Windows Phone 7 - Nokia Lumia 900

Nokia and Microsoft’s partnership has finally started to show some results with the release of the Nokia Lumia 800 and Lumia 710, but the sales of the two handsets were nowhere near the predictions of both companies or the various research companies for that matter.

They are more in line with the predictions of ordinary users, who don’t really see the point in getting a Windows Phone 7 smartphone over the iPhone or an Android smartphone, especially when the latter are more powerful and have more features.

Still, things can still change, and Nokia has entered the New Year with a new phone – the Lumia 900, which is basically an updated version of the Lumia 800, kind of like the iPhone 4S was to the iPhone 4, only with less new features under the hood.

The new smartphone has the same overall design and shape as its predecessor, with the same unique unibody polycarbonate housing, which is very sturdy (surprisingly so for plastic, actually) and doesn’t interfere with any signals at all, leading to a better cell tower, Wifi, Bluetooth and NFC reception compared to other metal-frame phones on the market like the iPhone 4S or Droid RAZR.

The front is adorned by a single sheet of Corning Gorilla glass (still the old iteration – not the newer, more durable version demonstrated at CES), under which you can find the display and three touch navigation buttons for Windows Phone 7.

The screen has been upgraded, as well – it is now a large 4.3 inch unit, but the resolution still remains at the good old 800×480 pixels. Thanks to the ClearBlack AMOLED manufacturing technology, however, the picture quality is still at a very high level, especially compared to all the LCD displays out there – the black levels really stand out, as well.

Not a lot has changed on the inside of the device, which is kind of a bad thing, since all the other manufacturer’s flagship phones are now touting HD displays, ultra-fast dual core processors, gigabytes of RAM and more. Nope, the Lumia 900 plays the game just like most of Nokia’s Symbian phones did – using the old hardware until it’s almost obsolete – this may not pan out so well for them this time.

The processor in the Lumia 900 is the same 1.4 GHz single core that powered the Lumia 800, and it’s still aided by 512 MB of RAM and 16 GB of internal storage space with no option for expansion. The Adreno 205 graphics adapter is also getting a bit slow for all the new games that come out – an upgrade to the newer Adreno 220 would’ve been great, but alas.

Read more

Windows Phone 7

2012 may prove to be a breakout year for Windows Phone 7: The analyst firm Ovum says it will be the fastest-growing smartphone OS in 2012 and will draw a surge of developer interest.

It’s the latest in a series of reports that say Windows Phone 7 will eventually become a success.

Ovum’s Telecoms In 2011 report predicts that Windows Phone 7 will be the fastest-growing smartphone OS. According to the site V3.co.uk, Ovum analyst Tony Cripps said the smartphone platform will grow quickly because of its “unique and very desirable take on the smartphone user interface”. He added,

“Microsoft is finally managing to harness the evident design and user experience nous of its Xbox, Zune and Windows Live teams to create a proposition that is more than the sum of its parts.”

Of course, given that Windows Phone 7 has a miniscule market share, it’s easy for it to be the fastest-growing smartphone OS; compared to the iPhone and Android phones, not many Windows Phone 7 devices have to sell to show a growth surge in terms of percentages.

Read more

Bill Veghte

Hewlett-Packard, this week named a new chief strategy officer: Bill Veghte, the current executive vice president of HP Software and the former senior vice president of Microsoft’s Windows business.

“As chief strategy officer, Veghte will be responsible for keeping HP on the cutting edge of innovation,” HP said in its announcement on Tuesday. “He will work with HP’s senior business and technology leaders to help define the IT industry’s future and make certain HP continues to lead the way.”

Veghte will retain his current title on top of his chief strategy officer role. Some of his new responsibilities will be overseeing HP’s cloud efforts — which include a major push into the public cloud — and the webOS mobile platform.

Veghte’s promotion comes in the wake of a tumultuous period for HP. In August 2011, the company surprised the tech industry by announcing that it was considering a spinoff of its PC business and the discontinuation of its webOS-based devices.

A month later, the company fired CEO Leo Apotheker less than a year after appointing him, and named Meg Whitman as his successor. Whitman subsequently announced that HP will, in fact, keep its PC business and that it plans to contribute webOS to the open source community.

Read More

web browser grand prix

Every so often, Tom’s Hardware runs what it calls a “Web Browser Grand Prix,” putting the latest browsers through a battery of grueling benchmarks.

