News tagged ‘Microsoft’

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hWpuHGUP26o

Microsoft has finally revealed its two new mobile devices named Kin One and Kin Two. They work on Windows Phone 7 OS and have a capacitive display with multi-touch support, custom browser (based on Zune version and has no Flash and Silverlight) and no third-party apps support.

Kin One that was earlier known as "Turtle" is a square slider with a QVGA display, 5 MP camera , LED flash, 4GB storage drive and QWERTY keyboard. Kin Two, more known as "Pure", differs by its landscape form factor, HVGA display, 8 MP camera and 8GB storage. But the experience in both of the products is almost the same. Kin One and Kin Two have 3G, Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth.

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Almost twenty years ago Scientific American posted an article of Xerox PARC. Its authors were thinking about the future technology and decided the next stage of it will be the ubiquitous computers.

"Ubiquitous computers will also come in different sizes, each suited to a particular task. My colleagues and I have built what we call tabs, pads and boards: inch-scale machines that approximate active Post-It notes, foot-scale ones that behave something like a sheet of paper (or a book or a magazine), and yard-scale displays that are the equivalent of a blackboard or bulletin board.”

They were right - tabs are the iPhones and iPods Touch and pads are iPads. But does it mean that we can expect from Apple something really huge like big-screen hubs? Such devices have already been developed (the best example is Microsoft's Surface table, the other one is Samsung MultiTouch Board shown on the picture), but they are still too expensive because of a flat-screen TV components.

For the last few months we have been witnessing the competition between Google and Apple that becomes more and more significant. We tried to analyze some facts and made a conclusion that the confrontation is more personal than corporate.

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The Wall Street Journal has information that nearly 10,000 iPhone users regularly access the Microsoft employee mail system. Such a number represents almost 10% of the company's global staff.

It is really interesting as Microsoft executives are not happy to see their employees using products of rival companies. Its CEO Steve Ballmer already had an accident last September when he caught a man from the company's personnel who tried to snap a photo of an entrance with his iPhone. At that moment he was so angry he put the phone on the ground and pretended to stomp on it. After that he walked away.

The WSJ also reports:

"...the company in early 2009 modified its corporate cellphone policy to only reimburse service fees for employees using phones that run on Windows Phone software."

It is obvious the company tries to reassure its employees to use its software and hardware, but they continue to hide and even customize their iPhones to make them look more like generic handsets.

iSMEStorage is the first application for iPhone with cloud storage virtualization service that allows users to manage more than 10 different storage clouds from their device in 1 Cloud file. Clouds include Google Docs, FTP-as-a-cloud, Email-as-a-cloud, Gmail-as-a-cloud, Miscrosoft SkyDrive and LiveMesh, Apple Mobile Me and Amazon S3 and other.

SMEStorage CEO says:

"We are very happy to add the iPhone to the list of clients that users can use to get access to their files from our platform... It is the first [application] to virtualize storage clouds and make them available from one Cloud File System, and it is the first App of any kind in the App Store that enables access to Microsoft SkyDrive files."

iSMEStorage v1.01 is available here in the Productivity Category from the AppStore only for 0.99$.

"Icons" Pop Art exhibition was opened on the day when most New Yorkers were preoccupied with St. Valentines’s Day bustle. The 15 000 square feet installation room houses the photos not only of Steve Jobs but other renowned persons as well. His photo is placed beside that of Jack Dorsey (Twitter founder), Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook creator) and Bill Gates (Microsoft CEO). Although Jobs doesn't seemed to be very enthusiastic of his second row placement.

Last year’s installation was called "The Holy Trinity” and immortalized such personalities as El Jobso hung between Linus Torvalds (Linux creator) and Bill Gates.

This exhibition features the four luminaries who resemble more the wanted posters rather than pop art celebrities.

It will run till late March.

T3 is reporting that Mike Tedesco, Microsoft's Senior Product Manager for WindowsBU, stated that a version of Microsoft Office for the iPad is "something that we're looking at." Tedesco added that he couldn't make any official announcement today, but from the sounds of things, Microsoft is at least considering a version of Office for Apple's newest creation.

