opinion

After Windows Phone 8 leak, Microsoft needs to reassure Windows Phone 7 buyers their phones are upgradable

February 4, 2012 | By Surur

Some have speculated that the recent Windows Phone 8 information was a controlled leak, to reassure the market that Microsoft was still in the game.

I am however relatively sure it is not, due to the very real Osborne effect the news is having on Microsoft’s current handsets. I have come across many comments over the last 2 days of people saying “I was going to buy a Nokia Lumia 900, but now I am going to wait to see what Nokia can do with Windows Phone 8”.

The danger is seriously disappointing sales which suck the momentum that is slowly building in Marketplace and with Nokia’s new offerings.

The damage is already done for those who insist on waiting for HD screened handsets, but for the majority who are merely not wanting to buy a handset which will not run the latest OS in a mere 9 months Microsoft can do a lot simply by announcing that current generation handsets will be upgradable to Windows Phone 8.

As long as the silence continues doubt will grow, and sales will suffer.

Are our readers hesitant to upgrade to pre-apollo handsets, and would you be reassured if you knew they were upgradable? Let us know below.

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Apple’s education event has huge ramifications for the Windows 8 tablet

January 19, 2012 | By rush24

appletextbooks

I hate to admit it, but I was very impressed by the Apple’s education event today. Following along the event via the Verge.com live blog, it was clear that the guys from Cupertino have created a compelling set of products with iBooks 2, iBooks Author and a revamped iTunes U app that will indeed change the education landscape. Its not that these ideas are new, Apple has just found a way to offer them to the masses in a more user friendly format that millions of users will flock too. Apple, in one fell stroke has just outmaneuvered their rivals by creating a new lucrative and integrated ecosystem in the learning field that neither Microsoft or Google posses a completive alternative. What’s more as is customary with Apple, the products are available now rather than a few months down the road giving them an enormous first mover advantage.

So how does this affect the Windows 8 tablet? Even with the success of the iPad and iPhone, Microsoft still dominates the education field whereby a majority of the PCs being Windows based in conjunction with Microsoft office products.This announcement turns the whole paradigm on its head. If more schools decide to adopt the new Apple system, why would any student need a PC when all their textbooks and school assignments are accessible via iPads? Furthermore, with a version Microsoft Office for the iPad in the works, its evident that the long running PC advantage finds itself on shaky ground. Imagine also a student getting their project done and presenting it to whole class wirelessly via airplay (via a compatible projector or simply an Apple TV connected to a regular projector. The possibilities are endless!

Continue reading →

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Prediction: 2012 Will be the Year of Windows Phone

January 18, 2012 | By robtiffany

Windows Phone 7.5 is running fast out of the gate for 2012. The stunning mobile operating system from Microsoft was the talk of CES in Las Vegas this year. The accolades streaming in from the world’s most influential newspapers, magazines, reviewers, and tech bloggers are unprecedented.

The Nokia Lumia 900 won the Best of CES award in the Smartphone category and it’s no surprise. Before listing off the impressive specs, just look at this gorgeous piece of hardware. Looks matter…trust me. Windows Phone is already the most elegant mobile operating system. Breathtaking industrial design is the other half of the equation. When paired with iconic hardware, it’s like pairing your favorite Walla Walla Cabernet with your favorite steak.

I can’t count the number of reviews and comments stating that Windows Phone on the Lumia 900 has surpassed the iPhone. If you follow the U.S. wireless market, then you know that things like 4G LTE network speeds, large screens, front-facing cameras, and dual-core processors are the current drivers of smartphone sales. The Lumia 900 addresses three of those drivers with support for AT&T’s 4G LTE network, a 4.3-inch AMOLED ClearBlack display, and a front-facing camera for video calls. It’s powered by a single 1.4 GHz processor and if you’ve paid attention to all the reviews in the press, you’ve heard that Windows Phone runs circles around its dual-core competitors. Better software design, better engineering, more efficient algorithms, and optimized coding techniques means you can do more with less. Last but not least, the Lumia 900 comes with an amazing 8MP camera with Carl Zeiss optics.

