News tagged ‘Microsoft’

A new version of the Google Docs Viewer has been launched by the company for the iPad, Android and iPhone to let you view PDF, doc, docx and ppt file uploaded to your documents list without needing to download the file itself.

With our mobile viewer you can switch quickly between pages and pan/zoom within a page. On your iPhone and iPad, you can pinch to zoom in or out. You can try it out by going to docs.google.com on your Android-powered device, iPad or iPhone and select any document in these formats that you've previously uploaded.

When the iPhone 4 was introduced at the WWDC, Apple especially noted the capabilities of the device, putting emphasis on its camera. The company said that, even though the iPhone 4 had only 5 megapixels, while 8 megapixels was beginning to be the norm for the latest smartphones, the iPhone 4 would have a far superior performance thanks to some special features that go far beyond the simple megapixel count.

Now the iPhone 4 is finally on the market, and so are samples of the new Droid X from Motoralla introduced on Wednesday. This made camera tests possible and this is what Macworld did in their series of tests aimed to compare 4 devices: the iPhone 4, it’s predecessor 3GS, the Droid X, the HTC EVO 4G, Samsung HZ35W and Galaxy, as well as basic Sony and Samsung point-and-shoot cameras. For the video test, the devices were also compared to the Flip Video M2120.

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Finally, Microsoft has released Windows Live Messenger application for iPod touch and iPhone. Here is a shortlist of actions it allows to perform:

• Instant messaging;
• Viewing and commenting friends' status updates and photos from Windows Live, MySpace, Facebook and some other;
• IM notification even if the app is closed;
• Uploading photos from the phone for sharing;
• Accessing Hotmail accounts.

The app is free and may be downloaded here.

When Gizmodo showed new iPhone's prototype most of us stopped expecting from Jobs anything shocking on WWDC 2010. But he amazed us, and not only with new display's resolution, FaceTime function and 802.11n support, but also with gyroscope. Many developers instantly realized - this is a new breakthrough.

While conventional accelerometer measures linear acceleration as a change of direction apart a change in velocity, a gyroscope measures angular acceleration, or in other words, a change in both direction and velocity at the same time. Thus the device can sense its rotation while ignoring hand jitters and linear movements, which is impossible for accelerometer.

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Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer shares his thoughts on the iPad at D8.

Here is an interesting interview with Microsoft founder Bill Gates. The topic of the discussion is technology, Apple and Steve Jobs.

According to new MobileTech World report, Microsoft had presented its new goal at ReMIX event in France. The company wants to sell 30 million devices with Windows Phone 7 OS by the end of 2011.

Garter revealed that Microsoft had only 16,5 million mobile devices sold in 2008, though later Steve Ballmer claimed there were 20 million. That same year Apple exceeded its goal with 11,4 million iPhones. At the beginning of 2010 it was only 8,8 million iPhones and 3,7 million Windows Mobile phones sold.

It is also known that Microsoft will present its Windows Phone 7 (which is incompatible with previous Windows Mobile OS) in the end of this year, which means the company will have a year to gain its goal. Currently the company has no library of apps, no really installed base of users and only two retail stores.

Ballmer had been rumored by Wall Street analyst Trip Chowdhry to be making an appearance at WWDC. He was expected to announce Microsoft's Visual Studio 2010 with support for iPhone OS and Mac OS X development.

Here is an official tweet from Microsoft:

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Because of Apple and Google success on a mobile device market Microsoft is going to conduct "major organizational changes" in its Entertainment and Devices Division that is currently responsible for Xbox, Zune and Windows Phone. It looks like first step has been already taken - the work on the dual-screen tablet named Courier had been canned. This allegedly caused its main developer J Allard to leave the company. Further changes will affect on the team that develops Windows Phone 7 mobile OS. The latter must be introduced this fall.

Nick Wingfield from the Wall Street Journal wrote Microsoft lose its positions mainly because of its Windows Mobile OS that had been criticized much for years.

Microsoft's division of Entertainment and Devices also develops portable media players named Zune. The latest Zune HD received many positive reviews but couldn't rival with tremendously popular iPod touch.