The last throwdown took place in August, and was notable for its inclusion of a “hackintosh” computer, except that wasn’t enough for Mac-heads, who worried the results might be biased for lack of an authentic Mac in the mix.

Until today: TH just published one of its multipage, exhaustive benchmark features, pitting Chrome 16, Firefox 9, Internet Explorer 9, Opera 11 and Safari 5 against each other. The test machine? An 11-inch MacBook Air with a 1.8GHz Intel Core i7 processor running OS X Lion and Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit (via Apple’s Boot Camp) — about as apples-to-apples as you’ll get in cross-platform Mac/Windows testing.

The results are fascinating if you have time to comb through them, derived from what TH calls “core, observation, dated, and quarantine” tests, each keyed and weighted to reflect TH’s experience with the benchmarks and how trustworthy their results are.

The tests consist of routine activities, ranging from startup times and cached or uncached page loads to each browser’s chops running stuff like Java, Silverlight, Flash and HTML5.

And the winners: On Windows 7, Firefox 9 (Safari took last place) and on OS X, Safari 5 (Firefox took last place). But here’s the interesting bound-to-be-contentious part — the overall winner was Firefox 9 on Windows 7.

Read more: 

RIM MS Nokia

The idea has been kicked around for at least five years. Days after the iPhone’s introduction in January 2007, Seeking Alpha suggested that the Xbox maker ought to buy RIM in order to build an XPhone. In retrospect, this would have saved both companies a lot of grief.

It’s early 2007 and the BlackBerry maker is riding high. With its Microsoft Exchange integration; a solid Pim (personal information manager) that neatly combines mail, calendar, and contacts; and the secure BlackBerry Messenger network, the “CrackBerry” is rightly perceived as the best smartphone on the market.

I love my BlackBerry and once I manage to get a hosted Exchange account for the family, I show my ungeeky spouse the ease of over-the-air (OTA) synching between a PC and the BlackBerry. “No cable?” No cable. She promptly ditches her Palm device. One by one, our adult children follow suit. For a brief time, we are a BlackBerry family.

But the BlackBerry’s success blinds RIM executives. They don’t see – or refuse to believe – that the iPhone poses a threat to their dominance. A little later, Android comes on the scene. Apple and Google deploy technically superior software platforms that, by comparison, expose the BlackBerry’s weaker underpinnings.

In 2010, RIM acquires the QNX operating system in an effort to rebuild its software foundations, but it’s too late. The company has lost market share and shareholders see RIM squander 75% of its market cap.

Now, imagine: on the heels of the iPhone introduction in 2007, Microsoft acquires RIM and quickly proceeds to do what they’ve only now accomplished with Windows Phone 7 – they ditch the past and build a modern system. This would have saved Microsoft a lot of time and RIM shareholders lots of money.

Instead, Microsoft mocks the iPhone and brags that the venerable (to be polite) Windows Mobile will own 40% of the market by 2012.

More from the Guardian

Microsoft ballmer

Microsoft has announced that they have sold over 525 million licenses of Windows 7 since its introduction in October 2009.

The figure was made public in Microsoft’s Q2 2012 earnings report, a quarter where the Windows Division posted a six percent decline from the prior period.

Windows 7 celebrated its first birthday with 240 million in sales, and the operating system shows no sign of slowing down.

Windows 8, the subsequent operating system is expected to hit Beta status in February of 2012.

Windows 7 Dropping Sales

Microsoft is seeing sales of its Windows 7 operating system slip and has lowered its overall expectations for the year.

The Windows division posted revenues of $4.74bn (£3.01bn), a 6% decline from the prior period. Overall, the company quarterly revenue of $20.89bn (£13.5bn) for the quarter ended December 31, 2011, a 5% increase from the prior year. However, its net income remained flat at $6.62bn (£4.3 billion), down slightly from the 6.63bn (£4.28 billion) a year ago.

The company also announced it is revising its guidance for the year downwards, to $28.5-28.9bn (£18.4-18.7) for the year ended June 2012.

CEO Steve Ballmer said he was happy with the results leading into ‘a launch year that will accelerate many of our key products and services.’

“Coming out of the Consumer Electronics Show, we’re seeing very positive reviews for our new phones and PCs, and a strong response to our new Metro style design that will unify consumer experiences across our phones, PCs, tablets, and television in 2012.”

Microsoft has sold over 525 million Windows 7 licenses since launch, and 175 million licenses in the September to December quarter.

