Nature abhors a vacuum, and that goes double for tech news types.  When supplied with little or no information, the talking heads will fill the void with any ol’ thing, baseless rumors and guesses being, more often than not, the medium of choice. And, like an anthropologist lecturing on peoples eons-dead, they deliver their speculation with absolute confidence. 

And that’s fine – hell, it’s even entertaining – but we usually leave the wild speculation to others.  That said, we also like to keep you updated on the latest specumation making the rounds whenever it seems credible.

The latest comes from Gizmodo, which has some interesting ideas on Windows Mobile in the new year.  In a nutshell, the story states that Windows Mobile 7 will indeed be shown at the MWC in February, that the OS will ship sometime in late 2010, and that there will be – contrary to recent reports – support for at least some WinMo 6.x applications, probably via emulation.

Each of these assertions seems reasonable given what we’ve been told over the last several months, but we won’t know anything for sure until mid-year.  Even if Microsoft shows off 7 in February (and we think they will, in some form at least), changes will come between then and year’s end.  The legacy support for existing third-party apps seems the most suspect, although new, fast mobile CPUs could make this a possibility. 

We can’t imagine Zune media components not being part of the mix, and there will surely be significant UI changes.  There could also be Minority Report-style gesture controls, Windows XP emulators, a Bluetooth neural interface and…

Wild speculation.  So tempting.