According to Channelweb, the Premium Mobile Experiences (PMX) team has caused, either by layoffs or by pissing them off, a large chunk of the Danger team to leave Microsoft. Danger is the team that actually built the Sidekick, and Roz Ho was siphoning off their resources into the Pink camp in order to make sure the latter could survive. By doing so, it seems like she's killed off both groups, which might be why Microsoft keeps denying that they're going to make phone hardware.

Channelweb's tipster sounds similar to the tipster last week that talked to MobileCrunch about management ineptitude and lousy business choices. To summarize, Roz Ho, Microsoft's "head of mobile experiences", seems to be making so many bad choices that naming the project after Pink, the angry singer, seems like one of her best choices.

If Microsoft somehow manages to push Pink out the door, CRN says that it won't even include a calendar app or an alarm clock app. That's a feature that if you saw was missing on a dumb phone, you'd politely hand it back to the salesman while asking him to show you something in a less shitty variety. Not only that, it won't ship with a mobile app marketplace—which makes sense, since it's also rumored that they're not really smartphones anyway.

The bottom line is that massive data outages might be just the kind of early warning users need to abandon the Sidekick and get on another device before the decision gets knocked out of your hands like the punchline to a standup's retort. [CRN]

The source is anonymous, but sounds like someone who either worked for the project or somehow has a lot of insider knowledge of it. They say a good chunk of the Danger/Sidekick team that Microsoft purchased for their phone knowledge actually has been let go or left on their own, leaving "no braintrust that understands how to build a project."

What's even more interesting is that the tipster says the staffers on the team hate the phone, and feel like they're just being used to goad the Windows Mobile 7 team into stepping it up. Other details like the fact that the project might be 2 years behind schedule, that the smaller device's touchscreen is unusable and that their internal staffers are struggling to fix UI design work originally made by "an outside party" is troubling. [MobileCrunch]

Well, at least no Zune Phone as we're hearing it. A few days ago, some analysts stirred up the rumors of a Zune specific piece of hardware this week, complete with hardware details, which Barrons quoted. CNBC declared that a Zune Phone, called Project Pink, was slated for CES. Mary Jo Foley at ZDNet, who separated the Zune Phone hardware from the Pink project weeks ago reminded us that Pink is not a piece of hardware but a platform of services that could allow Zune like services to run on platforms like Windows Mobile. (Although Mary Jo Foley told me today that she thinks that it would be powerful if Pink services ran on other devices, and I agree.) So leave the hardware and Pink apart for a moment. Mary Jo believes Pink could come at CES and with it, a platform for Zune like content on mobile devices, but in line with what Seitz has said on behalf of Microsoft and what Mary Jo Foley believes, I think the Analyst and CNBC have the details slightly skewed.

Both CNBC and the analyst Barrons quoted could have been talking to a manufacturer of a phone, describing a specific implementation of Zune like features on a given set of hardware, via Pink components. But coming from a company that builds their best devices in house, I don't think we can call a Zune Phone a Zune Phone until we see actual devices designed in house design by the Entertainment and Devices team. (To me, this stands in contrast with Google and its Android platform, where every implementation of the OS is a Google Phone, since they have no claim to making great hardware.)

Based on all this, I reiterate that my best guess is that we have is a good chance of seeing Pink, but not a Zune Phone, at CES 2009. [Thanks to Mary Jo Foley for her expertise]