Today in New York Microsoft is hosting an open house showing off all its goods it intends to offer consumers this holiday season, including a new generation of cellphones it hopes will grab the attention of users it lost to Apple’s iPhone. Still relying on various 3rd party manufacturers to provide the hardware, the new operating system, creatively dubbed Windows Mobile 6.5, will need to do most of the talking. One of the biggest improvements Microsoft has made to the new OS is the internet browser which has been notoriously slow, unwieldy, and unable to scale well or handle most Web 2.0 applications. They have also surrendered to touchscreen interaction rather than staying focused on the bottom left and right anchor buttons which they insisted was necessary for one-handed use of all applications -but severely restricted developers.
They’re saying the phones can already access more than 600 applications with more on the way, but only time will tell if the phones and new OS can help reclaim a share of the consumer market or bring over a significant number of mobile developers. With the success of iPhone’s Apps, it seems like a real chicken-and-egg problem I hope they can overcome. Why? In spite of where health care reform seems to be headed and what Michael Moore says, I think real competition can only benefit both Windows Mobile users (of which I previously was one) and iPhone owners (of which I am one). I happen to think Apple is sitting a little high-on-the-hog right now and too comfortable.
Microsoft’s open house is also showing off Windows 7, Bing, MS Office, Live, and new keyboards, webcams, and Zune hardware – all in a cliche’d mock-up of a house of the future, were Microsoft IS the future. There is even a garage featuring a couple of Fords using Microsoft’s SYNC technology. (Sadly, the cars of the future seem to be normal terrestrial-bound vehicles that don’t fly or even hover.)
Are you a High School or College student with an interest in science, technology or mathematics? Then the Association of Computing Machinery has a hell of a deal with you. For a one-time membership fee of $19, you get 8 licenses for Windows 7, plus killer deals on Office and other Microsoft products. The catch? There isn’t one, as long as you can prove you’re a student.
So who qualifies for the student membership? Any high-school or undergraduate student according to their form. The organization does focus on science, technology, engineering, and mathematics fields though. For high-school students especially it would be tough to prove which “field” your focus is on since the curriculum is mostly general studies, but they may want to see related classes on your schedule.
It looks like Project Natal, the nifty gesture-recognition system for Xbox 360, will be coming to Windows. According to who? None other than Bill Gates. In an interview with CNet, Mr. Gates said:
“I’d say a cool example of that, that you’ll see… in a little over a year, is this (depth) camera thing.” Gates said it was not just for games, “but for media consumption as a whole, and even if they connect it up to Windows PCs for interacting in terms of meetings, and collaboration, and communication. Both the Xbox guys and the Windows guys latched onto that and now even since they latched onto it the idea of how it can be used in the office is getting much more concrete, and is pretty exciting. I think the value is as great for if you’re in the home, as you want to manage your movies, music, home system type stuff, it’s very cool there. And I think there’s incredible value as we use that in the office connected to a Windows PC. So Microsoft research and the product groups have a lot going on there, because you can use the cost reduction that will take place over the years to say, why shouldn’t that be in most office environments.”
Those of your brave enough to venture into release candidate territory, Microsoft has made Windows 7 RC 1 available for anyone to download. This latest version of the highly-acclaimed operating system won’t expire until March 1, 2010, so you’ll have plenty of time to test everything out and get comfortable until you have to plunk down money for a retail copy.
Microsoft has announced some new features coming to Games for Windows Live in the coming months. Firstly, Microsoft will be introducing an anti-piracy measure they call the “zero-day” solution, which, judging by the name, looks like it intends to prevent pirates from playing games on the day of release. No word on how Microsoft plans to pull this off, though it is known that good-old key codes will be part of the plan. Secondly, Microsoft will be debuting a new marketplace solution that will allow game designers to sell their wares from their own customized store front using Microsoft’s new API.
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