Monthly Archives: February 2010

Windows Phone 7 Series : Back with Vengeance

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Windows 7 lived upto expectations and proved the Microsoft has learn form its mistakes (in this case, the biggest ofcourse – WIndows Vista) and this time it’s true once again.

Microsoft’s Windows Mobile 6.5 was just a big mess and they knew it that something better was surely needed, especially after a great outcry of developers and consumers. Growing competition from competitors like Apple could have also been a force driving them to innovation. Whatever the reason maybe, Microsoft has proved it that they are the winners with Windows Phone 7 Series.

They have redesigned the whole concept of a Phone OS which is a new concept to your phones which is 100% original and you wouldn’t have experienced it (unless you own a Zune). Layouts, Motion, Transitions, Text Fonts, Hardware integrations and nearly everything your OS has, is re-engineered with Phone 7.

In a crowded market filled with phones that look the same and do the same things, I challenged the team to deliver a different kind of mobile experience. Windows Phone 7 Series marks a turning point toward phones that truly reflect the speed of people’s lives and their need to connect to other people and all kinds of seamless experiences.

Steve Ballmer boasted highly of the new OS and why shouldn’t he? It’s really worth all our wait! One thing most people hate about iPhone OS is the Start Screen, it just shows you icons and icons. Phone 7 revolutionizes it with Live Tiles. This new feature grabs real time content from the web, for example all you friends photos and shows it up on your home screen on a tile and you can have any number of tiles (as long as they fit in the screen).

Window’s introduces Hubs. These bring together bring all the data from the internet, application and services together into one and most useful mashup.

  • People – This hub is like contacts on your Phone. This time, it snatches all their activity on Social Networks and Photos together and puts them here. It also provides a centralized location to post updates to Facebook.
  • Pictures – Social Networks and your Videos and Pictures now go hand in hand! Easily sync them.
  • Music + Video – If you’ve used a Zune you would be used to this. If not this is seriously fun man! This draws content from your computer and you can use Zune Desktop Software too, use online services or listen to Radio.
  • Games – As we had smelled it earlier, it’s here. Windows Live comes to Windows phone. Now you can play Xbox live games on your phone, use Spotlight feed and see a gamer’s avatar, Achievements and gamer profile.
  • Marketplace – The Store for Applications and Games.
  • Office – This feature makes the phone ideal to be held by every business man. Office, Outlook Mobile, OneNote and SharePoint Workspace are all here making it easier than ever to read, edit and share documents!

Now there’s something which is going to hurt Google. It’s Bing which has got tight integration with Phone 7. Search anything, anywhere amidst anything without the need of copy pasting, just Bing! Email and browsing support multi touch capabilities.


Microsoft says that work with partners is currently on and phones with Phone 7 support are being developed and will hit the stores by holiday season later this year! Overall, the interface is a huge victory for Microsoft. All hail Microsoft! Check out their official blog post here.

Google Buzz to Buzz up your social networking experience online

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Google rules all the market except one, Social Networking. They did try to tap it using Orkut which worked out only in Brazil and India and few other parts of the world. Facebook gained 400 Million users this week which proves Social Networking is a massive market and Google does not want to leave it.

There they come. No, not with a new product, but with new features! It’s Google Buzz that is making all the buzz in the town. Google buzz is a new Social Addon to Google’s existing product Gmail which is used by masses.

I would term it a very smart move, and the biggest reason being that Google doesn’t need a new user base to make up for the social network, they already have the Gmail users. So existing users can get into the network. Another great concept of Google Buzz is that it’s directly from the Inbox so no hazzles of logging into seperate websites. Just log into Gmail and you are there!

Social Web is huge and every second there is something or the other to know. Too many tweets, messages would make one go haywire. Google claims that it will cure all the problems, or perhaps the social disease and sort it the right way. Google Buzz will arrange all the social happenings in the timeline systematically and the best feature is that you can integrate it with service like Twitter, Picasa, Flickr, and Google Reader. (Where’s Facebook?)

Everything here is real time, so no F5 required. Your content can be private or public, as simple as this. Another key feature is the inbox integration of this service. Comment’s are sent into your inbox so you can easily keep track of conversations. This is photo friendly and will show all thumbnails and full screen pictures for service using them.

