It ain’t easy… being Pink. Techeye is reporting that Microsoft’s Project Pink phones are going to be delayed until sometime in April. The reason for the delay? “issues with the European models and roll out,” but that’s not to say there’s anything wrong with the phones which are already done and ready. There’s just some stuff to work out with carriers.

It’s looking like they’ll be available on Verizon here in the states and Vodafone in the UK. Originally there was talk about unveiling the Pink phones (Turtle and Pure) at CeBIT but now it’s looking like Microsoft is going to throw their own events to herald the arrival of the Pink phones and they’re willing to shell out big bucks to make sure it’s something significant..

Looks like the firmware for the new Turtle and Pure phones has leaked and is being picked apart. @Conflipper is posting details about the OS of these two phones and the many clues hidden amongst the code.

Before we dive in, how do we know this firmware is for the Project Pink phones? Well, there’s this string in there:

ProviderName=”Microsoft Pink” USB\PinkUsbDbg.DeviceDesc=”Pink USB Debug”

It looks like there’s going to be possibly four different devices, well kind of. The Turtle and Pride phones are going to be 320×240 pixel screens with UMTS and CDMA radios respectively. The Pure and the Lion will be higher resolution devices at 480×320 pixels and again UMTS and CDMA respectively.

DEVICE_TYPE=TURTLE RADIO_TYPE=UMTS SPLASH= 320_240
DEVICE_TYPE=PRIDE RADIO_TYPE=CDMA SPLASH= 320_240
DEVICE_TYPE=PURE RADIO_TYPE=UMTS SPLASH=480_320
DEVICE_TYPE=LION RADIO_TYPE=CDMA SPLASH= 480_320

Also of note, it looks like they’ll be based on a version of the Windows CE kernel developed for an ARM architecture thanks to this string in the firmware:

Zune Device.K.E.Y.V.A.U.L.T .A.R.M…W.i.n.d.o.w.s. .C.E. .K.e.r.n.e.l. .f.o.r. .A.R.M.

What version of CE? Well, possibly CE 6 since there’s this:

Microsoft Windows CE Ethernet Bootloader v%d.%d for NVIDIA %s Platform. Partition name %s …..CE6.CE6/

. And yes, that’s an NVIDIA you see in there, most likely the NVIDIA Tegra which also runes the Zune HD.

There’s of course all sorts of references to “PMX” which we already know is Microsoft’s Premium Mobile Experience, aka Microsoft + what’s left of Danger. But one mention of PMX is interesting:

PMX2009 = “PMX USB Modem 2009″ PMX2009S = “PMX USB Modem 2009 Standalone” %PMXDevice2009% = QportInstall00, USB\VID_045E&PID_0123&MI_00

Tethering perhaps?

And finally, Conflipper mentions: With reference to Silverlight and Visualizer feeds with a heavy background to social networking I dont think these phone are all that “dumb”

Looks like one of Microsoft’s Pink phones, the “Turtle“, hit the FCC. Model PB10ZU appears to packed with dual-band CDMA, EVDO, Bluetooth, and 802.11b/g. There’s also a reference to PB20ZU (the “Pure” perhaps?) but no details on that one. March 29th is the date to wait till for the rest of the FCC docs to be released. For the record, the FCC ID is APYNAR0067.

FCC Docs via Engadget