the pipeline?

If the Feb update rumor was unfounded, MS would have come in and asked people to lower the expectaion. They didn't. Relax, this "compelling" or "massive" or "minor" or whatever you want to call it is happening.

Wow can't believe so many are disappointed with this rumor. Guys, Silverlight runtime, HTML5 and east asian language support are huge. And we all knew asian language support was coming around that time. Her comment about Jan/Feb updates are just purely her speculation without any new info from someone. So was this "major" and "minor" characterization. Nothing has changed for the Jan/Feb updates. C&P, task switching, new 3rd party APIs, turn-by-turn nav(?), etc, are also very big IMO.

Ballmer already gave hints about possible upcoming WP7 based tablet in addition to this W7 solution. I'm guessing its timeframe is more like 2nd half of next year. It's not a one-device-fits-all world. MS is NOT overlooking the importance of tablet. They are just showing off what will be available from MS near term.

W7 tablet doesn't restrict anyone from creating touch friendly apps for it like they do for ipad. They just need a good app launch touch layer that makes the device more user friendly. It will look very much like ipad or G Tab. Read the article. The only question is how thin it will be or what the battery life is like. Obviously they won't be as good as ARM based tablets but since W7 (with perhaps flip/slideout keyboard) can do so much more than ipad, people will weigh the tradeoffs.

"Why is Microsoft that obstinate about not letting WP7 be scaled up to the tablet?"

And you figured that out by reading the NYT piece? You are acting like a drama queen again.

W7 is fine as touch UI as long as you are not trying to do everything that a mouse & keyboard allow you to do in which case you whip out that slideout keyboard. I understand some people might prefer a simpler layer and MS is providing it. Battery life will be the key. Will be interesting to see how good the Oak Trail is.

FWIW, if you model after the Android attachment ratio which is about 4:1, you get 185K/0.25 = 740K.

Yeah I think 6:1 is a little too much since, like I noted earlier, the daily actives are noticeably higher portion of the monthly actives than for Android and RIM. That tells me the FB daily actives are more common to WP7. I don't know if that's because materially more daily FB users are drawn to WP7 or because the built-in feature just makes it seem so. Just for fun, if I were to assume the *monthly* active to device user ratio to be same for all OS's (still a big if) and work the numbers backwards, I get 5.2:1 ratio to apply to the daily actives of WP7. That is, we have 140K*5.2 = 728K WP7 phones active.

I'm aware the number you had is the monthly active user count. I just picked the daily active users number becaues that's what FB used. i.e. The 6:1 ratio applies to the daily active user count.

Even though there's built in FB app, I don't think it counts toward the daily stat if you don't have a FB account which is true for 2/3 of people out there according to FB. So there's at least a factor of 3 right there.

Now, if you do have a FB account on your WP7, does the fact there's a built-in FB app automatically count you as a daily active user even though you don't use FB all that often? The answer seems to be no because if it does, the daily and monthy active user count should be the same which is not the case here. Daily is 140K, monthly is 180K. However, compared to Android and RIM, the delta between daily and monthly for WP7 seems to somewhat low. For Android and RIM, there's a 50% jump from daily to monthly whle you see only a 29% jump for WP7. I'm guessing WP7's built-in app makes people use FB more often.

BTW, just to clarify for those confused, FB reports daily, weekly and monthly "active" user count for each app. Daily active just means a user uses FB on daily basis. Monthly means at least once in past 30 days. Each user must login to FB and use its features to be counted.