A new leak doing the rounds today is giving us a first glimpse of what is expected to be the notification center in Windows Phone 8.1 . Obtained from a confidential slide deck sent internally at Microsoft, the notification center will be dubbed ‘Action Center’ but will pack all the functionality that we’ve come to expect from such a feature.
Continue reading “Notification Center for Windows Phone 8.1 spotted in fresh leak”
Stephen Elop, the ex-CEO from Nokia, will be heading the expanded devices team at Microsoft, as per reports. Previously rumoured to be in the running for the top job at Microsoft, Stephen Elop now gets to lead the newly formed team, like previously agreed upon. This is pretty obvious now, as Microsoft just announced its newest CEO, Satya Nadella, who takes over the position from Steve Ballmer. Elop stepped down from his role as the CEO of Nokia immediately after the announcement of Nokia-Microsoft acquisition, to avoid a conflict of interests.
Foursquare, the popular location-based social network, has just received a 15 million dollar investment from Microsoft. This equity investment from the Redmond company comes after a successful $35mn round of VC funding for the New York based Startup in December last year, reports the Wall Street Journal. Along with this fresh investment, Microsoft has also entered into a multi-year deal with Foursquare for licensing its vast location-based data. This will apparently be put to use in its Search Engine Bing, and naturally in Windows Phone too, as an extension. Foursquare has a massive point of interest database that’s heavily crowd sourced with tips, check ins, comments and so forth, hence we think this deal is a biggie for Microsoft.
Continue reading “Microsoft invests $15mn in Foursquare, enters deal for licensing data”
Just as several reports had predicted, Satya Nadella is officially the new Microsoft CEO, succeeding Steve Ballmer as the tech giant’s third Chief Executive Officer. Having led several Microsoft divisions including the wealthy Enterprise and Cloud business, Satya Nadella becomes the insider CEO, after several reports of an outsider being considered as the next CEO. Bill Gates also announced that he will leaving the board Chairman position, leaving way for John Thompson to take over that post, which is seen as a move to appease investors of radically lesser influence from the Gates-Ballmer era. While we scour for more publicly available information, here’s an introductory video directly from Microsoft –
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T8JwNZBJ_wI
Continue reading “It’s official, Satya Nadella is the new Microsoft CEO”
Windows 8.1 Update 1, a small evolutionary update to the controversial operating system from Microsoft, has leaked ahead of its official March release. The update 1 is squarely aimed at desktop users, with enhancements made to lessen the gestural actions that don’t make sense for people using Windows 8 with a keyboard/mouse combination. New mouse-focused context menus, search and power/shutdown buttons on the lock screen and the ability to add metro apps to the taskbar are some of the notable changes in Update 1. This sets the stage for the next version of Windows codenamed “Threshold” which will be detailed at the Build developer event in April and released to OEMs sometime next year.
Continue reading “Windows 8.1 Update 1 leaked ahead of official March release”
The end to a long CEO search is getting near, as reports are piling up from the other side of the planet that Satya Nadella, a senior VP who heads the enterprise and cloud business at Microsoft, is all set to become the new third CEO, after his predecessors Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer. It’s been a long while since Ballmer announced his retirement from the CEO position, with pressure from investors mounting as Microsoft fumbled its mobile and tablet strategy, the two fastest growing consumer electronics markets. However, under the same leadership, Microsoft became a company with a diversified portfolio, with hit consumer products like Xbox and the fast growing enterprise products like Office 365, a key initiative by Satya Nadella. This might be one of the biggest reasons why the Board members are narrowing down on Nadella to be the next CEO, he is the moneymaker in Microsoft’s wealthy still-growing division.
Continue reading “Satya Nadella all set to be the new Microsoft CEO according to reports”
Bing Rewards is a program that Microsoft started, to encourage use of its search engine, so that it could dole out rewards for doing so. It was a desperate, yet successful attempt, as people started using it for gaining credits that could be redeemed at Amazon, Fandango or even get you an Xbox console, just through using the rarely used search engine. Till now, the rewards program was exclusively on the desktop, where one could sign in to Bing and use it to gain rewards, but finally, it is now coming down to mobile, through the Bing mobile apps for iOS and Android. Nope, Windows Phone support is apparently “coming soon”, and we might have reasons why. That aside, the Bing rewards feature will give you certains “tasks” to finish, like a game, and once you finish it, you’ll be rewarded with credits of varying amounts depending on the task.