Bringing Office over to the iPad would go a long way toward establishing it as a legitimate productivity device.

Giles Turnbull from the CultOfMac noticed one interesting thing in the video of Apple’s official iPad announcement event.

At 1:04 of the video (the picture above) Phil Schiller demonstrates the new iWork for iPad. On the picture we can see a Keynote and visible in the left corner of the screen button called “My Presentations”. When he moves on to Pages, “My Documents” can be seen clearly. And it really reminds of Windows 95!

Still it is not clear, is this just a Pages feature or maybe a system-wide folder that can be used by other apps. And eventually, “My Documents” may only be a working title with a possibility to be renamed when iWork for iPad will actually be released.

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After the iPad presentation on Wednesday Walt Mossberg, The Wall Street Journal journalist, had a conversation with Steve Jobs who revealed interesting information about the new product.

Books for the iPad were rumored to cost between $13 and $15, and Mossberg asked, why customers will purchase books on this price if Amazon charges only $9.99. Jobs answered: “The prices will be the same”.

Later Mossberg inquired Steve whether he can use Pages application to write his review and then send it to his editors in the Microsoft Word format, as his colleagues doesn't know anything about Pages. Jobs told that the mobile version of Pages allows saving files as Word documents.

The journalist also asked about battery life on the device, and Jobs answered that iPad offers 140 hours of music playback with the screen off or 10 hours of reading. It seems not so much in the comparison with e-books, but Jobs revealed that 10 hours is enough, as nobody reads for 10 hours, and plugging the device or docking it in the end is "not a big deal".

Businessweek reports that Apple and Microsoft are currently in negotiations to replace Google as the default search engine on the iPhone with Microsoft's Bing.com. The talks have reportedly been underway for weeks.

"Apple and Google know the other is their primary enemy," says one of the people, who's familiar with Apple's thinking. "Microsoft is now a pawn in that battle."

With Google's entry into the mobile phone business as well as Apple's recent acquisition of a mobile ad company, the two businesses have encroached on each other's territories. Apple has even been said to be working on distancing itself from Google's Maps data in the iPhone.

If the negotiations are successful, it could also mean that Bing could eventually replace Google as the default search engine for Apple's desktop version of Safari as well.

Microsoft just released an official application of its search engine "Bing". The app looks really good and is well done. It allows you to find websites, images, videos, maps, shopping, news and offers step by step directions to navigate from one point to another! There is even a voice search, a business directory, ability to add pushpins and save locations.

Bing app is avaliable for free via AppStore (link).

Microsoft Windows 7 will probably be a very popular OS. iPhone is already one of the most popular phones. So compatibility between the two is expected, right? Well, many users report in Apple forums that they get "error 0xE8000065" message whenever they attempts to sync. The problems might be in Intel P55 Express chipset's USB controller. We hope that either Intel or Microsoft will find a solution.

There was an Anti-iPhone advertising campaign from Verizon called "iDon't" and designed to publicize the new Motorola Droid listing all the shortcomings of the iPhone. Today a new video was published obviously in favor of the iPhone, called "iDon't Care".

Obviously it was not made by Apple, which usually responds with irony only to Microsoft. The author is Jon Anderson, a simple Apple fan as well as admirer of the iPhone.

He's the original video from Verizon:

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Here is a quick cnet video review of released Microsoft Zune HD mp3 player:

During the It’s only rock and roll Apple spent some time discussing numbers. And as usual the numbers were huge. So here's what we've heard:

• 30 million iPhones sold
• 20 million iPod touches sold

That makes 50 million iPhone OS X platform device on the market, up from 45 million on July 21.

• 75,000 apps in the iTunes App Store
• 1.8 billion downloads (not counting updates)

In terms of games, compared with other mobile platforms, here’s the library count:

• 21,178 for Apple iPhone/iPod touch
• 3,680 for Nintendo DS
• 607 for Sony PSP

Here's more:

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