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Microsoft is intent on tightening its mobile requirements for hardware manufacturers ahead of the shipping of Windows Phone 7 Series.

Some details have emerged about their decision to cut back the unwieldy number of supported Windows Phone chassis to three with Windows Phone 7.

From ZDNET:

Chassis 1 is for PC makers developing “big touch screen” phones, the hosts said. These will be touch-only devices, with 1 GHz processor (hello, Snapdragon!) and a dedicated graphics processor, the Frankly Speaking guys said. These are the phones that will be out first at launch this holiday season.

Chassis 2-compliant phones will support real sliding keyboards plus touch, the podcasters claimed. They said these would be more Palm-Treo-like. There also will be Chassis 3 phones, about which the pair didn’t have any details. One of the hosts (I couldn’t tell which) said he expected Chassis 3 phones might be candy bar phones. The pair didn’t say when Chassis 2 and 3 phones might ship.

It’s been rumored for over a year that Microsoft would be locking down its phone ecosystem so that fewer partners were required to adhere to more rigorous specifications. In fact, all those rumors about Microsoft making its own Windows Mobile 7 phone were more likely than not, actually rumors about the evolving set of chassis specs that Microsoft was creating for its Windows Phone partners.

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