Microsoft launch new Windows Phone 7 smartphone to compete with Apple’s iPhone
The company wants its new operating system, Windows Phone 7, to put its mobile business back in the running against not just Apple, but also Google and others.

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Speculation about Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer is constant. But who could replace him?

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Looks like Microsoft is trying to clear the path for their upcoming Windows 7 Phone as they are going after Motorola’s DROID series of phones which, of course, run Google’s Android mobile operating system.  Some of the details in the lawsuit regard Motorola’s code implementation of synchronizing email, contacts, and calendars, including the way meetings are scheduled.  It also covers the way battery level and signal strength notify applications.

In Microsoft’s defense, Motorola did license some of their mobile technology from 2003 to 2007 and supposedly failed to renew the license, yet continued to use it.  Still, it is unfortunate that the big boys can’t share the space in the handset market.  Microsoft has already called out Android as not really being “free”, stating that there is a lot of toe-stepping on patent infringement with the open source operating system.

Such accusations hold merit as there is already a case of Apple vs. HTC regarding the “slide to unlock” feature.  It looks like future Android manufacturers will need to tread more carefully as the smartphone market gets more crowded.

View full post on Google Android News Android Forums

Ah just what today needed, news of yet another lawsuit flung in the direction Android and its manufacturing partners. This time it’s Microsoft, not at all new to the patent-mincing game, looking in Motorola’s direction for alleged infringement of nine patents in their Android devices. Microsoft is calling to task processes for “synchronizing email, calendars and contacts, scheduling meetings, and notifying applications of changes in signal strength and battery power,” claiming Moto’s handling of such procedures is in violation of MS’s intellectual property.

While there is a pretty good chance this one will reach an out-of-court settlement, it could also fall into the other column of long, drawn out legal battles. Oh well, guess that’s the route you need to take when you spend your time releasing things like the Microsoft Kin.

Microsoft Files Patent Infringement Action Against Motorola

REDMOND, Wash. – Oct. 1, 2010 – Microsoft Corp. today filed a patent infringement action against Motorola, Inc. and issued the following statement from Horacio Gutierrez, corporate vice president and deputy general counsel of Intellectual Property and Licensing:

“Microsoft filed an action today in the International Trade Commission and in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington against Motorola, Inc. for infringement of nine Microsoft patents by Motorola’s Android-based smartphones. The patents at issue relate to a range of functionality embodied in Motorola’s Android smartphone devices that are essential to the smartphone user experience, including synchronizing email, calendars and contacts, scheduling meetings, and notifying applications of changes in signal strength and battery power.

We have a responsibility to our customers, partners, and shareholders to safeguard the billions of dollars we invest each year in bringing innovative software products and services to market. Motorola needs to stop its infringement of our patented inventions in its Android smartphones.”

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Oh Microsoft, you so crazy.  Tivanka Ellawala, a Microsoft financial officer, recently spoke to MarketWatch regarding the “truth” about Android. Ellawala went on to say that, although the platform itself is free to manufacturers, it is full of spooky patent infringements that could bring about lawsuits and zombie attacks to manufacturers who choose to deploy it.

One recent lawsuit brought on by Apple against HTC does bring these points into question, and despite the outcome, it can be argued that using Android has cost HTC some coin in legal fees (although this dwarfs the revenue brought in by selling Android powered devices).

However, with Android blowing past Windows Mobile in the smartphone market share and showing no signs of slowing down, Microsoft better hope that Windows Phone 7 is up to the challenge, or they will just have to continue sitting on the sidelines and come up with more ways to complain about Android.

View full post on Google Android News Android Forums

As part of the launch event to show off the new Internet Explorer 9 beta, Microsoft also demoed a new version of its Bing search engine that uses HTML5 and CSS 3 to spice up Bing’s homepage and search results.

During the demo, Bing developers showed off a version of the search engine that uses the HTML5’s video tag to take Bing’s well-known background images a step further, replacing the static image with a video of waves crashing on the beach. Another new feature, using the Canvas element, will allow you to zoom around a very large image.

The revamped version of Bing will launch in October. Microsoft is still tweaking some of the code, but its demo at the launch event was already complete enough to impress.

