It’s just one of those days where I keep running into satire—and it’s so annoyingly subtle that I’m not even sure it’s there. I just wrote about Apple’s “miserable weekend sales” in “Apple hatred at its worst!,” and now here’s another one.

Chris Green at ITPro claims that Microsoft is planning a Zune-based smartphone. This is what he says:

…such a device is in the works, which is great news as it would easily provide respectable competition to Apple’s iPhone.

All the components are in place – Windows Mobile as the underlying OS, the Zune user interface for the front-end, tweaked and extended…

Thankfully, he doesn’t cite the sources. In fact, his sources are as vague as, “Following Microsoft’s partner conference in the US last week,” and, “Sources close to the situation.”

This gives me the hope that this is some kind of a perverse joke. Also, he begins by making fun of Microsoft a little:

You have a smartphone platform that you’ve been working away on for years, but despite your best efforts and hundreds of millions of dollars of investment, it’s still rubbish!

So – what do you do?

The correct answer is admit that you suck at this and give up. But Microsoft’s answer, it seems, is to come up with a Zune-based smartphone.

I hope not.

You might well ask: why am I so set against a Zune-based smartphone anyway? I don’t actually think that Apple has anything to worry about even if Microsoft does launch a zPhone. After all, Zune never made an impact on the music players market, and never managed to eat into the iPod’s market share. And there’s no reason to believe that a Zune –based phone will have any better luck.

It’s just that there are enough iPhone killers around already, (not one of them actually strong enough to take on the iPhone) and we’re just going to get these endless reports about one more iPhone killer. It’s just plain annoying to encounter that stuff over and over again.

So I’m really hoping this one is a satire. What does it look like to you?