Hasta La Gadget!

It’s unclear whether Verizon will ever get HTC’s 7 Pro, but it’s a lock that Big Red will eventually have some manner of Windows Phone 7 gear in its lineup — and now we’ve got one in the flesh. Looks like HTC will be remixing the Trophy for use on CDMA networks, featuring a 3.8-inch WVGA display, 5 megapixel cam, 16GB of storage, and 802.11n, and Verizon is circulating a brochure for Microsoft employees saying they’ll be able to buy the Trophy in “early 2011” for $199.99 at launch when they renew their contracts now (they’ll also get a leather case and a car charger for free, but hey, they’re Microsofties). Oh, and that’s not the best part: the Trophy is also identified as being a “quad band global phone,” meaning you’ll be able to roam on GSM networks when you leave the US behind — a feature Verizon seems to be pushing pretty hard across its smartphone lineup now. Follow the break for a bigger version of the pamphlet.

[Thanks, anonymous tipster]

Continue reading HTC Trophy with Windows Phone 7 coming to Verizon in ‘early 2011’

HTC Trophy with Windows Phone 7 coming to Verizon in ‘early 2011’ originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 15 Nov 2010 14:04:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Microsoft’s new Casual Game Hub defragments its non-Xbox game sites. It also points towards an eventual united platform for all of the company’s social gaming services on every device.

Besides Xbox and Xbox Live, Microsoft has offered three gaming sites targeting casual gamers: MSN Games, Bing Games and Windows Live Messenger, which offers a smaller selection of social games. With Microsoft Game Hub, games on on all three sites appear the same way: anyone using any of the services can play games on any platform.

What’s more, users can log in to Microsoft Game Hub with their Facebook IDs as well as Microsoft Live IDs — expanding the social network for initiating games and sharing status updates.

This might seem like a little tweak, but I think it’s something bigger. The sweet spot for high-volume gaming today is straightforward: keep it simple and make it social. It shows Microsoft’s big push for one identity and one social network, regardless of platform or device.

“It doesn’t matter where you play – on Messenger, on Bing, on your mobile device, or on your PC,” says Microsoft Xbox’s Michael Wolf. “You can have that sense of connectivity and competition regardless of platform, which is something no one’s ever really done before.”

The only major Microsoft-owned gaming device/platform left off that list (by a member of Microsoft’s Xbox division!) is Xbox and Xbox Live. Here, Microsoft faces a challenge: preserving Xbox’s loyalty and name recognition among dedicated gamers while broadening its audience to include the gaming audience opened up by platforms like iPhone, Facebook and Nintendo’s Wii.

The expansion of the Xbox 360’s multimedia capabilities have increasingly made it equally suited to the family room as the dorm room. Microsoft’s Kinect and the expansion of Xbox Live into Windows Phone 7 are already shifting Xbox gaming away from what I’ll call “the Halo paradigm”: graphics-intensive, highly-violent, quick-reflex games with a devoted following dominated by young men.

There’s a risk of alienating these early supporters, who might not think so highly of companies known for their Facebook games like Crowdstar crowding their space. In fact, it’s almost a cliché at this point to lament that Kinect hasn’t realized its potential by offering more robust support for these “serious games.”

At the same time, crossover games like Kinect Sports (for the Xbox 360) or Angry Birds (on its way to Xbox Live) make this less of an either-or proposition that it might appear.

The unifying thread between gaming in both the hub and Xbox is and remains the social dimension. Xbox users love to play and talk trash with their gaming friends across the country as much as office workers like killing time with Tic Tac Toe over Windows Messenger. Add Facebook integration to the mix and you’ll see an increasing overlap of both networks.

It takes a long time for a company as large and differentiated as Microsoft to bring so many different properties into a single, cohesive unit. So any deep integration of the separate gaming services will most likely be gradual.

The other open question is whether gamers will be willing to give up their separate identities. The person who blasts aliens with college friends may not be so easily folded into the person who plays word games with their thirteen-year-old sister.

Still, if Microsoft is successful at using the Windows Live cloud and Facebook-augmented rich social features to pull its properties together, it could provide a model for other companies looking to attempt something similar. For instance, it would be easy to imagine iOS’s rich casual gaming market migrating from iPhone and iPad to Apple TV and the Mac.

For Microsoft, it’s Windows and Xbox Live: for Apple, it’s the App Store — and potentially Ping and Twitter. But Microsoft has more resources, a more versatile set-top box, a bigger social network partner and a better record in the cloud. For the first time in a while, Redmond is way ahead of the game.

