if there is no upgrade for the apps, then am stuck with having to full price again…!!! if that happens, then probably i will stick to old 6.5.x and what i have or embrace the dark side and start looking for illegal stuff!

But cmon. I dont care who this guy is what I am highly skeptical of is him. He referred to Android 3.1./3.2… wow he must be pretty good to know what 3.1 is going to look like. Of course a newer version of CE wouldnt be compatible with old apps, maybe some kind of backend solution. To me he seems to be regurgitating a bunch of rumors. No screen shots, no noting. No offense but I'm going to completely disregard this article.

Emulation, such as Rosetta, helped Apple bridge from PowerPC to x86. But the thing to remember is that the interface remained the same through Apple's platform migration.

Emulation may not work for Windows Mobile, in that it is the interface that will need the most changes. The interfaces from the old WinMo 6.x apps (designed for stylus) won't work with the new Zune-like interface of Windows Mobile 7. It seems obvious that every app will need some modification.

A really large proportion of the WM 6.x apps were unusable on capacitive screens, such as the HTC HD2. Those apps were originally designed for a stylus pen interface, and some were useless on the capacitive screen of the HD2.

Microsoft must cut the stylus loose, and move the whole Windows Mobile OS and all its applications to the capacitive interface. The market demands capacitive screens. Resistive, stylus interfaces will simply fail to sell (which is what's happening now with 6.x).

Whichever way it goes, most of the existing applications will need modification and interface changes. Maybe not a total rewrite, but it will be a major rewrite. We also know that WM7 will have a new kernel (CE6)

I think what we will see is more like a XP to Vista transitition. Some apps won’t work just due to OS changes (to be expected), but the bulk will because the underlying system is just a newer version of the old.

Finally, Microsoft loves the developers. They really do! Announcing that all the developers’ hard work for Windows Phone 6.5 and the app store is all for naught next year would just not at all be consistent with their tradition of “here’s our next OS, here’s how you make sure you are compatible” trend they set.

However,the bulk of apps will probably work. The ones that don’t will need to be tweaked, but not written from scratch.

Microsoft is a business company. If they want to remain competitive with RIM, they need business apps. Are they going to rewrite the entire Pocket Office suite? Maybe, but it seems like a lot of extra work.

Besides, Windows CE is incredibly mature and powerful and used on multiple platforms, from the XBox to rugged mobile devices, to high security devices, to, most famously, Windows Phone. Why would they change that when they were under the gun to begin with from a time perspective?

As I said on another blog…

A cornerstone at Microsoft is backwards compatibility. Look at the effort put into Windows 7. It’s actually more backward compatible than Vista with the integrated “XP Mode.”

I wonder what Microsoft has been doing all the time.