The unthinkable will be thought, the unimaginable will be imagined, the undoable will be done! Microsoft will finally enter the phone business sometime next year. Ballmer should be happy right? Microsoft’s smartphone will probably try to compete against the iPhone, but will that be possible at all? They have a head start and some experience in the mobile business. Windows Mobile will go to version 6.5 and then 7.0 but what about the rest?

The smartphone will be built on NVIDIA’s SoC or system-on-a-chip platform. So it’s not a Zune phone is it? Will that work? Here’s what the Inquirer has to say about it:

What do you get if you take an iPhone, remove the clean UI, user friendliness, nice industrial design, battery life, cachet, functional OS, and in general everything else that makes it worthwhile? The new Microsoft phone, powered by NVIDIA.

The SoC will be NVIDIA’s Tegra chip, according to the Inquirer. Tegra is available for GPS, handhelds and notebooks and smartphones. The Tegra APX 2500 is the chip for the phone and it has a 600 MHz MPCore Processor, up to a 12-megapixel camera support, GeForce ULV support for OpenGL ES 2.0 and up to 720p H.264 decoding. The NVIDIA nPower technology will get you over 10 hours of HD video playback and about 100 hours of audio.

We might see the device next February at the 3GSM conference in Barcelona and shipping will start soon after. My mid 2009 we should have the first Microsoft smartphone ready to compete against Apple’s third generation iPhone?