The price of the motion-sensing ‘Project Natal’ peripheral for Xbox 360 will start high and end up lower, that’s the news from a Microsoft Open House event in New York, as Variety.com reports.

Robbie Bach, president of Microsoft’s Entertainment and Devices division is the man with the message. Alas, he wasn’t going to be drawn on Natal's actual price – what kind of fool do you take him for? Instead he would only talk in the vaguest, non-committal terms, telling those assembled:

“Relative to Natal, we’ll see how the pricing cost works out. But people should except that it will go through the usual price curve.”

And asked about when the ‘Natal’ codename would be dropped, Bach would only offer ”When we tell you to call it something else.” Which, we suppose, indicates that Microsoft is at least thinking about something catchier to call the product when it launches later next year.

So, no flies on Robbie Bach. He was similarly tight-lipped on the much discussed question of Microsoft moving into portable gaming devices. Although he did give the speculators plenty to chew on:

“The portable market is important. You have to decide which direction the market is going, though. Is it going to stay with portable devices and continue to grow or is the phone you get going to be powerful enough to handle games? I’m probably more biased to think that (phones are) the direction the market is going.

“So in the gaming space, you need to make a fork in the road decision on whether you’re going to do a portable device or focus on phones. The way technology is advancing with phones, (they are) going to be a very strong platform. The only think holding it back today is battery life.”

But that’s more than enough to get the rumour mill spinning. Any takers on a Microsoft-branded, Zune-equipped mobile for 2010? Put another way, does anyone out there really think that Microsoft will sit still forever while Apple mops up the entire gaming/phone market…?