Yesterday Dell officially announced its first 5-inch Android tablet. The announcement was made on the company's official blog.

So the device is now called the Streak. Previously it was shown at Consumer Electronics Show 2010 as a concept and called the Mini 5. The tablet has a 800x480 pixel capacitive multitouch screen, 1GHz Snapdragon processor from Qualcomm, VGA front-facing camera for video chatting, 5MP autofocus camera with LED flash, removable battery, 3.5mm headphone jack, 3G, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and MicroSD-card support. The Streak runs a customized version of Android OS with multitouch support and "Dell UI enhancements".  The system allows accessing to 40,000  apps in the Android Market, navigation with Google Maps, support for Google Voice and Microsoft Exchange Connectivity.

Blogger from the Round Rock company in Texas Lionel Menchasa thinks the Streak may be very perspective:

"I've been at Dell for 16 years, and I don't think there's ever been more buzz around a single Dell product than this. In my view, that's for good reason. Hardware and design-wise, this thing impresses. Add the ever-increasing capability that Android brings to the equation, and you've got a mobile device that offers a ton of flexibility while looking cool in the process."

The device will be shipped to the UK on June 4 and will be exclusive to the O2 network. Still there is no information on prices, data plans and American partners, but Menсhasa said everything will be soon announced.

In a video above one of the device developers Kevin Andrew tells and shows how useful the Streak may be in the everyday use.

Those developers who study new beta-versions of iPhone OS 4.0 reveal that new firmware has features of suggested word replacement and spellcheck imported from the iPad to the iPod touch and iPhone. They were presented first in iPad which has iPhone OS 3.2.

Spelling system allows users to select a misspelled word with a touch and then choose «Replace...» instead of using copy/paste operations. The word that was misspelled is underlined in red like in Mac OS X or Microsoft Word. After that system offers replacement word suggestions that also can be chosen with only one touch.

Apple announced that iPhone OS 4 will also allow iPod touch and iPhone to support iPad's Bluetooth keyboard.

As you remember, last week Steve Jobs posted a letter about his thoughts on Flash and that same day Adobe’s CEO commented on it.  Sometime later chief technology officer Kevin Lynch also expressed his opinion on the situation:

"It's not about HTML5 vs. Flash. They're mutually beneficial. The more important question is the freedom of choice on the Web."

In the meantime, Instead of using plugin-based technologies like Adobe Flash and Microsoft Silverlight, Apple created a new client-side framework Gianduia to produce quality online applications for retail users.

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Several web-resources including Gizmodo and TechCrunch confirmed that HP stops working on its "HP Slate" tablet device. The decision is caused by this week's deal that will end soon with acquiring Palm. Now Hewlett-Packard is rumored to integrate Palm's WebOS instead Microsoft WIndows in their tablet (which can take a year or more) and reconsider using Intel-based hardware in it because of its excessive power requirements.

So now it looks like HP changes it course and is going to convert webOS to a tablet OS and compete with Google's Android and Chrome on the market of operational systems.

Meanwhile, Microsoft has also cancelled working on its own booklet-style tablet device called "Courier". Gizmodo sources say the project will be no longer supported. Anyway, the device had never been publicly announced, though it could be very interesting with its two touch-sensitive screens in a foldable format and handwriting recognition input.

According to the sources from Apple Insider, AMD representatives have been seen recently on the meeting with Apple's top brass. The discussion was about the possible partnership between these two organizations as Apple looking forward in bringing AMD's CPUs to workstations and notebooks. The main reason for changing its main processor supplier is probably the try to increase the flexibility and competitive options of Cupertino's company. Another explanation is problems, that were encountered with Intel recently (they include limited availability of recently produced processors and new chipset designs that don't allow using any video chips except its integrated graphics chip).

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Kamagames.com posted another interesting video. Now they've tried to launch Windows 95 on iPad using BOCHS emulator. It looks pretty cool though the OS is very slow. That might be the reason why the Kamagames devs didn't try to install WinME or at least Windows 98.

The main idea of this experiment is that though Windows 95 is very old OS it actually supports mutitasking! Moreover, maybe it is a first step to even bring Flash to the iPad.