Hasta La Gadget!

It’s not every day we see Windows Phone being used to launch a major new feature, but Twitter has done just that. An update to its official app has just enabled automatic translation if you happen to be reading a person’s tweet that isn’t in English. The tweet isn’t translated in your actual timeline; instead you have to manually click through, but that’s nothing to complain about. Microsoft’s Bing Platform, also released yesterday, is likely being used as the backend, so this feature could very well come to Twitter’s official apps on Android and iOS (not to mention a whole range of other apps) in the near future.

Filed under: Software, Microsoft

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Via: The Nokia Blog

Source: Twitter (Windows Phone Store)

With Windows 8.1, Microsoft has pushed out a revamped version of Internet Explorer that is supposed to be significantly faster than its predecessor, not to mention the fact that it claims to be easier on battery life. Fortunately, it appears that the company fully intends to make IE11 available to Windows 7 users as well. While Microsoft opened up about this fact, it wasn’t so keen to offer up any timing expectations. Thus, it’s quite possible that we may not see it show up on Win7 until after it’s had some time to bedazzle those who are already packing the latest and greatest version of Windows.

Filed under: Desktops, Internet, Software, Microsoft

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NVIDIA’s Shield won’t arrive on its previously announced date of June 27th, instead moving its launch date to an undetermined point in July. A statement issued by NVIDIA explains the delay ambiguously, citing “a mechanical issue that relates to a third-party component” — the company confirmed to Engadget it’s an internal component, but wouldn’t go into any more detail.

“We want Shield to be perfect, so we have elected to shift the launch date to July,” the statement reads. We pushed the company for a specific date but were rebuffed — “We’ll update you as soon as we have an exact date,” was all we were told. We’ll have a full review of the Shield just ahead of its July launch; for now, we’ve got a hands-on with the final version from mid-May to tide you over. Head below the break for that video.

Filed under: Misc, Gaming, Handhelds, Peripherals, Software, Mobile, NVIDIA

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Microsoft already showed off a new Bing platform and 3D maps for Windows 8 today at Build 2013, and now it’s revealed that optical character recognition (OCR) is coming to the OS as well. Of course, OCR has been available on Windows Phone for some time, but the feature has now finally made it to Win8 as a part of Bing’s new capabilities. In the demo, Microsoft showed a Surface tablet using OCR scanning Spanish text on a sheet of paper, then translating it to English. A quick verbal command later, and the info was added to an itinerary within a travel app. Of course, we assume with all those new APIs, devs will be able to find many other ways to use this newfound feature. Time to get creative, people!

Filed under: Software, Microsoft

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Robot toys aren’t what you’d normally expect from Microsoft’s developer-focused Build conference, but that’s just what the company served up today. In a chat about developer tools, Microsoft’s VP of Web Services Antoine Leblond demoed a version of Lego Education’s unreleased Mindstorms EV3 platform using — what else? — a brick-built robot and a Surface tablet. Citing the Win RT APIs that let users interact with device-specific protocols (i.e., USB, Bluetooth, etc.) Leblond was able to stream live video of his face, using a separate Windows tablet, to the tank-like franken-toy. All whimsy aside, this MS / Lego collaboration’s less about giving kids a neat, remote spying tool and more about making programming fun and approachable. You know, STEM stuff. And we’re all for it.

Filed under: Robots, Software, Microsoft

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