The HTC Titan II came to the CES party guns-blazing with a monster of a smartphone. It tics all the required boxes needed for sales by delivering a massive 4.7 inch screen, support for AT&T’s 4G LTE network, and a front-facing camera. The 1.5Ghz Snapdragon 2 processor gives this superphone all the horsepower it needs.

Joining the camera arms-race with the Lumia 900, the Titan II comes equipped with a whopping 16 megapixel camera that can capture 720p video. If you’re looking for a giant phone that can go head-to-head with the Galaxy Nexus, this is your device.

2012 is already shaping up to be a great year with compelling hardware matched-up with Windows Phone 7.5, but what else does this platform need to make my prediction come true? Oh yeah, apps. Do you remember back in the 80′s when DOS-based PCs from IBM and Compaq gave Apple IIs and Macs more than they could handle? It might not have been eye-catching, but DOS had more apps that allowed consumers and companies to be successful. In the 90′s, Windows ran away with the computing market with the Mac, Linux, NeXT, and OS/2 unable to compete in the app department. Why do you think this was the case? I know a big reason was because Borland and Microsoft made better and easier-to-use development tools for Windows.

With 50,000+ apps in the Marketplace, Windows Phone is surging forward and now sits in third-place behind the iPhone App Store and the Android Market. Aside from developers betting on the success of a platform, they need development tools, emulators, and programming languages that make it easy for them to be productive. When I look at the velocity at which new apps are being added to the Windows Phone Marketplace, it tells me that Visual Studio is making a big difference.

In my job, I have to work with the development tools for all the major smartphone platforms and I can tell you without drinking any Kool-Aid that the competition isn’t even close. Most iPhone developers I know find that learning Objective-C from the NeXT operating system to be a daunting task compared to modern, high-level languages like C# and VB. While the world is full of Java developers, the complexity of cobbling the necessary tools together needed to build for Android apps is a real productivity killer. Just running Eclipse on JDK 1.6 sucks the life and performance out of my fast Windows 7 laptop. Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Express for Windows Phone is free and the emulator + SDKs all download and install together making the whole process fast and simple. Apps get access to all phone sensors, a local database (SQL Server Compact), and Metro design.

Better productivity means faster time-to-market which means more apps for Windows Phone.

If you’re a web designer/developer, Internet Explorer 9 is alive and well on Windows Phone 7.5. This means you’re no longer held hostage to the highly-fragmented WebKit mobile browser platform. You get a hardware-accelerated, amazingly fast browser with support for more “fully-baked” HTML5 standards like Web Storage, Geolocation, Canvas, Audio and Video.

The lightning fast-Chakra JavaScript engine supports ECMAScript 5 which means your DOM interactions and Ajax web service calls will blur the lines with native apps. When you retrieve data from the cloud or your on-premise servers via Ajax, you’ll now be able to persist it offline in Web Storage. Support for CSS3 means things will be beautiful, 2D transforms will occur, and media queries will give you responsive design.

So here we stand with the best smartphone operating system, best hardware, best development tools and the best mobile web browser. I’m certain that Windows Phone with its army of app developers, OEMs and Mobile Operator partners will be marching to victory this year.

Be fearless,

Rob

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Blackberry putting itself up for sale, will Microsoft nibble?

January 16, 2012 | By Surur

RIM is having a pretty horrible year, with its Blackberry market share plunging in USA, and even upstart Windows Phone looking to overtake it in mind share if not market share (and that’s coming also).

No wonder rumours that the company has hired investment bank Goldman Sachs to ‘explore strategic options’ (analyst speak for find us a buyer) has boosted the stock price by nearly 4% last week – the company would be better off under nearly any management than their bumbling dual CEOs.

However the question is if anyone wants to buy RIM – its market cap is already lower than the combination of its cash and assets, making the company a real steal already, but still no-one is taking a bite.

Of course one company which has always been in the running is Microsoft, mainly due to the natural affinity Microsoft has with RIM’s business customers. In fact at a market cap of $8.34 Billion is is in the same ballpark as Skype, which Microsoft purchased in October 2011.

However owning a major OEM like RIM would certainly interfere with Microsoft’s relationship with their other big partner, Nokia. There is however a very simple way around this – a joint venture between Microsoft and Nokia. There have been previous rumours of the two companies investigating such a deal a few weeks ago, and with RIM nearly 30% cheaper than it was 3 months ago the deal must once again be looking attractive.