See Also:

• Xbox 360 Dashboard Redesign Brings Kinect, ESPN Support
• What Every Parent Needs To Know About The XBox Kinect
• How Facial Recognition Works in Xbox Kinect
• How Motion Detection Works in Xbox Kinect
• Sony May Be Developing Phones and Tablets For Casual Gaming …
• Wired 12.06: The Wrinkled Future of Online Gaming
• Games, Chat, ePub: Imagining the Future of Apps for Kindle …

We all knew this would inevitably happen, but seeing it in action is something else — the Kinect transformed by the power of open-source drivers into a true 3D video camera for capturing oneself. UC Davis visualization researcher Oliver Kreylos fed the streams from his peripheral’s infrared and color cameras into a custom program that interpolated and reconstructed the result, generating a mildly mindblowing 3D virtual reality environment he can manipulate at will. And if it makes him look a little bit like the proficiently penciled protagonists in Take On Me, that’s just the cherry on top. Don’t miss the videos after the break to see what we’re talking about.

Continue reading Hack turns Kinect into 3D video capture tool

Hack turns Kinect into 3D video capture tool originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 14 Nov 2010 20:06:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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This article was written on April 18, 2008 by CyberNet.

It looks as though Microsoft is more than just dabbling with the idea of offering a subscription-based version of Microsoft Office. According to CNet in the next few days they will launch a limited Beta program of a project codenamed Albany. With it you would agree to pay a subscription that includes Microsoft Office Home and Student as well as the OneCare security suite. That way when new versions of the software are released you’ll automatically be eligible for the upgrade!

It sounds great to me, but there seem to be a few skeptics out there. Some aren’t too fond of the idea that if you don’t pay your dues the software will come to a screeching halt. That’s understandable, but it all boils down to what price Microsoft will consider fair for the software suite.

I’m not sure what price would be within my comfort zone. Five dollars a month seems like a sweet spot, but I’m guessing that will be on the low end for Microsoft. The list price for Microsoft Office Home and Student 2007 is $150, but some bargain hunting will reveal prices closer to $120. At just $5 per month that would take Microsoft two years to recoup the cost, and then there’s also OneCare that I haven’t accounted for in that pricing.

My guess is that Microsoft will charge between $5 and $10 per month for the entire suite. If this turns out to be successful it’s possible that they will adopt a similar subscription plan for Windows, but it may not be worth it if there are large gaps between the releases like there was for XP and Vista.

Thanks to Omar for the tip!

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We’d put forth the theory that Microsoft and Samsung would eventually certify microSD cards specifically for use with Windows Phone 7 devices after they finally came to terms with the fact that the microSD drama surrounding the Focus was going to lead directly to broken devices and broken hearts — and sure enough, that’s exactly what’s happening. We just received this statement from AT&T, pointing out that the platform is extremely finicky when it comes to microSD selection — so finicky, in fact, that only “Certified for Windows Phone 7” cards should be used. No such cards are currently available. Here’s the full statement:

“Windows Phone 7 requires a certified high-speed microSD card for optimal performance. Because the Samsung Focus is expandable via a microSD card, only microSD memory cards certified for Windows Phone 7 should be used. This information is not currently marked on any microSD packaging in market today. As a result, we are advising customers to delay purchasing an external microSD card until the cards identified as “Certified for Windows Phone 7″ are available commercially or in AT&T stores.”

Coincidentally, we appear to have fried a card after moving it in and out of our own Focus today to the point that no PC, phone, or camera can read it anymore, so this is definitely a real problem that needs a real solution. It’s odd that Microsoft appears to have been fully aware of this situation prior to release and yet AT&T’s only now drawing the line, but we can’t even imagine the kinds of bureaucratic head-butting that happens between corporations the size of AT&T, Microsoft, and Samsung. In the meantime, be careful out there, folks.

Update: The Focus is in the microSD hurt locker on at least two fronts here. First, the platform is definitely finicky in terms of card specification — Microsoft’s support docs explicitly say the requirements are more stringent than just the SD class:

“Determining whether an SD card is Windows Phone 7 compliant is not a simple matter of judging its speed class. Several other factors, such as the number of random read/write operations per second, play a role in determining how well an SD card performs with Windows Phone 7 devices.”

But what appears to have fried our card is the fact that any card inserted into a Windows Phone 7 device “will no longer be readable or writable on any other devices such as computers, cameras, printers, and so on” according to documentation on Samsung’s site — including, amazingly, the ability to format the card. That’s hardcore, and it also explains why these guys are so skittish about external storage in general and why so few WP7 devices support it at this point.

Update 2: We’ve just been slid some more details on the specs Microsoft is looking for to certify cards — turns out it has a lot to do with random access speed, not total throughput, as the company’s support docs imply. It’s the latter value that’s identified by a card’s class (the big number that’s often stamped on the card), so that’s why Microsoft can’t just say “any card Class 6 or higher is fine” or something to that effect. What’s upsetting is that we’re hearing the cards that work best can’t be bought by consumers — they’re only sold in bulk, which probably explains why the cards installed in the Focus are fine and nothing else is (at least, according to AT&T) at the moment.

AT&T tells Samsung Focus customers not to buy microSD cards yet, wait for ‘certified’ ones (update: random access speed is key) originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 12 Nov 2010 16:35:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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