• ZDNet, Tuesday, May 4, 2010 2:28 PM

ZDNet's Mary-Jo Foley investigates Microsoft's "Menlo" -- a "hush-hush research project which seems to be focused on replacing Windows Compact Edition (CE) with Windows NT inside of mobile devices," according to her sources. Foley is also looking into a project codenamed "Experiment 19" -- a graphics platform that Microsoft researchers are apparently building to complement Menlo. According to Foley, the lead for the Menlo project is Galen Hunt, the Microsoft researcher who spearheaded Microsoft's Singularity research project, as he acknowledges on his bio page on the Microsoft Research Web site. Singularity is a "microkernel-based" operating system developed by Microsoft Research, and supposedly the starting point for Microsoft's Midori effort.

Based on her research, Foley believes that Menlo "definitely" has something to do with Microsoft's future strategy in the mobile space. "But exactly why the company may be looking into replacing the CE core -- which is at the heart of many third-party devices, as well as Microsoft products including Windows Mobile, Windows Phone OS 7.0 and the Zune operating system -- is still not 100 percent clear."

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