It’s like a huge timeline with updates from people you follow. You can comment, like and email a reply too. Seems like a mashup of all service around! Google’s timeline aggregater promises that it will include only the stuff you might care about and neglect crappy useless stuff like “brb” messages.

Google Buzz would be surely concentrating on the mobile market too so they are iPhone, Android ready from the beginning. As we said, the location aware internet is on the rise and geo tagging with every post is automatically done with every post. Now this is the complete mashup of all good parts of the best services on the web!

Facebook planning to provide Webmail service with Project Titan

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It’s been up for a while and seems like folks at TechCrunch have partially confirmed it. Facebook could be possibly working on a Web Mail like service which would replace the current messaging system on Facebook.

This would feature a User@facebook.com email, POP and IMAP access and would give users the feature to send non-users a message too. Facebook did revamp it’s current Facebook messaging systems adding feature to search messages and a better interface to interact with the data but that’s not enough.

We all know that, the most preferred mode of communication on the internet is Email and perhaps with Project Titan (Codename for the Facebook webmail project) they hope to replace the current mode and make facebook the central mode of all the communication.

Facebook already has about 400+ Million users and about 175+ Million users who log into the website everyday and penetration into the email market for facebook wouldn’t be much of work and in short time they would be able to capture large audience.

Your current Vanity URLs (facebook.com/VanityUrl) could be your username for the Webmail i.e VanityUrl@facebook.com. Could this be a huge challenge to other Web Mail providers? You never know! Facebook already has made a lot of “impossible’s” possible so this could be it.

Apple turning against Adobe while it seeks cover under Google

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Apple and Adobe are having a kind of coldwar. This all started when Flash was not included in the iPhone OS and now not on the iPad OS too. Recently at a town hall meeting, Apple’s CEO Steve Jobs slammed Adobe and called it lazy.

There have been huge discussions, lengthy blog posts written, tweets all over. Tablets could be the future of browsing and Apple is already a leader in Mobile device manufacturing so it could be a major game player in the future and Adobe knows this fact very well. Apple had skipped flash with the launch of the iPad and perhaps this could be a huge loss to Adobe as they miss a lot of consumers and to consumers as they miss a lot of content.

Apple is not interested in integrating flash in either of it’s platforms (iPhone or iPad) and their CEO in a town hall meeting with their execs said that the future is HTML5. Folks at Adobe did take it seriously and constantly forced on the fact that Flash is installed on about 98% on computers all over the world and 75% of video content is flash and flash covers a huge portion of active content on the Web.

They are announcing Flash for top platforms like Google’s Android, RIM’s Blackberry, Nokia, Palm Pre and these partnerships are a part of the Open Screen Project which has over 50 partners.

For example, the recent Nexus One from Google will rock with a great experience in the browser with Flash Player 10.1.

Adobe can do two things

  • Either get flash integrated or
  • Stop consumers from buying Apple Products

They say they have tried first method whose failure leads them to no other option than the second one. Apple and Google have also grown hostile and as they saw Sharing a common enemy makes way to a great friend, and same applies here. Adobe and Google are taking each other’s cover in their fight against Apple.

Adobe could possible start promoting Google products publicly surely as they’ve got Adobe technology integrated and this would be profitable to both of the companies.

Rumor : The iPad might get a inbuilt camera at launch

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iPad missed the camera. That’s what we know from the announcement for now but Mission Repair doesn’t think so. They received shipment of iPad parts few days back and then they tear it down to show us the possibilities of the camera.

They show us the metal internal frames of the iPad  and they note the “spot” left for a Camera. Next what they try is that they remove a camera (iSight) from a unibody MacBook and try to fit it in the “spot” and to their amazement, it fits exactly!

The Camera fits in the place, the lens also goes into the hole and the LED indicator for the camera fits in too and ambient light sensor hole is just right. Shocking isn’t it? Even i can’t get the fact, and i think this can’t be possible as Apple rarely adds new features after they’ve announced. I think this could be possible in the next version or maybe a device for the corporate world (business ready version) which is more likely to happen after the device enters the market.

