Can you please elaborate on what made windows mobile better for apps? Why did Microsoft not want to continue this? I think windows mobile was a complete scratch and rewrite?

My understanding for why Google wanted Android and open handset alliance is the fragmentation of mobile at that time: it took too much effort to get Google maps on all these different J2ME (I think I got the name right) devices.

I had both J2ME and Symbian versions of Google Maps running on my Symbian devices.

Anyone that tried to make an Android app run properly across Android devices, specially Samsung ones, knows that the fragmentation issues aren't gone.