Hasta La Gadget!

Woo! Developers! Yeah! Synergy! Steve Ballmer is sure to bring his characteristic enthusiasm to another MWC keynote, though this one should be quite a bit different from the same presentation this time last year. Microsoft is no longer just talking about Windows Phone 7, it’s shipping it all around the world, and now it has a major new partner in the form of the world’s foremost smartphone seller, Nokia. Stephen Elop might still be around central Barcelona and drop by for a chat, but we suspect Microsoft will have some more goodies up its sleeve. Join us after the break as we liveblog every second of it.

Live from Steve Ballmer’s MWC 2011 keynote! originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 14 Feb 2011 09:43:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Each week Ross Rubin contributes Switched On, a column about consumer technology.

This week saw significant and contrasting twists for the legacies of two operating systems that had their roots in the heyday of the PDA. HP revealed that it is killing off the Palm brand, and Nokia announced that — while it would continue to “harvest” less capable versions of the Symbian operating system on its basic handsets — it would shift away from the operating system in its smartphones in favor of Windows Phone 7. In some ways, the demise of the Palm brand and the loss of Symbian’s last major supporter at Microsoft’s hands represent the end of an era.

Continue reading Switched On: Iconic trends meet ironic ends

Switched On: Iconic trends meet ironic ends originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 13 Feb 2011 20:10:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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This article was written on August 29, 2007 by CyberNet.

Microsoft has taken the lid off of Vista SP1 (Service Pack 1) by releasing a detailed report of what to expect when it is released. This announcement comes the same day that Microsoft pushed out two of the most important updates since Vista’s release, both of which make significant improvements to the usability of Vista.

All the information that you need regarding Vista SP1 is below, and it’s broken up into categories so that you can quickly find what you’re looking for. Disappointingly there was no news of a revamped User Account Control (UAC), but hopefully they’ll consider adding a "remember my choice" option so that it isn’t so redundant.

UPDATE: A Release Candidate of Vista SP1 has been made available publicly, and feel free to read our initial thoughts on it.

Alright, now we’ll take a look at the important release dates that were mentioned as well as some of the bugs that will be fixed.

–Vista SP1 Beta Release Date & Availability–

Microsoft said that they plan on releasing Vista SP1 Beta to a moderate amount of testers (10,000 to 15,000) by mid-September. It’s speculated that a public build of Vista SP1 won’t be ready until it hits the release candidate stage, which Microsoft hasn’t provided a timeframe for.

There’s no doubt that Vista SP1 Beta will be leaked to Internet shortly after it is in the hands of testers, especially since another pre-beta version was just leaked the other day. This pre-beta is a standalone version with the build number 6001.16633, and it’s a hefty 700MB download. If you do a search on torrent sites for that build number you should have no troubles finding it.

–Vista SP1 Release Date–

We knew that Vista SP1 was in the works when Google hammered Microsoft with an antitrust complaint regarding the integrated search in Vista. Microsoft was forced to open the search capabilities to third-party applications, and Vista SP1 will be doing just that. Microsoft, however, still has plenty of time before they have to worry about Google overtaking the search capabilities in Vista.

The final release date of Vista SP1 is expected to be in the first quarter of 2008. They are holding back on announcing an official release date because they want to hit the "quality bar" first, but they said that it will ship alongside Windows Server 2008 RTM (release to manufacturing).

–Vista SP1 Delivery Format–

When Vista SP1 is released it will come in several different formats just like XP’s Service Packs did. Almost everyone will probably be using the Express version which will download only the updates that are needed for your computer, but I always like to have the standalone on hand. Here are the three different formats that will be available:

Express – Requires an Internet connection but minimizes the size of the download by sending only the changes needed for a specific computer (approximately 50 MB for x86-based operating systems).

Standalone – Recommended for computers with limited Internet connectivity and for applying the service pack to multiple computers. The download size is larger than the express package (about 1GB for the x86 version), but customers can apply a single package to any Windows Vista version and language combination (within a platform).

Slipstream – The slipstream version of Windows Vista SP1 is media that already contains the service pack, which companies can use to deploy the operating system to new computers or to upgrade existing computers. Slipstream media will also be available to Volume Licensing customers.

