So what will Windows Mobile 6.5 really look like?

France Smart­phone posted the two images you see to the right today as a pre­view of what’s to come in Win­dows Mobile 6.5. In case you missed it, Motorola let the cat out of the bad a cou­ple weeks ago when they men­tioned 6.5 as one of the OSes they had in their new slimmed down lineup for new devices. Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer con­firmed the exis­tence of the oper­at­ing sys­tem last week (seri­ously, why do they let him any­where near a micro­phone?). 6.5 should should appear early to mid next year, and pave the way for Win­dows Mobile 7 by early 2010.

How­ever…

Take a good look at these screen­shots. While they’re cer­tainly good look­ing, they’re also cer­tainly fakes. The biggest tip-​offs are the color of the Start flag (col­ored in on one shot, white on the other) and the posi­tion of the sig­nal strength and bat­tery icons, which swap sides from one shot to the other. So while this might be a very good guess at what 6.5 might look like, it’s only a guess, and not leaked from Redmond.

Now that we know they’re not real, let’s see what they do tell us. The first one, a pro­gram launcher of sorts, uses the hex lay­out famil­iar to table­top RPG folk instead of a more tra­di­tional rows and columns grid. Can you say track­ball nav­i­ga­tion? We know some of the new Moto devices use a Blackberry/​G1-​style track­ball instead of a d-​pad, and this is just the kind of UI I’d expect to take advan­tage of that. But since I don’t think most of the new devices are going to be trackball-​based, I think we can skip that one.

But the sec­ond shot is far, far more inter­est­ing. Here we see the stan­dard Win­dows Mobile Today screen, but laid out and nav­i­gated far more like the Zune inter­face. This makes sense, since we know that Microsoft plans to bring the Zune soft­ware plat­form to both Win­dows Mobile and X-​Box even­tu­ally. If that effort were far­ther along that we thought, this would be a very cred­i­ble look for Win­dows Mobile, a com­bin­ing of the Zune UI with Win­dows Mobile 6.1 Standard’s “slid­ing pan­els” home­screen interface.

So while I’m con­vinced these shots aren’t real, I do think Microsoft should take a good long look at them as an exam­ple of how they could mod­ern­ize the Win­dows Mobile expe­ri­ence with­out chang­ing it so much that it’s not Win­dows Mobile any­more. After all, those of us who choose to use Win­dows Mobile today know the iPhone and Android are out there, and we picked Win­dows Mobile for a reason.