After seeing the huge success of the iphone and the introduction of Android the Windows Mobile team decided to take a step back and approach building the next generation of Windows Mobile from the ground up from both an Operating System and User Experience perspective.

After tagging their original Windows Mobile (WinMo) 7 release as 6.5 and finally kicking it out the door last year the folks in Redmond have been able to focus on their next generation mobile experience. After much speculation to what the new WinMo 7 would be Microsoft just debuted things in Barcelona at the Mobile World Congress and the folks in Redmond did not disappoint when it comes to delivering something completely new.

The branding of the new WinMo family and experience is Windows Phone 7 Series. It reflects two major shifts in strategy for Microsoft.

First in User Experience on the device. Taking the lead from what the Zune experience provides with a efficient yet minimal UI 7 Series is completely revamped…, this aint your old WinMo device, and actually if the initial impressions are any sign of whats to come its a new approach to just about anything that is on the market today.

The second shift is in how Redmond is working with the handset providers. Previously, just as they did on the desktop OS side of things, Microsoft pretty much provided the bits for the OS and let the carrier pretty much decide what they wanted to do from a configuration, layout, theming perspective on Windows Mobile devices. Not any more. A chunk of the time Microsoft has put into this new generation of mobile experiences focused on working with manufacturers to create a base set of a rumored 2 or 3 hardware and formfactor variations. Going forward everyones base User Experience will be the same and their hardware will adhere to minimum specs for screen size/resolution, processor speed and memory size.

There are still a lot of questions to be answered and MS still has their work cut out to get things out the door for what they say will be a holiday 2010 launch. A big thing not addressed this morning is a split between two different 7 Series experiences in both software and hardware, one more business like, the other more entertainment. The longtime secret Project Pink which is rumored to be the offshoot for the next generation of Danger devices has had some more light shed on it recently but is still under wraps.

In the up and coming months, especially at Mix 2010, we should see even more news and demonstrations of this mobile rebirth for the folks in Redmond. In the meantime you can check out the press event here (video coming soon), the official press release here, and some more news to come from SiliconAngle folks on the ground in Barcelona.