Of course RIM by itself may not be enough to convince MSokia to buy, but the prospect of the company and its patent trove being scooped up by Google must make the deal seem almost inevitable.

The best deal would see Nokia managing RIMs business while Microsoft works on the back-end integrating Blackberry support into Exchange, and then working on transitioning Blackberry OS to Windows Phone 7 over the course of a few years.

What do our readers think? Is the deal inevitable? Let us know below.

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What if #smokedbywindowsphone came to retail stores?

January 12, 2012 | By Livven

Most of you have probably seen the “smoked by Windows Phone” campaign by now, in which Windows Phone evangelist Ben “The PC Guy” Rudolph challenges people to perform various everyday tasks on their smartphones and compares the time it takes to to do the same thing on a Windows Phone. It’s really a clever marketing campaign, but, first and foremost, a great way to demonstrate the real advantages of Microsoft’s mobile OS.

While this has probably helped raise some much-needed awareness, it’s not enough, of course. Actually, nothing is enough until Windows Phone reaches the sales numbers it deserves, which is still a few months off at best. However, as Mary Jo Foley noted on Twitter, what if some sales persons were trained to do the same thing in actual retail stores, to demonstrate the speed advantages Windows Phone has, not in benchmarks but in real world tasks?

Sure, this would cost a lot and thus may not be viable, you’d say. But then, Nokia alone has a marketing budget of $200 million to spend in the US, and some of that money could be put to good use by demonstrating the real advantages of Windows Phones in retail stores. Sales incentives and advertisements are one thing, but something like this, which would give people an immediate reason to consider and even choose Windows Phone over rival platforms, should undoubtedly be the most effective and convincing, in the long term.

Of course, we are no retail experts, and if Microsoft saw potential in this idea, maybe they would be considering it already. However, it’s no secret that Microsoft isn’t the most effective company when it comes to advertising, so this might actually be a very worthwhile idea. What do our readers think?

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Editorial: If Microsoft wants to tout the 25 GB on Skydrive as storage they need to make it more useful

January 11, 2012 | By Surur

This editorial is pretty much encapsulated in the headline. Most Windows Phone 7 users are stuck with 8 GB (6 GB available) of storage, and a lucky minority with 16 (14 GB available).

Having 8GB of storage on your phone is pretty 2008ish, and it seems the state of the art has pretty much decided to stand still on Windows Phone. Even if you wanted to pay for 32 Gb of storage the option is not available.

Many OEMs are now advertising the 25 GB of storage on Skydrive as the solution and a reason why even less built-in storage, such as the 4 GB on the ZTE Tania, is acceptable and it is of course a justification raised very often in our comments if one were to dare complain about the restriction.

I have however pretty much run out of storage on my 8 GB HTC 7 Trophy, and each morning when I try and sync my podcasts I am faced with the dreaded”Not Enough storage” error and asked to edit my sync groups and basically trim my playlists and remove music I would prefer to keep on the device. I had 2.5 MB free this morning.

(And no, Zune Pass is not the solution – I buy maybe 2 tracks per month. No way am I paying £108 per year to rent music I own already.)

If Microsoft is going to insist on allowing such limited amounts of storage they need to make the difference between cloud and local storage transparent. In particular this means they need to make it easy to both load music on Skydrive and stream this music from SkyDrive. Podcast streaming should be indistinguishable from playing local content. Photos need to upload at full resolution. Documents should be saved by default to SkyDrive.

Microsoft concentrated on removing the need to micro-manage your smartphone with Windows Phone 7. Now they need to remove the need to micromanage your storage also. If they can do this, and succeed, it could be their killed advantage.

Are any of our readers stuck on 8 GB troubled by limited storage? Let us know below.

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Interesting article on the death of webOS and what it means for Windows Phone

January 3, 2012 | By Surur

Michael Mace, ex-Palm many years ago, has posted an interesting article on the failure of webOS.

While he takes on board the claim by Paul Mercer that the failure was in part was due to webkit being unsuitable for an application framework, he notes that a slow, under-featured operating system is normal for the first release of a product.