The operating system remains Microsoft’s best selling system ever. By comparison, Windows XP sold 210m copies in two and half years. After 18 months, Vista had sold 180m licenses (no further data is available, and Vista is still officially supported by Microsoft) despite being considered a flop.

Check out more from CBRonline here

Best 6 Windows Laptops

Great article from a UK website called Expertreviews.

They go over the top 6 Windows Laptops that they recommend.

The 6 are:

• Asus ZenBook UX31
• Samsung Series 7 Chronos
• Acer Aspire S3
• Dell Inspiron 15R
• Acer Aspire 5749
• Lenovo Ideapad S205

It’s a good article and you can check it out here

Welcome to our Windows 7 tech support section.

We get tons of questions every day from Windows Vista and Windows 7 users.

They have interesting and valid questions about all sorts of Windows 7 related questions.

These are just a few examples below…

Obviously, we aren’t able to answer every Windows 7 question on this website  and even though we have a Windows 7 questions section, we felt that it was really important to try and provide Windows 7 technical support for our visitors.

To that end, we have recently partnered with Justanswer.com, which allows you to ask questions via email to one of their thousands of computer experts.

Justanswer.com has been featured on a lot of prominent sites on the web and they have a great track record of being able to provide affordable and timely computer support.

How does Justanswer’s service work? It’s real simple.

1. Ask a question.
   Enter your question, and create a user account.
2. Name your price.
   You can pay up front or wait until an Expert answers. Prepaid questions are typically answered faster.
3. An Expert answers, often within minutes, usually within a few hours.
   JustAnswer will send an e-mail notifying you of any answer or request for information from an Expert.
4. Accept the answer.
   If you got great service, consider adding a bonus. Your acceptance pays the Expert and indicates you�re happy with your answer.

Tip: Click here to run a free scan for common PC errors

Microsoft officially unveiled Windows Phone 7 during Mobile World Congress 2010 (February 15) in Barcelona and revealed additional details at MIX 2010. Microsoft released a technical preview version of Windows Phone 7 on 18 July 2010.

The completely new user interface (UI), named “Metro”, looks very similar to that of the Zune HD. The home screen (called the “Start screen”) is made up of “tiles”, which by default are links to important features, such as phone, music and videos, email, office, and contacts.

The User can customize the tiles, delete them, or add their own – by pinning an application (or “experience”), media item, favorite contact, or almost anything to the Start screen, it becomes a tile.

Tiles are dynamic and update in real time. Tile contents are organized via “hubs” which combine both local and online content. Windows Phone 7 will have a more friendly touchscreen UI than previous Windows Mobile devices by using multitouch technology.

Integration with popular social networks, such as Twitter, Facebook, and Windows Live will be included. Windows Phone 7 also features integration with Xbox Live, Zune, and Bing services.

Adobe has announced that Flash 10.1 will be released for Windows Phone 7 within months after launch. He also stated that the browser is “halfway between IE7 and IE8 rendering engine.” Its web browser will be a modified version of Internet Explorer 7, rather than being based on the current IE8.

Microsoft’s hardware requirements stipulate that every handset must have a dedicated hardwired ‘Bing Button’ on the front panel. Bing will be the only default search engine on Windows Phone 7 handsets. Though users cannot change the default to a different search engine, Microsoft said it would allow other search companies to build an app for Windows Phone 7 if they wished.

WP7 can also search Bing by voice using the TellME, this can be activated by clicking and holding the Windows Button. There is no global search in Windows Phone 7, though hitting the search button while an app is loaded will result in local search in applications that choose to utilize this function.
Software updates

Microsoft has highlighted its intention to make Windows Phone 7 into an advertising platform. Microsoft’s General Manager for Strategy and Business Development, Kostas Mallios, said that Windows Phone 7 will be an “ad-serving machine”, pushing advertising and brand related content to the user.

The platform will feature advertising tiles near applications, and a sliding box known as Toast, which will bring updating advertising notifications. Mallios said that Windows Phone 7 will be able to “preserve the brand experience by going directly from the web site right to the application”, and that Windows Phone 7 “enables advertisers to connect with consumers over time”.

Technology publication The Register said that Microsoft’s Toast is a radical departure from iAd and Google’s web ads, in that it will push advertisements to Windows Phone 7 users even when there are no browsers or applications running.

Phones with Windows Phone 7 OS should start to hit the stores this (2010) Christmas season.