Continue reading “Bing rewards goes live for iOS and Android, Windows Phone curiously left out”
After a trademark infringement lawsuit, won by the Sky broadcasting corporation in the UK, Microsoft was tasked with changing its consumer facing cloud service “SkyDrive” to something else. Today the company has revealed that SkyDrive will be called “OneDrive”, and that it will start rolling out the changes gradually. Technically, the product remains the same but the name, which is usually a constant, receives a change. This is not the first time Microsoft has been forced to rename its products, as we had witnessed earlier how the company was forced not to use “metro” for its whole design language it developed. That said, the OneDrive blog has posted a video that showcases the new vision that Microsoft wants to portray for its new product –
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e4NsPPUDjyU
Continue reading “Microsoft’s SkyDrive will be called OneDrive”
Long rumoured voice assistant, codenamed “Cortana”, is all set to make its beta appearance on Windows Phone, starting April 2014, according to a very credible source – @msftnerd. The Siri-like feature is reportedly voiced by Jen Taylor, who actually did the voice acting for Cortana, an AI character in the hit game-series “Halo”. The voice assistant, which might carry the name “Bing Tell me”, will launch for developers, in beta, in April, which coincides with the Build 2014 Developer event by Microsoft. “Build” is where Microsoft plans to unveil information about the next release of Windows, codenamed Threshold.
Nvidia spilled the beans on its brand new Tegra K1 processor earlier this week at CES and it looks like the new fangled chipset will form the core of the next gen Surface RT tablet. Nvidia’s new chip dubbed the Tegra K1 sports 192 Kepler cores and has a new CPU as well. The K1 chip will ship in two variants. Either with a quad core ARM A15 CPU or a dual core 64 bit Project Denver CPU, the specifics of the latter are still somewhat murky. Continue reading “Microsoft Surface 3 to be powered by Tegra K1 processor”
We’ve been hearing how the Nokia Lumia 520 has been the best selling Windows Phone of all time, but if Microsoft’s recent words are to be believed, Windows Phone, as a platform, is now outshipping iPhone in 24 markets. Before you jump to conclusions, the iPhone is not doomed, because it’s the emerging markets where the 3rd ecosystem is cementing its place, most likely behind Android in the first place. This is a decent achievement for the platform, but tells us more about Nokia rather than Windows Phone, because these markets are clearly influenced by their legacy supply chain, and hence the obvious sales. Microsoft recently floated this fact with TechRadar claiming that it is the fastest growing mobile platform right now.
Continue reading “Windows Phone outshipped iPhone in 24 emerging markets, according to Microsoft”
Windows Phone users have something to be extra happy about this Christmas. Microsoft is spreading around some festive cheer in the form of 20GB of free SkyDrive storage. Microsoft says that the free storage is valid for 1 year after which we presume you’ll have to pay for it. Continue reading “Windows Phone users to get 20 GB of free SkyDrive storage for an year thanks to Microsoft”
Nokia Lumia 1520 Unboxing
The Nokia Lumia 1520 just launched a couple of days back in India for a price of Rs. 46,999/- after launching internationally in Abu Dhabi back in October. Being the company’s first phablet sized device with a 6 inch 1080p screen, it also naturally is the first Windows Phone with a full HD resolution and quad core innards. With these specs and more, the platform finally comes to parity with Android in the mobile space, at least in the hardware department. Software too has seen small changes with an additional column, upping the information density to a higher level than before. We have got the Indian retail unit with us now, so we went ahead and unboxed it for you –
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fiWULtK6ZV0
Continue reading “Nokia Lumia 1520 Unboxing and First Impressions”
Subway Surfers for Windows Phone 8
Subway Surfers is an extremely popular endless running game, set in an urban landscape with trains and tunnels and all you have to do is, get away from a security guard and his dog. This game has been in the spotlight for the past two years for its addictive gameplay. It initially debuted on the iPhone and then eventually Android where the popularity exploded. Now this game has finally arrived for the third ecosystem – Windows Phone. The game, usually seen as a must have for some people, was one of the things I personally missed when using Windows Phone. Of course, it was not a deal breaker, because it’s just a game, but the lack of it certainly proved costly for the ecosystem, but finally it’s here. Without further ado – download it from the link below.
Subway Surfers on Windows Phone Store – Only for 1 GB RAM devices, 512 MB support coming soon.
Continue reading “Subway Surfers now available for Windows Phone 8”
Rumors have been going around for a while that Microsoft might drop the hardware buttons requirement for their mobile operating system. This first leak by the infamous Evleaks seems to reaffirm this. Continue reading “Windows Phone 8.1 leak suggests incoming on-screen controls”