Other tricks up Bing’s sleeve include some fancy transitions between search types — nice sliding and fading transitions between tabs (presumably done using CSS 3 transitions) — and other visual touches, like animated backgrounds for weather forecasts and auto-expanding search results.

Some of Bing’s coming enhancements have been in the works for quite a while. Microsoft previously demoed some of the background effects and other visual touches at Apple’s WWDC in June 2010.

Beyond the eye candy, Bing also has one pretty cool new feature — the ability to see slideshows from image search results. And here’s the best part of the new slideshow: it replaces Bing’s current Silverlight-based slideshow with an HTML5/CSS3-based version. Yes, Microsoft has ditched its own proprietary technology for something using open, standards-based technology.

Some of what’s in the video can be a little confusing. For example, why Microsoft thinks it needs “HTML5″ to keep Bing’s tabs at the top of the screen when in fact the CSS rule position:fixed has been widely supported for nearly ten years now is unclear.

But despite the marketing-speak tendency to refer to everything in the new Bing as HTML5 — which Apple and Google are also both occasionally guilty of — both the Bing and IE9 teams seem genuinely enthused about the possibilities of HTML5.

In theory, all of Bing’s new features should work in any modern web browser, not just the coming Internet Explorer 9. However, given the continual references to “leveraging the power of IE 9’s hardware acceleration,” it’s highly possible the new Bing may be a bit slower in Safari and Chrome, which, thus far, lack the depth of hardware acceleration found in the Firefox 4 and IE9 beta releases.

Microsoft says to expect the Bing changes “in about a month.”

See Also:

• Microsoft Adds OpenStreetMap Layer to Bing Maps
• Bing Is in Your Facebook, Indexing Your Status
• Internet Explorer 9 Beta Drops. It’s Lean, Fast and Modern

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Nokia appoints Microsoft executive as new CEO
Nokia’s new chief executive officer, Stephen Elop (right), giving a speech during a press conference in Espoo, Finland, yesterday. Photo: Antti Aimo-Koivisto/AFP

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Nokia dumps CEO, taps Microsoft exec
Nokia, the world’s top cellphone maker, brought in Microsoft’s Stephen Elop to replace its embattled chief executive and lead a renewed effort to compete in the smartphone market. Microsoft – Nokia – Stephen Elop – Smartphone – Business

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Nokia dumps CEO, taps Microsoft exec
Nokia, the world’s top cellphone maker, brought in Microsoft’s Stephen Elop to replace its embattled chief executive and lead a renewed effort to compete in the smartphone market. Microsoft – Nokia – Stephen Elop – Smartphone – Business

Read more on MSNBC

Nokia dumps CEO, taps Microsoft exec
Nokia, the world’s top cellphone maker, brought in Microsoft’s Stephen Elop to replace its embattled chief executive and lead a renewed effort to compete in the smartphone market. Microsoft – Nokia – Stephen Elop – Smartphone – Business

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Nokia’s Kallasvuo replaced by Microsoft exec
Nokia Corp. will replace CEO Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo with top Microsoft executive Stephen Elop as the world’s largest mobile phone maker struggles to keep pace with smaller and more innovative rivals, particularly in the smartphone market.

Read more on AP via Yahoo! News

Nokia chooses Canadian Microsoft exec to replace its CEO
Nokia Corp. is replacing chief executive Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo with Microsoft executive Stephen Elop as the world’s top maker of mobile phones aims to regain lost ground in the fiercely competitive smartphone market.

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Nokia brings in Microsoft exec to replace CEO
Nokia has hired Stephen Elop, a Canadian Microsoft executive with Silicon Valley credentials, to replace its embattled chief executive and renew its drive to compete with Apple.

Read more on Reuters via Yahoo! News

Nokia CEO Ousted, Replaced by Microsoft Exec Stephen Elop
Nokia CEO Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo will step down and be replaced by Microsoft executive Stephen Elop, Nokia announced Friday.

Read more on PC Magazine via Yahoo! News

Nokia dumps CEO, turns to Microsoft exec
Nokia Corp. is replacing CEO Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo with Microsoft executive Stephen Elop as the world’s top maker of mobile phones aims to regain lost ground in the fiercely competitive smart phone market.