An operating system is an incredibly complex piece of software, just about the most complex software you can write. In the first version of an OS, the list of features you want to add is always much longer than what you can implement, there are always bugs you can’t find, and performance is always a problem. What’s worse, there is a built-in tension between those three problems — the more features you add, the more bugs you create. The more time you spend fixing bugs, the less time you have to improve performance. And so on. As a result, every new operating system, without exception, is an embarrassing set of compromises that frustrates its creators and does not deliver on the full promise of its vision.

The words are something to bear in mind when we become impatient with the slow feature add of Windows Phone 7.

Michael’s conclusion:

The operating systems that succeed are the ones that survive long enough for their big flaws to be fixed. That happens if the OS’s supporter has a deep, multi-version commitment to it (Windows) or if the OS does something else so compelling that customers are willing to buy it despite its flaws (graphics on the Mac). Your chances are best if you have both patience and differentiation.

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The lesson: Who’s your daddy, and what’s your killer feature?

He notes Microsoft has the deep pockets to keep hacking away at Windows Phone 7 and make it perfect, but lacks the killer features that will make consumers buy the phones despite their flaws.

Michael’s analysis makes a lot of sense to me, and resonates with my editorial a few days ago – Microsoft needs to leverage its assets to give Windows Phone 7 exclusive features which resonate with the billions of Windows users.

Make the phones instant secondary screens to PCs when plugged in via USB to PCs, make them the perfect remote access client for Windows, let them work as extra controls for all Xbox 360 games, whatever, but do something compelling and make it exclusive – without exclusive features to draw customers in Windows Phone could end up as webOS 2.

Read Michael Mace’s article here.

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Apps still don’t use Mango multitasking… what gives?

January 3, 2012 | By andrewbares

Fast Application Switching, otherwise referred to as multitasking, was a new feature added in Mango. Three months later, and you still can’t use this feature most of the time!

The sad truth is that only 30% of the top 20 apps in the Marketplace support multitasking. To make things worse, 19 of those 20 games are endorsed by Microsoft themselves. The top 20 free apps are quite better, but still not acceptable, with 20% not supporting Mango.

With so few games supporting Mango, responding to text messages is always a pain. The entire Windows Phone experienced is ruined for me when I have to sit there for 10 seconds waiting for a game to resume. For those who think: “10 seconds, quit whining”, consider that many people will respond to a text, go back to their game, play for maybe 60 seconds, respond to the reply, play again, respond…. those 10 seconds add up quickly.

Microsoft needs to get their act together and start forcing Xbox Live titles to support Mango.

The best solution (in my opinion) would be to simply require that all future apps and updates be Mango enabled. Mango has been out for a solid 3 months, and the dev kit has been out even longer! Developers have no more excuses. Share your thoughts below in the comments.

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Fake Spotify app invades Marketplace–is Marketplace Certification sleeping?

January 2, 2012 | By Surur

It is clearly against Marketplace rules to violate the trademark of other companies, but this is exactly what khanamish did when he posted his “Spotify app”, which appears to be simply a collection of links, and used the company’s official logo to boot.

To add insult to injury he charges $0.99 with no free trial for the pleasure of not being able to access any of the services one would expect from the Spotify app.

At WMPoweruser.com we walk a fine line between appreciating unofficial apps which give us access to services which do not have official apps, like the Pandora, YouTube or Onion apps for example, and of course being outraged when an app merely rips off other companies and users.

We have no hesitation in calling Khanamish’s app a scam, preying on users trying to get Spotify service where there is no official coverage. I would have hoped the Marketplace certification process would protect users from being exploited by this, but what use are those when they are arbitrarily enforced?

With Windows Phone we exchanged freedom for security. Today as a Windows Phone 7 user I feel somewhat less safe downloading apps from Marketplace. Microsoft needs to do better.

Via WPCentral.com

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$90,000 worth of WP7 Developer Unlock tokens sold shows demand for open homebrew access

January 1, 2012 | By Surur

chevron

In July 2011 the ChevronWP7 team revealed the fruits of their cooperation with Microsoft, the Officially Approved $9 ChevronW7 unlock. In November 2011 the ChevronWP7 unlock finally became available, and now, almost exactly 2 months later, it appears the service is officially sold out, with no more unlock tokens coming.

