No, they never said anything about CShell. All we know about that is hearsay. We actually don't know if W10M will get RS3 - but the feature2 branch is a sign that W10 is now in maintenance mode and that all future work will go to W10oA.
Oh wow, turns out you are right about that. That's a lot of rumours from many people about it though.
The feature2 thing has been addressed by the insiders dan knows, dans mentioined that on the front page many times. According to him, its not a deadend, just a temporary fork. He's not really incentivised to lie about something like that, as the runner of this site either.
Someone from Microsoft tweeted 'of course work is ongoing on windows mobile' or something similar.
I can see no reason why MS would abandon its "one OS to rule them all" vision in the form of mobile now, unless they had a replacement OS to roll out nearly ready for later this year. And they had windows on arm for proto ready last year. So why would they have rolled out the CU, if that was their plan?
Windows on arm, would require a lot of work to get on a smartphone platform.
Windows on arm is quite tricky as a mobile smartphone OS. You see no mobile OSes are real time multi-taskers. Not ios, not android not win10m. (Well bb10 is, but it runs little services and is limited to max 8 apps).
While its no big deal if you burn through a tablet in a few hours, its a major deal on a phone. The level of modification to energy consumption for windows proper is quite severe. Windows 10 as a platform was not designed for low battery consumption. Its been engineered in that direction because of tablets and desktops, and they are surely working on it, but its big work. You have to throttle cpu, you have to hibernate apps. Windows 10 proper, does not hibernate or cap apps, or services. Its not sufficient as is for a smartphone platform. Android has been refinining its ram management services for a long time too.
On a tablet this is no issue - bigger batteries, less reliance on battery life. On a smartphone its very important you get maximum life.
MS has openly stated that arm is pitched at tablets, and notebooks. And they have said 'mobile is not a priority'.
I'd be coloured extremely surprised if they released windows on arm, as a smartphone OS, with little apps to show for it, in some kind of rush.
That would to me, be very premature. It should release on tablets and notebooks, long before any smartphone, because they can run win32s on their native screen size, thus allowing the growth of the UW platform via more users.
In a few years it would make sense to retire win10 mobile, maybe scavenge it for parts for IoT core etc, when windows on arm is ready for smartphones. But I doubt that's this year unless MS is a lot better keeping secrets than it appears.