There is at least a scent of Zune coming your way, btw. :)

If I knew at the very least of a ‘road map’, that would give me huge reassurance when asked to sign away two years of my life to a phone contract.

Mind you, I’m in the UK, and we’ve not even had a *scent* of Zune yet, over 3 years after its launch, so who knows if Windows Phone will ever be launched here either.

If you mean… Can the connectivity behavior we’ve been discussing here be changed, then yes. (Will it be changed? I don’t know.)

If you mean, will it be possible to add to the storage capacity of a Windows Phone at a later date, or replace the camera with a higher-end model or whatever, then no. But this is pretty much common across smart phones. (With the exception of storage, I guess; WP does things the iPhone way.) You can replace the battery. But hat’s not an upgrade per se.

Never mind what’s ‘missing’ at the launch (such as copy/paste, multitasking, etc). What will matter is: Will any hardware be upgradable?

If I like what I see in the first Windows 7 phones, I’ll forgive shortcomings if I know they can be fixed within the phone I have with a simple download. In other words, if I knew my phone had a future beyond the next product launch.

If Microsoft does this, I would happily abandon the closed, mysterious world of iPhone.

(I’m late to commenting, I didn’t see this post until Scobleizer’s tweet today, sorry.)

From a marketing perspective, Microsoft does want to push the notion that a tablet-type device is basically a PC at heart and that the company will be there with solutions soon. They have nothing to offer at the moment, of course. But they’re trying to establish the notion that they’ve been successful in the PC market, so they’ll be fine in tablets too.

When Jobs refers to the post-PC era, he’s referring to the rise of non-traditional form factors and devices like phones and tablets. Which makes sense, since that’s what Apple sells.

When I say that the iPhone is using a PC-type app model, I mean that it provides individual apps for different purposes, not integrated experiences as you get on Windows Phone. I’ve explained this many times, so there’s no reason to go over it again here. But the point is simple: On iPhone, you go in and out of apps all day long. On Windows Phone, this won’t be as necessary.

So you can disagree, of course. But these things are not connected in any way, though you’ve tried to make some connection around the notion of “PC” for some reason. Let’s not get bogged down in semantics.