Read more on AP via Yahoo! News

Nokia Turns to Microsoft for New Chief
Nokia said it had appointed Stephen Elop, a Canadian who has run Microsoft’s largest division, to replace Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo, a 30-year Nokia veteran.

Read more on New York Times

Nokia Replaces CEO With Microsoft Exec
Nokia replaces CEO with Microsoft exec

Read more on Forbes

Nokia Appoints Elop From Microsoft to Become New Chief Executive Officer
Nokia OYJ named Stephen Elop, the head of Microsoft Corp.’s Business division, as its new Chief Executive Officer effective Sept. 21.

Read more on Bloomberg

You can now turn on a special layer in Bing Maps that displays maps from OpenStreetMap, Microsoft has announced.

OpenStreetMap is an open source mapping project that keeps an editable map of the entire globe. Anyone can make edits to the map — it’s been nicknamed the “Wikipedia of maps.” The open source model has proven especially effective in regions of the developing world where very little solid map data exists, and in areas where highly detailed, editable maps are critical for natural-disaster response efforts, like the recent Haiti earthquake.

Microsoft’s adoption of the open source mapping project follows a similar move by MapQuest, which began adding OSM layers last month.

To run layers in Bing Maps, you’ll need the latest version of Microsoft Silverlight and a supported browser. It doesn’t work properly in Google Chrome (at least on the Mac), but IE8, Firefox and Safari had no problems. If you’re using the Ajax controls to view Bing Maps (instead of Silverlight), then you won’t be able to see the OpenStreetMaps layer, but Microsoft says this is something that may make its way into the non-Silverlight version eventually.

Use the map view switcher at the bottom to change layers.

To add OpenStreetMaps to your Bing, go to the App Gallery. Look for the new OpenStreetMaps app in the gallery. Click on it, and your alternative OpenStreetMaps view should launch within Bing Maps.

You can switch back to any of the other standard views in Bing Maps by clicking on the layer control at the bottom of the map window. You’ll notice Bing Maps is using the Mapnik build of OpenStreetMaps for its map layer. You can switch back and forth between the OSM layer and any of the other standard Bing maps layers using the same control.

Microsoft has been quickly adding some innovative features to Bing, especially on its Maps website. In June, Bing Maps added the ability to browse parts of the world in 3-D, and in February it demonstrated indoor panorama views and location-specific videos that are accessible within Bing’s street-side imagery.

Microsoft also ran its King of Bing maps challenge for developers last month, asking them to create innovative apps for the mapping platform. For the contest, a developer named Ricky Brundritt built an app for Bing Maps that estimates your taxi fare within most major U.S. cities.

However, Bing’s reliance on Microsoft’s proprietary Silverlight technology to power these innovations is seen by some as an alienating factor — and an unnecessary one at that, since other mapping platforms like Google Maps accomplish much of the same functionality using JavaScript and other web standards. This is especially important on mobile devices, where the most popular browsers don’t allow for plug-ins like SIlverlight.

Still, it’s heartening to see Bing adding to the momentum OpenStreetMaps is currently enjoying. Anyone can edit the OSM maps, and now that the project is getting some attention — thanks mostly to its efforts in Haiti — edits are coming in more quickly.

According to the latest stats, the project has over a quarter of a million participants and over 1.8 billion uploaded GPS points. Dedicated users are getting creative and finding ways to add even more detail to the existing maps by doing offbeat things like tagging wheelchair ramps, mailboxes and trees in their neighborhoods.

Taxi Fare Calculator link courtesy Mashable

See Also:

• MapQuest U.K Teams Up With OpenStreetMap
• Google Maps Adds More Detail, Takes a Cue From OpenStreetMap
• Disaster Relief 2.0: Tech Tools Help Focus Haiti Resources
• Bing Maps Takes Panoramas Indoors

View full post on Webmonkey

Microsoft says it will offer two versions of the 2011 edition of its productivity suite — Microsoft Office for Mac Home and Student 2011 and Microsoft Office for Mac Home and Business 2011 — priced at $119 and $199, respectively. The new suite arrives in late October.

View full post on Macworld

Live Mail is Hotmail’s companion application, and it gives you many more tools than its web-based sibling.

Hotmail can aggregate multiple email accounts. Live Mail can do that too (now including Exchange), but it also gives you one place for managing multiple online calendars, RSS feeds, contacts and newsgroups.

