Microsoft might well have hit a home run with its Windows Mobile 7 announcement this past week at Windows Mobile Conference, and well into the 9th inning at that.(Nice baseball references with Spring Training just a couple of weeks away…) Although the first phones based on the platform won’t be out until the fourth quarter, they seem worth waiting for. The user interface looks sleek and fluid, similar to the Zune’s. Strong support for social media, photos, music, and videos is built in. Even some XBox Live integration is included. And for business users, the phones will support mobile versions of Office, including OneNote and SharePoint.

Moreover, Microsoft has not yet announced everything. At next month’s MIX10 event in Las Vegas, they will probably announce Silverlight 4 support for Windows Mobile 7. More specifically, they’ll probably announce that Silverlight will be the native platform for Windows Mobile 7 application development. That unleashes a huge army of .NET Windows developers onto the market, and it also means that Windows Mobile 7 phones will have full rich media web capabilities.

Coming into 2010, it seemed like the Apple recently announced iPad was going to be the year’s technological game changer, but the real game changer might be Microsoft’s Windows Mobile 7 phones . It will be a long wait for the fourth quarter, but an interesting one.

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