Microsoft isn't making the hardware itself, though the scroll wheel is on a reference design jointly developed by Microsoft, Polycom and LG-Nortel. The Microsoft representative I talked with couldn't comment on the legal issues around the similarity, but assumes it must have passed muster.Source: at CNET.
In any case, the scroll wheel appears to work as well for navigating a long list of contacts as it does finding the right song from a huge music library.
Microsoft is showcasing devices from nine companies at the Windows Hardware and Engineering Conference, which takes place here this week. The future Microsoft shows is a neat one, in which the "business phone" morphs into any number of forms from a portable speaker phone to a monitor with built-in array microphone, speaker and high-quality Web cam.
Microsoft phone has iPod-like scroll wheel
Posted on Saturday, May 19 2007 @ 20:46 CEST by Thomas De Maesschalck