The one caveat for those planning to buy HTC's latest smartphone powerhouse is that the HD2 will be running Windows Mobile 6.5. The soon to-be-obsolete OS will be replaced by the newest, snazziest contender in the mobile space, Windows Phone 7 Series, later this year.
So what are you to do if you want your 4.3-inch capacitive touchscreen and 1GHz Snapdragon processor now, but don't want to be stuck with old software later? You hack that thing!
A hacker--with no regard for the concept of official firmware--over at HTCPedia forums has managed to port the Windows 7 Phone Series OS to the HD2.
The hacker, who goes by the handle tom_codon, claims everything is working great, including Wi-Fi, GPS, and Bluetooth; he even has the video to prove it.
Microsoft is readying an aggressive push into cloud-based productivity applications with the upcoming release of Office Web Apps and other products, but the company is moving more cautiously when it comes to creating mobile versions of these products.
Office Web Apps is part of Office 2010, which is scheduled for release to corporate customers on May 12, with general availability expected sometime in June. The online productivity suite includes free, Web-based versions of Word, Excel and PowerPoint, and Microsoft hopes the release will counter inroads into the productivity market made by Google and others.
Microsoft on Wednesday fired the latest salvo in its multiyear battle to crack the business telephony market. At the VoiceCon event in Orlando, Fla., Microsoft demonstrated for the first time the next version of its Office Communications Server product.
Code-named Office Communications Server "14," the new version is part of the Office 2010 wave of products and is due out before the end of the year.
As it has for years, Microsoft is predicting the convergence of communications. At VoiceCon, Gurdeep Singh Pall, the Microsoft VP in charge of OCS, predicted that within three years, over half of voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) calls will include more than just voice. Pall also said, over the same time frame, three-quarters of new business applications will have communications built into them.
Microsoft is hoping to let Word do better in Chemistry class.
The software maker said on Wednesday that it is releasing an add-on for the word processor that makes it easier to include labels, formulas, and chemical images into documents. Chem4Word, as the add-on is known, was introduced on Wednesday at the spring meeting of the American Chemical Society.
It's available as a free download from Microsoft's Education Labs Web site. Microsoft also said it plans to release the code under the Apache open-source license later this year.
When it released Bing last year, Microsoft hoped that users would be willing to click on a host of additional options presented in a column along the left side of Bing search results.
It turns out, though that disappointingly few users clicked on the added options. The low click rate meant that some of the pages that Microsoft invested the most in--topic pages, articles, and custom data feeds--were being overlooked by lots of users.
Aiming to try to get more attention for its special pages, Microsoft is testing a new look that will add a series of tabs in the center of its Bing results pages, prominently identifying when there are additional types of content.
The state of the news media is this: Gossip and rumors are rapidly replacing factual reporting -- in large part driven by the Google economy. No company is benefitting more than Apple, and most recently with the launch of iPad. But rumors are no surefire way to sales success. Big hype will energize early iPad sales, but can it sustain them? I wonder, and perhaps you have the answer. I'm not looking for a scientific answer, just your story to tell -- more on that in at the end of this post.
If you want to lay any claim to innovation, your patent portfolio is the benchmark by which you will be measured. In that regard, Microsoft has set a very high bar. For the third year in a row, Microsoft has been awarded more software patents than any other firm. But where's Big Blue in all this? Datamation has that and more.
Microsoft again earned the most software patents in 2009, the third time in three years for the Redmond giant, according to the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers.
The new Windows Phones have a lot of things that prior versions of Windows Mobile haven't had, most notably a cool factor.
But one thing that the 7 Series devices won't have--at least not this year's crop--is the ability to broadly copy and paste items. As earlier noted by Engadget, Microsoft confirmed on Tuesday that developers shouldn't expect to have access to a clipboard to allow users to copy and paste. Nor will Microsoft's own Office applications have copy and paste. That's despite the fact that it has been a staple of past versions of Windows Mobile for as long as I can recall.
A new survey by Dell Kace indicates that 87 percent of responding IT professionals plan on deploying Windows 7. That's drawn from a pool of 993 respondents from North America, Europe and Asia Pacific (including IT hands-on professionals, IT managers and IT executives from a variety of small and large companies). The survey also produced some other findings:
46 percent of those surveyed said they planned to deploy Windows 7 before the release of Service Pack 1.
86 percent "reported concern about software compatibility when migrating to Windows 7."
25 percent expressed "concerns" about Windows 7 performance.
32 percent are "considering alternative operating systems to avoid Windows Vista or Windows 7," apparently down from 50 percent when this same group conducted a similar survey in April 2009.
A jury in Texas ruled against Microsoft Tuesday in a patent infringement case and awarded plaintiff VirnetX $105.75 million. Scotts Valley, Calif.-based VirnetX sued Microsoft in February 2007, alleging that the software giant had infringed on two VirnetX patents related to virtual private network technology.
The jury in U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas found that Microsoft willfully infringed on the patents, according to a statement from the firm of McKool Smith, which represented VirnetX.