If you’re used to Outlook Express, Live Mail can replace it, and do a lot more as well. For example, email is the most common way of sharing photos. Live Mail works with this by making images attached to email appear in a filmstrip at the top of the message. When you send photos, they are automatically arranged into an album on SkyDrive.

Unlike Hotmail, Live Mail doesn’t let you change the date when albums expire, but you do get other options, including the ability to change the file size, make images only available to the people you email and complete very basic tweaks to images before sending.

Productive changes

The new ribbon interface is particularly useful in this app, making the options for writing email easy to find.

Contacts and calendar open in the main window, but you can type in events and to-do items in the calendar within the Mail view. This is extremely useful, especially after you’ve been using it for a few days.

You can choose which of the eleven Quick Views you see in the folder pane. Outlook Express-style views and filters remain, but Quick Views are much more useful for finding the mail you need to deal with.

The new conversation view is clear and simple – messages in a thread are nested and you can expand or collapse them at will with a single click.

Live Mail has a remarkable amount of functionality packed into a neat and friendly interface. There are some oddities, but overall this is one of the best mail apps available out there, especially for Hotmail users.

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Despite the rise of social networking, instant messaging tools still count for much of the time we spend online. We like talking to people, and social network status updates give us cues and context for our conversations.

So why not bring the two together? That’s the rationale behind the new version of Live Messenger.

The Wave 4 version of Messenger is a very different piece of software from earlier versions. Not only does it take up a lot more screen real estate, its new larger view is designed to draw in much more social-network information from sites like Facebook and MySpace.

It’s an interesting alternative to the status streams of the social websites, or tools like Seesmic and Tweetdeck, featuring a well-designed layout that shows selected comments as well as status messages.

Messenger lets you choose social network favourites, giving you the option of seeing updates just from family and friends rather than the person you met at a trade show and thought might be a useful contact.

If it all gets too much then there’s an option to quickly switch to a compact view, with the familiar list of contacts.

Chat harder

There are plenty of little tweaks in Live Messenger, including tabbed conversations and tools for quickly adding photos. Video chat gets an update too, with offline video messaging and support for HD cameras.

There’s also improved integration with other Windows applications, with Live Messenger lighting up as an additional social network inside Outlook 2010 – so you can see if contacts are online before sending emails, or alternatively drop them an IM.

We weren’t sure about the new Messenger at first, but it’s grown on us. It does take up a lot more screen, but it also gives us a quick overview of just what’s going on with friends.

Our only real quibble is that the advertising blocks are perhaps a little too large, but after a while they’re easy to ignore.

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This isn’t the first time that Microsoft has tried creating a syncing service. You may remember the old Live Sync, a FolderShare-based synchronisation service that was finally replaced by Live Mesh.

As for Live Mesh, it’s still around, letting you keep folders synced across several PCs and mobile devices using cloud services and peer-to-peer exchanges.

You’ll find the new Live Sync very familiar. You can select folders to be synchronised between PCs and up to 23GB of SkyDrive storage in the cloud.

PC-to-PC sync uses a peer-to-peer protocol, allowing you to sync far more than the 2GB cloud storage limit. We would recommend just using Live Sync’s PC-to-PC tools for passing files between network-connected PCs, and then using SkyDrive for any files you want to make sure you can access anywhere.

One thing to note though – unlike Live Mesh, there’s no indication in Explorer if you’ve shared files. You’ll only be able to see which folders you’ve shared in the Live Sync client, making it easy to misread your syncing settings.

Cloud bursting

Setting up synchronisation is easy. Just pick the folder you want to synchronise and the PC where you want it to go, and files will start flowing, with the destination folder automatically created on the target PC.

You can also use the cloud-based SkyDrive service to share synchronised folders with family, friends or colleagues. It’s a simple way of building collaborative workspaces that ensure everyone has the same files, whether you’re planning a wedding or writing a sales proposal.

One useful new feature simplifies something many Live Mesh users had to set up by hand. Live Sync gives you a quick way of synchronising key Office settings (including templates, signatures and custom dictionaries) and Internet Explorer favourites. If you’ve ever had the pleasure of moving settings between PCs, you’ll certainly find these new features a big help.

