Nokia E7 Phone Finally Hitting Stores this Week

Nokia E7 Phone Finally Hitting Stores this Week

Following its unveiling last September and a long delay coming to market, the E7 will arrive in some stores over the next few days, with a broader launch to follow soon, Nokia announced today.

Initally scheduled to debut in December, Nokia told CNET at the time that the company decided to delay launch "to ensure the best possible user experience on the Nokia E7." Nokia did not specify what exactly had gone wrong.

The E7 includes the Symbian 3 operating system, a 4-inch AMOLED ClearBack touch screen designed to improve outdoor visibility, a full slide-out QWERTY keyboard, an 8-megapixel camera with a dual LED flash and HD video capture, USB and HDMI connections, and 16GB of flash memory.

Geared for the business crowd, the phone offers built-in synchronization with Microsoft Exchange and comes with Office Communicator Mobile, a corporate instant messaging app developed by Microsoft specifically for Nokia smartphones.

The E7 costs 495 euros ($674) before any potential carrier subsidies.

Nokia's announcement today did not specify any carriers for the phone nor did it specify exactly where it's launching this week. Nokia representatives were not immediately available to comment.

Although still the world's leading mobile phone maker, Nokia has watched its dominance slowly slip over the past couple of years. Losing market share and sales to Apple and Android devices, the company reported lower earnings yet again in the fourth quarter of 2010.

In a bid to regain its foothold, CEO Stephen Elop is planning a major shift in Nokia's strategy. Details are scheduled to be revealed in a financial briefing on Friday. However, some reports say that a management shakeup is already in the works.

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Download Microsoft Office 2011 for Mac | Buy from Amazon

Microsoft has released the Mac version of Office 2011 in trial format. The trial version lets you assess Office for Mac 2011 for a 30-day period; once this period is over, you get the choice of uninstalling the program, buying the suite from a store or purchasing a product key online.

The 30-day period is half the length of time that Microsoft currently allows Office for Windows users to test out the Office 2010 suite, as they get a full 60-day test drive.

The trial version of Office for Mac Home and Business 2011 includes the new versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook, the suite's word processor, spreadsheet, presentation programs respectively, and revamped and renamed e-mail client

Although some Mac users may have been put off from having any Microsoft software near their computers, Office for the Mac has not only been selling extremely well, the reviews of the latest version have been glowing. The only real competition on the Mac at the moment is the now dated iWork suite and Microsoft believes it is the perfect time to give Office for Mac a try.

Those who are interested in trying out the Office suite can download the free version from the Microsoft Office for Mac website. The cost of a product key or full-boxed edition of Office for the Mac 2011 varies from site to site, so it is well worth shopping around once your trial has ended.

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Lauch Date Of Internet Explorer 9 RC - '10 Feburary'

Microsoft is all set ready for the launch of its most awaited browser Internet Explorer 9 as it attempts to remain competitive in the browser marketplace. Microsoft delivers everything in its latest browser IE9 to compete with other browser platform and become browser king with its contenders Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox and Opera.

Microsoft Internet Explorer 9 RC build was leaked out earlier and Winreview.ru has posted some screenshots of that leak. The version which will be going to hit the web is 9.00.8073.6018 (WIN7_IE9_Partner.110121-2300). It is believed by many that Microsoft is gearing up for the release of IE 9 and the RC builds are of near final quality. Microsoft is also taking privacy to a new level, allowing the browser to block a website's ability to use location based services too.

Microsoft has just announced through its media press release about Internet Explorer 9 event on February 10th. The announcement will take place in San Francisco.

Microsoft is gearing up for the launch of IE 9 as it attempts to remain competitive in the browser marketplace. For Microsoft, IE 9 represents its latest attempt to remain the browser king while it fights off contenders Firefox, Chrome and a host of others. If Microsoft does not find a way to stop users from leaving the platform, its market share will continue to drop until it is no longer the market leader.

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Release Date of Windows 8 and Windows 7 SP Leaked Out

The latest news and information about Windows 8 and Windows 7 SP2 Launch Date has been leaked out by Wzor.net, who is very well known for as Infamous Leaker. Wzor.net has confirmed the news about the launching of Windows 8 pre beta and about Windows 7 SP2 launch.