–Vista SP1 Features–

Reliability improvements:

• Improved reliability and compatibility of Windows Vista when used with newer graphics cards in several specific scenarios and configurations.
• Improved reliability when working with external displays on a laptop.
• Improved Windows Vista reliability in networking configuration scenarios.
• Improved reliability of systems that were upgraded from Windows XP to Windows Vista.
• Increased compatibility with many printer drivers.
• Increased reliability and performance of Windows Vista when entering sleep and resuming from sleep.

Performance improvements:

• Improves the speed of copying and extracting files.
• Improves the time to become active from Hibernate and Resume modes.
• Improves the performance of domain-joined PCs when operating off the domain; in the current release version of Windows Vista, users would experience long delays when opening the File dialog box.
• Improves performance of Windows Internet Explorer 7 in Windows Vista, reducing CPU utilization and speeding JavaScript parsing.
• Improves battery life by reducing CPU utilization by not redrawing the screen as frequently, on certain computers.
• Improves the logon experience by removing the occasional 10-second delay between pressing CTRL-ALT-DEL and the password prompt displaying.
• Addresses an issue in the current version of Windows Vista that makes browsing network file shares consume significant bandwidth and not perform as fast as expected.

More Information: Vista Blog, All About Microsoft, Ed Bott, and jkOnTheRun

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This article was written on April 19, 2007 by CyberNet.

Microsoft has lofty plans over the next eight years.  By 2015, they have a goal of increasing their users to two billion people.  Is it doable? Especially when they already command 90 percent of the market with one billion users?

Here’s how they intend to do this:

• Offer developing countries $3 software packages with Windows XP and Office included.
• Increase the number of paid copies of Vista in developing countries.

$3.00 Software:

The $3.00 software package is called Microsoft Student Innovation Suite, and it will include Windows XP Starter Edition, Office 2007 Home and Student, and other educational type programs.  The software packages will be offered to governments who purchase Windows-based computers for the students.

It’s their way of getting new users hooked on Vista before they have access to anything else.  Generally speaking, developing countries are untapped, and Microsoft is thinking that they could do well there. It also sounds like Microsoft’s plan to compete with the One Laptop Per Child program(Linux) in developing countries, which has gotten plenty of support and publicity.

China:

Then there’s China they have to work with. In the two weeks right after the release of Vista, only 244 copies of Windows were sold in China.  One of the biggest, if not the biggest reason is piracy.

Pirated copies of Windows Vista are selling for just $1 all over the streets of China, and because of that, there’s no reason for people to purchase it for full price.  Microsoft had hoped that they had dealt with this issue before the launch of Vista by spending millions of dollars advertising about piracy, and the new operating system.Part of their advertising campaign was to place the largest Vista ad ever on the Jim Mao Tower, which reaches 421 meters tall in Shanghai. Clearly it didn’t work.

So, is it possible for Microsoft to increase their users by one billion in just eight years?

Source: Information Week

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Yesterday’s announcement by Nokia that it’s switching to Windows Phone 7 as its primary smartphone platform has already had, and will continue to have, great repercussions for plenty of parties besides the Finnish company and its new best bud Microsoft. One of the biggest effects of that deal was that Nokia now no longer considers MeeGo — the open-source OS it was co-developing with Intel — an item of priority, classifying it as a “learning project.” No prizes for guessing Intel’s nowhere near happy about that, but would you have also guessed Nokia kept Chipzilla in the dark about its new direction until the day it announced it to the world? Such is the word from TechCrunch‘s well placed sources, who also say that Nokia dedicated only a three-man external team to the development of UI customizations for MeeGo. Not exactly the hugest investment in the world, we’d say, and when you consider Nokia and Microsoft already have concept devices drawn up, you’ve got to think plans to abandon MeeGo as a sincere flagship strategy were materializing in Espoo a long time before this event. It would probably have been nice to tell Intel, though, just to be classy. Hit the source link for more detail, including confirmation that Nokia’s N9-00, its first planned MeeGo device, was canned — apparently due to complaints from operators about its hinge.

Nokia’s marginalization of MeeGo came as a surprise to Intel originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 12 Feb 2011 15:37:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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