You’re not limited to Windows, either; there’s a Mac OS client out now for Live Sync, as well as the possibility of extra mobile clients in the future.

Remote view

Live Sync isn’t just for transferring files. It also gives you a way of getting to a PC desktop from anywhere on the internet. Click the ‘Remote’ link on the desktop client to get access to a shared PC desktop, or use the connect option from http://devices.live.com.

Both give you the same remote desktop view, with full control of the remote PC. There’s some image degradation, with fonts looking jagged, so don’t expect a full fidelity desktop. You do get the option of scaling the image, though, so if you’re on a small screen netbook you can get access to the full desktop of a hefty desktop PC.

The web option is the most interesting, as it brings your remote PCs right into the browser. You will need to use Internet Explorer for a remote connection over the web, as the control needed is only supported in 32-bit versions of IE6 or later.

We also recommend dropping down to Aero Basic for a speedier connection, as the browser desktop connection is a little slow, even over a local network.

With more and more people using more than one PC, Live Sync looks likely to become an important tool for making sure that all your files are just where you want them – no matter which machine you’re using.

The addition of optional cloud storage with SkyDrive also means it doesn’t even have to be your own machine. It’s just a pity that some features didn’t make the transition from Mesh to Sync.

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Everyone carries digital cameras, but not everyone’s discovered the importance of editing and managing the hundreds of pictures they can hold. That’s where Live Photo Gallery comes in, giving you a one-stop shop for managing, editing and uploading.

It lets you do some very impressive tricks indeed, especially for a free download. Many of the Wave 4 features are familiar from the earlier Essentials releases (and from the original Vista Windows Gallery), with the new version gaining a new look and feel thanks to the Windows 7 iteration of Microsoft’s ribbon user interface.

Every section has seen a massive improvement, however, starting with management. Managing images is all about search, and while images aren’t the easiest of things to index, Microsoft has made it a lot easier to add captions and tags to them.

One option lets you quickly geo-tag pictures, typing the place name to add where you took the picture to the image metadata (although sadly not in a way that’s supported by popular photo-sharing site Flickr).

There’s a big improvement to the way Live Photo Gallery tags people too, with a new face-detection tool.

Ready and correct

The image-editing features are the most exciting part of the app. To start with, most of the basic editing features are available in the gallery itself. You can auto-correct, tweak colours and exposure and apply basic image effects without opening images, something that speeds up basic image processing workflow.

Once you open an image and move to the Edit tab, you’ll find more image-processing tools, including red eye removal and a Retouch tool that helps to remove blemishes. Unlike other retouch tools, this isn’t a healing brush and so it doesn’t need you to create an accurate outline around what you want to remove. All you need to do is drag a rectangle around the area you want to change, and let Live Photo Gallery do the rest.

Photo Fuse is another of the brand-new features in this version. If you’ve taken several photos of a group of people only to find that someone’s blinking in each one, you can use this to collect all the open eyes and bring them into one final version.

Select the images and Live Photo Gallery will align them, giving you one base image to work with. Once you’ve selected the area to edit (typically a head) you’ll be shown the alternative content from the other images. You can then drop the section of image you want into place.

Photo Fuse capably blends the images, leaving you with the photo you wanted to take in the first place. It’s a surprisingly useful tool and one that gives you effective results for very little effort.

One feature of Live Photo Gallery that often gets overlooked is its ability to launch other image editing tools, like Photosynth and Microsoft Research’s advanced image stitching and collage tools. Use the ‘More Tools’ option in the Create tab to download plug-ins, launch installed applications and open the currently selected images in any other image-editing tools you might have installed on your PC.

Microsoft has also added new upload plug-ins, with support for sharing images on Facebook and videos on YouTube, as well as storing files on its own Windows Live SkyDrive service. The upload tools have had a makeover, so it’s now easier to add tags and deliver images to the right online groups and galleries.

Despite its powerful new image editing tools, Live Photo Gallery isn’t a replacement for high-end software like Adobe’s Lightroom and Photoshop. What it is, however, is a replacement for budget image cataloguing and-editing tools like Photoshop Elements and Corel’s Paint Shop Photo Express.

It does the basics well, and at that most compelling of price points: free.

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