According to Wzor.net Windows 7 SP2 is already actively underway since the autumn of 2010, and if all goes according to plan then the appearance of a second service pack, Service Pack 2 for Windows 7 and Server 2008 R2 is expected in mid-2012 " and looking forward to Windows 8, Wzor states, " Windows 8 is scheduled for the very end of 2012, so it really can be called: Microsoft Windows 2012 Apocalypse Edition, at least the server version will be named as Windows Server 2012."

Further, for more recent information, the site states that Microsoft is planning two betas for Windows 8 and states that at least one, if not both versions, will be for public consumption and three months after the RC is released, Windows 8 will go RTM. Specific dates were not mentioned.

By far the biggest bombshell is that "according to our information, Microsoft will plan to begin selling boxed retail versions of Microsoft Windows on Monday January 7, 2013!”

Again all this information comes from a reputable leaker but as with any information, its subject to verification. Hopefully the information is on track but as for Windows 8 leaks, Wzor states, “Possible leaks in the network of test assemblies may be expected only close to the appearance of the first beta version of Windows 8 Beta 1"

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Intel To Integrate Windows 8 Into Phones

In Intel financials conference call with CEO Paul Otellini, Intel has shared information about Windows 8 to put into Mobile Phones. Otellini discussed the company’s future plans for products, including mobile phones.

Intel openly talked about the possibility of having a mobile phone running Windows 8. The only holdback in the near future with a full OS running on a mobile device is battery life. Intel was quoted, via ZDnet.com that Windows 8 could run on their lowest-power Intel processor.

We have the ability to put our lowest-power Intel processors running Windows 8, or “next-generation Windows,” into phones, because it's the same OS stack. And I look at that as an upside opportunity for us.

After Microsoft announced that Windows 8 will be able to run on a wide variety of processors, including ARM, the possibilities of running Windows 8 anywhere became a reality.

It's still unclear what direction Microsoft wishes to pursue with Windows 8 on mobile devices. Although it would be great to have Windows 8 running on a tablet PC, would Microsoft ever want to release a line of mobile phones running Windows 8? Windows 8 is still more than a year away, and with Microsoft's newly launched Windows Phone 7 operating system, it wouldn't make much sense to replace the OS after a years time, but perhaps a slimmed down version of Windows 8 might be ideal for a dual-OS phone.

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Enter Into Microsoft Spelling Contest & Win $15K

Microsoft have started a new competition between users knows as "Speller Challenge". In this competition people have to correct incorrect spelling of Bing Search Engine for better search results and the top five winners can win upto a prize of $10,000.

Bing feels that there is a lot of room for improvement in this area of their search engine as they are teaming up with Microsoft Research to offer a reward to the team that develops the best spelling alteration technique. They are calling it the Speller Challenge and goal is to "develop a spelling alteration system suitable for large-scale statistical data mining-based web search."

A common approach to spelling alteration is the noisy channel model, in which the received query (q) is treated as a noise-corrupted version of the target query (c). In this model, the spelling alteration system alters q into c and returns the latter's results. The techniques to best identify query/target pairs and best estimate these statistics are the active research problem that underlies this challenge. But that's just the foundation. Place the spelling alteration task in the context of web search, and you have another dimension to consider. The effectiveness of using a fixed lexicon is a known problem because it can lead the speller not only to miss "real word" errors but also misrecognize out-of-vocabulary tokens as errors.

If this challenge sounds like something up your alley Microsoft is offering a sample dataset for developers and researchers to use, a similar dataset will be used to test the effectiveness of the spelling alteration engine. There will be five winners with the first prize winner getting $10,000.

Click here to Enter into Challenge!

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Windows Phone 7 Gets "VoIP"; iPhone "FaceTime" Competitor ?

Microsoft had a solid CES appearance with the announcement of many new key products. But sometimes it’s not what’s said at the main events but inside conversations that can provide a peek into the upcoming products from the company.

At a high profile CES Event, a key WP7 employee delivered, in an off comment fashion, a few tips about where the platform may be headed. One feature that was discussed was that Microsoft is working on a FaceTime type like application for Windows Phone platform.

Now we have confirmed the news that Microsoft is working on a Apple iPhone's "Facetime" competitor, a feature of the platform that allows the user to make video phone calls to other users of the iPhone.

