Menlo is a codename that has been buzzing on the net ever since Mary Jo Foley first talked about it a couple of months ago. It has be speculated that this was probably Redmond’s attempt to build a new mobile operating system or something close to this. Things are now a little bit clearer thanks to a research whit paper entirely dedicated to this project. What comes out of it is that Menlo is actually a Research Project / Prototype Device centered around Activity-Based Navigation on Mobile Devices. Here’s the abstract:

We introduce activity-based navigation, which uses human activities derived from sensor data to help people navigate, in particular to retrace a ?trail? previously taken by that person or another person. Such trails may include step counts, walking up/down stairs or taking elevators, compass directions, and photos
taken along a user‘s path, in addition to absolute positioning (GPS and maps) when available. To explore the user experience of activity-based navigation, we built Greenfield, a mobile device interface for finding a car. We conducted a ten participant user study comparing users‘ ability to find cars across three different
presentations of activity-based information as well as verbal instructions. Our results show that activity-based navigation can be used for car finding and suggest its promise more generally for supporting navigation tasks. We present lessons for future activity-based navigation interfaces, and motivate further work in
this space, particularly in the area of robust activity inference.

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