[Windows Phone 7 General] emigrating:
While you are right that the 800MHz CPU is minimum spec, that does not mean you can take any other processor and build a Windows Phone around it. From my understanding Mango will support the MSM7x30 range of SoCs (i.e. 800MHz CPU that performs on par with the current chipset) and the MSM8x55 (1GHz CPU). Both of these come with the Adreno 205 GPU which is a massive improvement on the current Adreno 200 GPU.

This is the strategy, and as far as I'm concerned it's a great one. It means there will be no fragmentation like certain other platforms.

Take the following scenario;

Windows Phone allows you to use ANY Qualcomm SoC as long as it meets the minimum spec of the MSM7230. So, HTC releases a HTC Trumpet running on MSM7230 (800MHz CPU / Adreno 205). At the same time they releases the HTC Flair running on the MSM8660 (1.5GHz DUAL-core CPU / Adreno 220).

Right, we now have two phones running the same operating system albeit on very different hardware. The OS is obviously designed for the MSM7230 (lowest common denominator) so would not utilize any of the extra performance in the higher-end, more expensive HTC Flair. If the phones perform the same on both chipsets, why bother releasing the more expensive Flair in the first place? Who would buy it (expect gadget junkies who always wants the best of everything)?

Ok, some people would obviously buy it. Perhaps even enough people to make it a viable addition to the existing WP lineup. Now we're hitting another problem, Commercial developers; these people are in this for the money. They want as many people as possible to buy their game while at the same time spending as little money as possible on actual development (there are a few exceptions to this, but generally speaking any developer follows the above mantra). Do you think they will develop for the base-model? the high-end model? or both? The vast majority would target the base-model (i.e. the HTC Trumpet). Again that means the HTC Flair does not utilize any of the extra power it has - not to mention the fact it is likely to use more battery.

Do you know why developers hate Android? It's because of the above. There is no coherency. You cannot target Android as a platform, because there is no guarantee your game will be as fluid on device A as B, C or D. Even if you tried targeting phones running ontop of a similar chipset you would run into problems because the OS utilizes a range of different UI layers utilizing various amounts of CPU cycles.

Since the apps are XNA and/or Silverlight based, yes - all they need is the ability to run Silverlight and XNA. This is why I don't think we will see a CE7 based phone, CE will be phased out once Win8 is released - CE has served it's purpose, it was their "mobile" OS. There is no point maintaining two different OSes targeting the same customer segment when Win8 will run on ARM. A full Win8 ARM install runs great on 1GB of RAM, just imagine how small the footprint could be if you take away all the fluff and run it as a modularized OS (think WES7, but for Win8 on ARM).

Agreed, and this kind of timeframe seems to work really well with the current strategy. They will provide updates which will run "seamless" on 2 generations of phones at the same time. In other words, Mango will run great on todays devices as well as the ones coming this fall. The 2012 update will probably still run on todays handsets, but will be more optimized on 2011/2012 devices - 2113 update will run like **** on todays devices, okayish on 2011 and be optimized for 2012/2013. Pretty much like how iOS works.