Robbie Bach answers questions at today's Blacks at Microsoft Minority Student Day.

REDMOND -- Robbie Bach joked afterward that his Q&A session with minority students today felt more like a grilling from the press. In fact, the high-school students at the Blacks at Microsoft Minority Student Day asked some very insightful questions on subjects including Windows Mobile and Microsoft's Zune portable media device.

And some of the questions extracted some interesting hints from the Entertainment & Devices Division president. Read on for highlights.

On the future of Windows Mobile: "You're going to see from us over the next 24 months probably more innovation that you've seen in the last, I'd say, three or four years in the Windows Mobile space. We'll start announcing some of that next week. You should think that the next two generations of Windows Mobile are going to do some of the following things: One, you'll geta different user experience, basically a different way to interact with the phone itself. Things being much more touch organized. Much better transitions, much richer, it'll look a lot less like a PC and lot more like a fun experience on a phone. I think that will be a pretty dramatic change.

"You'll get dramatically better browsing, so the idea that you can access the Web easily and literally look at almost any Web page on your phone I think will be very powerful.

"Today our Windows Mobile devices are pretty business-oriented. They look like something I would use, probably not something that you would use, let's say it that way. And you're going to see that expand pretty dramatically, including music, video and some other capabilities in what we would call the consumer space that I think will be super-exciting.

"Final thing I'll say: A bunch of the changes in Windows Mobile aren't going to happen on the phone itself, because one of the biggest trends, and I talked about this in my speech, is that people are going to be connected to services. Because the phone now has 3G, which is kinda broadband on a mobile phone, you can now connect to other services and have new capabilities. So think about the Xbox Live demo you saw, think about Facebook, think about Twitter, and you want to be able to connect to all those things in a rich way. We're going to enable those services in a very cool way on our future Windows Mobile technology."

On Microsoft Zune's competition with Apple's iPod: "We've been doing Zune now for about three years, and I would say that, if you took a Zune and iPod, and you included iTunes and our marketplace and just looked at the whole product offering, we win about 40, 50 percent of the reviews. So, from a product quality and capability perspective, in some semi-objective sense, we think we have as good or as better of a product.

"Now, it's not selling like that in the marketplace today. You can look at the data. Apple has, depending on the month, 70 or 75 percent market share, and ours is much less. That's a function of the fact that they have a very strong brand, and they got to market four years earlier than we did. So they have built up a very tough position for us to kinda respond to, even with, in some cases, as good or as better a product.

"So you could say, well, Robbie what are you doing about that? The thing that we're looking at, and I think you'll see play out, is the standalone music-playing category is declining. People are going to want to play their music on a portable device, and they're going to want to play it on the TV and they're going to want to play it on the PC but the portable device increasingly is going to become the phone.

"And so I think what you're going to see is a lot of work on our part to take what we've built with Zune -- we'll continue to do the hardware, we can make that a good business for us -- but to continue to take that software and services and those assets, and use it in a lot of other places. I won't make any specific announcements, but you are going to see us think about the great software we've done as an asset that can be used across multiple screens, as opposed to just on a dedicated Zune device.

"The Zune devices will continue, but there will be other opportunities to experience music that I think will be very, very rich.

On the possibility of a touch-screen Zune: "I won't talk about future product things that we're doing, explicitly, cause that will get me in trouble with a lot of people. I will say that some of the things that I showed today around touch and voice and cameras and those types of things, you will start to see that in a lot of places, not just in my division but across Microsoft.
 
"Independent of specific plans for any specific product, you should just assume over time that that's going to become part of the products that we produce. Specific timing and all of those things I'll need to decide, but it is a huge trend and once you have something like touch or voice to interact with, you wonder why you did it the old way. So I think it's going to be a very powerful trend."