Multi Touch finally arrives at Nexus One officially via OTA update

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No more missing multi touch interface on Nexus One, Google just issued a OTA (Over the Air) update for Android running on Nexus one’s which brings in multi touch capabilities to your Web Browser, Gallery and Google Maps. Earlier some third party patches had enabled Multi Touch only in the browser.

This means all those pinch and zoom gestures which iPhone users are much used to have now arrived at Nexus one. Also the Google Maps version is upgraded to 3.4 which brings the talked about “Night Mode” feature to Maps.

Nexus one’s hardware was completely capable of Multi touch gestures but they had not been added initially. Rumors were up that the reason behind Google not adding these features was due to patent infringement matters with Apple as they used the same technology in their popular products, iPhone and iPod touch. Few other market analysts say that it was because Google wanted to track user’s initial reaction to Multi-touch’s absence.

This is an automatic update so it’s not in your hands for the update to start and end but you can surely get the update manually if you don’t have it yet  [Instructions here].

Windows 7 now has 7% of the Operating System market

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From few years from now, when asked what is a computer, few people answered, “Windows”. I could hear those geeks laughing but they were just a minority while most others really did not know what the question meant.

Time’s changed. Windows Xp came which currently has 60%-70% of the Operating System market share and then Windows Vista came which was the biggest flop in the history of Microsoft’s OS lineup. But then Windows 7 arrived which proved to be a game changer and if reports from NetMarketShare are to be believed then Windows 7 has captured 7.50% of the market share within just three months of launch.

This has broken Microsoft’s all past records and Windows 7 has defeated Windows Vista sales by over 280%! One of the biggest reasons why this happened is because most of the computer manufacturers quickly flocked to Windows 7 as it was way better than Windows Vista and not to forget Microsoft does have a huge of army of manufacturers! NetBook sales were also all time high and Windows 7 quickly sailed it’s way to success in the Netbook river too!

Stats after the break. (click to enlarge)

WordPress for Android officially released

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We knew it was coming and here it is. WordPress for Android is now available officially from Automattic, Inc. This Android apps gives you access over to your wordpress blog via a simple user interface which allows you to create, edit and publish – Pages, Posts and comments.

When posting you can add pictures and metadata to your post too and you get a new feature, “Notifications”. You can set up comment notifications to get notified on your phone when you receive new comments. This app is much similar to the iPhone version which works very smoothly.

You can download it from the Android market by searching, “WordPress” or follow this link to download wordpress app for Android if you are surfing directly from your android device.

Google Apps to abandon Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 6 from March 1

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Internet Explorer 6 has been a huge problem for developers from sometime as they (including me!) are having difficult time optimizing websites for a browser made in 2001 for websites developed in recent times as technology has evolved a lot in recent years.

Google will be phasing out browser support for Google Docs suite and the Google Sites editor from the first of march which means that Google will no longer guarantee the working of their products on the older browsers from that date.

Google will use technologies like HTML5 and faster javascript processing which are not supported by older browsers. They will also be showing updates on their website to upgrade browsers if you are using them. The worse part is that 100+ computers at my school use Internet Explorer 6 (I hope to break in and download Firefox soon!) . Support for services like Google Mail and Google Calendar for older browsers will be phased out later this year too.

The few prominent supported browsers would be Internet Explorer 7.0 and above, Firefox 3.0 and above, Google Chrome 4.0 and above, and Safari 3.0 and above.

This is a great news for all those people who had started and participated in the campaigns, for driving out IE6 from computers around the world as apart from lack of functionality, these old browsers hold a huge threat to data security too.

iPad spotted at 52nd Annual Grammy’s with….. Stephen Colbert!

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iPad, iPad everywhere so how could it not be present at the 52nd annual grammy awards? Guess who got it? Stephen Colbert!

Where’s my Nominee list? Oh, it’s on my iPad. (He’s flaunting it a lot)

I am so sure, Apple’s paid a huge amount of money, to get iPad out there and if that’s not true, then Stephen just got lucky. Seems like Apple has kickstarted their marketing campaigns for iPad’s public appearances.

Thanks Engadget.