A total of 10,000 tokens were sold at $9 each, and now they are gone the only option for most WP7 users to install homebrew apps is to purchase the official developer unlock for $99 or to use one of the many cooked ROMs, some of which are fully unlocked, like the the DFT Freedom ROMs, both of which are probably too daunting for most dabblers.

Given that close to 10,000 members of the small Windows Phone 7 community have already put their money where their mouth is, I think the evidence is that there is a strong demand for this service, which Microsoft should be providing directly as part and parcel of owning a Windows Phone. Who knows, it may draw in some of the Windows Mobile users who may otherwise have gone Android due to the increased freedom there, and the thousands of dollars generated could go to supporting Windows Phone 7 development directly.

What do our readers think? Should Microsoft be providing a “homebrew license” directly? Let us know below.

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Happy New Year and my prediction for 2012

January 1, 2012 | By Surur

Happy New Year to all our readers. Below is a calendar of likely events that will be filling 2012 and the pages of our site. What will make 2012 different from 2011 is that we expect more than a single batch of Windows Phone 7 handsets to be released by OEMs, especially Nokia, but also that these handsets will be more targeted geographically, for example low end handsets to China and high end handsets to USA, with Europe getting something in the middle.

January	Nokia Lumia 900 announced at CES for AT&T
February	New LTE Samsung and HTC and Nokia handsets for Europe announced. Tango previewed at Mobile World Congress
March	Tango update starts rolling out to all handsets.
April	New Tango handsets head for emerging markets, may come as Pay as You Go to the west also.
May	Holidays. Nothing happens.
June	E3 – Likely a batch of new Windows Phone Xbox Live games announced. Hopefully Microsoft announce compatibility with high end cross-platform game engines such as Unity.
July	Nokia N8 equivalent for Windows Phone released
August	Holidays. Nothing happens.
September	BUILD 2012 – Windows Phone 8 may be announced here. New handsets start leaking out. New Windows 8 tablets released
October	New Windows Phone 8 handsets start reaching the market.
November	New Windows Phone 8 handsets reach USA.
December	The world ends.

It is unlikely we will see a massive increase in Windows Phone market share, especially in the first half of the year, unless Nokia is more successful on convincing their Symbian users to convert to Windows Phone rather than Android.

The absolute rate of growth of the Windows Phone population will however increase, as more geographies and carriers are hit, and I expect we will hit around 10 million by the end of Q1 2012 or early Q2 2012. This should make marketplace increasingly viable as an income source for developers, and should help support the growth of apps, which should hit 100,000 by June 2012.

I predict Windows Phone will hit about 5% market share by the end of 2012, which will not make anyone happy, but which would still represent massive growth of the ecosystem over 2011. Windows Phone’s biggest victory will be taking over Blackberry’s mindshare, which should help the OS remain part of the conversation and ensure companies support not just iPhone and Android, but Windows Phone also.

Is there anything I should be adding to the calendar? Let us know below.

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Another Sign Of Metro UI’s Appeal: Kid Chooses Windows Phone Over iPhone

December 28, 2011 | By Livven

WPCentral reported on a blog post written by Christina Tynan-Wood, in which she describes how her son, who originally wanted an iPhone, eventually came to prefer a Windows Phone, the Samsung Focus Flash (pictured right).

That the boy took such a liking to Windows Phone to even overcome the peer pressure, since most of his friends had iPhones, really speaks to the appeal of Metro UI – its quality, simplicity and approachability. Despite being anecdotal evidence at best, this is certainly a very encouraging sign for Microsoft – if people get to really experience Windows Phone, with its beautiful and immersive user interface, they’ll mostly like it.

That is, if.

In her post, Tynan-Wood wrote this:

I had given up — years ago — on seeing a Windows mobile operating system that I would want to live with. I’d been hearing good things about the new Windows mobile but wasn’t really buying in.