The registry keys "VoIP" and "SIP" are hidden inside the "ControlPanel" portion of the registry, and both seem to be set to be off (by having "0" under their "Enabled" value). It's worth noting that for some reason, these keys are in a portion of the registry that contains other features that are fundamental to the platform, such as theme colors. Right now, we don't have write access to the registry to attempt to turn it on, but hopefully in the near future the homebrew community may allow us to do this.

The VoIP feature has not been revealed before, and it is not certain whether or not this will be used for the "Facetime" like feature, or if it would be available for actual VoIP calling to other Windows Phone 7 users.

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Android Overtakes iPhone in U.S.A

As we told you in our post last year regarding Android overtakes iPhone by 2013, It seems that we were correct that time and now it seems that Android overtakes iPhone in early 2011. 61.5 million people in the US owned smartphones during the three months ending in November 2010, up 10 percent from the preceding three-month period. For the first time, more Americans are using phones running Google's Android operating system than Apple's iPhone, but RIM's BlackBerry is still in first place, according to comScore.

RIM fell from 37.6 percent to 33.5 percent market share of smartphones, Google captured second place among smartphone platforms by moving from 19.6 percent to 26.0 percent of US smartphone subscribers, and Apple slipped to third despite its growth from 24.2 percent to 25.0 percent of the market. Microsoft, in fourth place, fell into single digits from 10.8 percent to 9.0 percent while Palm was still last and further slipped from 4.6 percent to 3.9 percent.

What you have to say about this? Speak in comments!

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Microsoft Surface 2.0 Demo Video & Features

Everyone seems to be waiting for new Microsoft Surface 2.0 version, now the wait is over, Yesterday Microsoft revealed Surface 2.0, an updated touchscreen display system produced in partnership with Samsung. The 40-inch 1080p display will run Windows 7 on a 2.9GHz AMD Athlon II X2 processor with a Radeon HD 6700M for graphics processing. More significant than the hardware specs though are the changes in two key areas.

The Samsung SUR40 for Microsoft Surface uses a new technology called PixelSense, which can track more than 50 points of contact; the only limitation to PixelSense is the amount of hands you can fit onto the screen. While the original Surface used cameras to detect objects and input, the new design utilizes Microsoft's PixelSense, an infrared sensor system allowing each pixel to recognize colors, shapes, and touch. As demoed, the device can read the text on a piece of paper, presumably allowing it to scan text and pictures directly onto the screen for manipulation.


Microsoft plans on expanding the Surface to developers in the very near future, creating unique and innovating applications for the interactive table.

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Facebook Chat Coming to Windows Live Web Messenger

Microsoft released a beta refresh for Windows Live Essentials which saw a new feature in Messenger allowing people to chat with their Facebook friends just like talking to their Messenger friends. However, this ability was not made available on the Web version of Messenger and people could only chat to their Messenger friends. But this looks set to change.

Click to Enlarge

On the Windows Live Phone service (which Microsoft has recently tweaked), that we wrote about last week, it can be seen that a refined header is being used with a few new options and it features Facebook Chat integration. When hovering over the Messenger link in the header a Facebook category appears on this site. The status of contacts is shown just like within Messenger, if a friend is available to chat to they have a green icon and an orange one for away; if you are also friends with them in Messenger then they can also be set to busy which is a red icon.

The chat box has also been tweaked to reflect the Facebook Chat addition as it is now possible to select which chat protocol is being used for the conversation. This feature also allows people to select SMS as a chat option. This feature has also leaked in upcoming Windows Live Messenger 2011 Screenshots.

One final feature that was spotted by Liveside is that when a user is signed in to Messenger on a PC it’s not possible to have a conversation via Web Messenger as Messenger windows will now force themselves to be used. However if a user is not signed in to Messenger then it is possible to chat to people in the browser. Before this refinement it was possible to chat to people via both Messenger and Web Messenger at the same time. (Signing into Messenger when conversations in Windows Live Phone were open sees them closed, however when navigating to a different Windows Live site the conversation reopens. Microsoft have yet to update the Web Messenger across most of the Windows Live sites.)

It has been rumoured that Microsoft will make available a release candidate of Windows Live Essentials 2011 soon and it’s likely that at a similar time they will also update the Windows Live sites.

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