The fact that she still calls it Windows Mobile, to the point where she thinks of the “Mobile” as a descriptor rather than part of the brand name (by not capitalizing it), is a clear indication that Windows Phone severly lacks awareness. And, most damningly for Microsoft, that people still confuse Windows Mobile with Windows Phone, and thus don’t give it a second chance even if they heard “good things” about it. There still is a lot that needs to be done in this regard.

Of course, Tynan-Wood points out the app marketplace as a weakness, which is definitely true. 50,000 apps just doesn’t cut it, yet.

You can read the full blog post on Momster. Oh, and psst: Don’t tell her that Microsoft has released an Xbox Live app for iOS, ‘mkay?

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Reviewing A Smartphone Just From Its Tech Specs ! ! !

December 20, 2011 | By Pradeep

An editor from an Indian website moneylife.in posted a review of Nokia Lumia 800 last week. The review received many negative comments because the ‘review’ was done not by handling an actual Lumia 800 unit but just by looking at its tech specs.

The editor compared the Lumia 800 specs with Samsung Galaxy S II and other devices to conclude that “Nokia Lumia 800 the nophone that need to go miles before”. It seems some Nokia and Microsoft employees also commented on that post regarding Lumia 800 device. Since he/she received many negative comments, the editor started to trace back the IP address of the readers who commented on the post and posted a follow up post to reveal the people who made comments.

Last Friday, I wrote an article about the newly launched Nokia Lumia 800. The article was aimed to educate and inform readers and buyers about this latest smartphone from Nokia so that they could make a smart decision. However, this review ruffled some feathers and we saw an orchestrated pile of comments. The common factor in all these comments was use of abusive language that explains the motive.

However, the biggest surprise came when I decided to check the back-end for the origin of these comments. And was I surprised? You bet. The first comments that appeared were posted by none other than the employees and associates of Nokia and Microsoft. Especially one commentator, Harish, who later realised his mistake of posting comment from his official IP address (from India) and changed it later, is the one who had written the maximum (nine so far) abusive posts. I wonder, if this is called good PR practice at Nokia and whether they believe that everything can be bought like the ad-extravaganza they created in newspapers and TV channels?

Here is what Mr Harish says…

Name = harish
Email Id = harishnhce@gmail.com
Ip Address = 192.100.117.41

What an crap review!! it’s one of the best phone available, iphone is so dumb compared to this…. Guess some one is paying you lumpsum, congrats..

The IP address ‘192.100.117.41’ belongs to Nokia Corp.

Same is the case with other commenter, Aditya Agrawal. While Mr Agrawal has refrained from using abusive word, he had tried hard to convince us that 512MB performs better compared with 1GB or more memory. Since this argument is from somebody from Microsoft, I am really missing my good-old Win98 that used to run on just 32MB RAM unlike the latest Win7 that requires 4GB RAM on the lower side. Hope, Mr Agrawal will tell those guys at Bellevue in Microsoft to make the next Win8 run on less memory so that it can perform better and we all can bring back our discarded systems into some use! Similarly, he should also try and convince the guys at Intel and AMD not to make any better processors as their old ones would perform better with Microsoft OSs. Here is the comment of Mr Agrawal and his IP address…Name = Aditya Agrawal
Email Id = rushmax77@hotmail.com
Ip Address = 207.46.55.31dude, gone are the times when actual consumers just use to care about the technical specificiations of mobiles. today, people want devices which are beauitful, fast and easy-to-use. for most of the consumers, it does not matter if the phone has 512mb or 1gb ram. if the 512mb performs better in real-life, that’t the one customers are gonna prefer.just a small advice, go to a store and use windows phone 7.5 for 10 mins, the last thing you will care is whether the phone has a single or a dual core.The IP address 207.46.55.31 belongs to Microsoft Corp.

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We are also clueless about the kind of ‘Kolaveri di’ (rage over) generated by readers (?), especially from countries like Singapore, the US, UK and even Poland. We had traced back the origins of all the comments and would publish, if necessary, at suitable time.

So why am I posting this here ? Some websites like Guardian UK are posting on this story as if Microsoft and Nokia PR committed a huge error. C’mon, how can you control a MNC employee from commenting on a blog defending their product from their private name/email address ? The editor did however committed a huge mistake by violating the privacy of his users and even threatens to publish their details as well. Crazy Journalism ! !

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