microsoft

Microsoft undertakes not to withhold standard-essential patents

February 9, 2012 | By Surur

In a statement on their website Microsoft has promised to license any standard-essential patents on reasonable and non-discriminatory terms to any comers. The move comes in the wake of Apple complaining that the FRAND system is being abused in Europe, where Samsung has been fighting back against Apple claims by using their own library of standard-essential patents, which would normally form part of a patent pool.

Microsoft writes:

Like other leading high-tech firms, Microsoft regularly contributes to the development of industry standards. Industry standards are vitally important to the development of the Internet and to interoperability among mobile devices and other computers. The international standards system works well because firms that contribute to standards promise to make their essential patents available to others on fair, reasonable and nondiscriminatory terms. Consumers and the entire industry will suffer if, in disregard of this promise, firms seek to block others from shipping products on the basis of such standard essential patents.

Microsoft’s approach is straight-forward:

Microsoft will always adhere to the promises it has made to standards organizations to make its standard essential patents available on fair, reasonable and nondiscriminatory terms.

This means that Microsoft will not seek an injunction or exclusion order against any firm on the basis of those essential patents.

This also means that Microsoft will make those essential patents available for license to other firms without requiring that those firms license their patents back to Microsoft, except for any patents they have that are essential to the same industry standard.

Microsoft will not transfer those standard essential patents to any other firm unless that firm agrees to adhere to the points outlined above.

Presumably Microsoft is hoping for similar reciprocation from other companies as it moves into the tablet market, and to influence the law makers in Europe while Apple argues the case.

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Major Fail: Now even Microsoft is calling Windows Phone 7 Windows Mobile

February 8, 2012 | By Surur

majorfail

When carriers and Microsoft partners mistakenly call Windows Phone Windows Mobile we always say Microsoft should be a lot more involved in their promotions.

However ignorance can hardly explain why Microsoft Studios missed the memo, and decided to flash back to 2009 with their new initiative – Windows Mobile Wednesdays, “which will highlight a Windows Mobile game we love!”

As a commenter on the page said “Way to go with associating “Windows Phone” with the dead ‘n buried “Windows Mobile“.”

We could not have said it better…

See the page here.

Update: The page has now been pulled, but even better would be to avoid such silly branding issues in the first instance.

Update 2: A corrected version has been posted here.

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Windows Phone Wins Connecting / Production Category Of Interaction Awards 2012

February 6, 2012 | By Pradeep

Windows Phone has won many awards for its design and functionality. In the recent Interaction Awards 2012, Windows Phone got nominated and won the award in the Connecting / Production category. Ixda is a global network of over 25,000 members worldwide dedicated to the professional practice of Interaction Design and the association is sponsored by Google. Its good to see Windows Phone winning accolades everywhere.

Source: IXDA via: Microsoft Next

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PixelTV it is a simple movie maker!

February 4, 2012 | By Stiml2

PixelTV it is a simple movie maker! PixelTV allows you to create fun movie in your hand.

Express yourself in 108 pixels and 24 colors and share a movie with the world! Create your own pixel TV.

PixelTV in Hot Apps by MS Channel 9

PixelTV is $0.99 with a free trial. Trial version limit up to 10 movies’ plays.

Get app in Marketplace here.

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Visual Studio Achievements For Windows Phone Now Available From Marketplace

February 1, 2012 | By Pradeep

Visual Studio Achievements for Windows Phone allows users to track their achievements and share it with others. Microsoft announced the program two weeks ago, using a Visual Studio Extension achievements are unlocked based on your activity.

From Microsoft,

A software engineer’s glory so often goes unnoticed. Attention seems to come either when there are bugs or when the final project ships. But rarely is a developer appreciated for all the nuances and subtleties of a piece of code–and all the heroics it took to write it. With Visual Studio Achievements Beta, your talents are recognized as you perform various coding feats, unlock achievements and earn badges.

Download the free app here from the marketplace.

via: wpcentral

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ITC Dismisses Barnes & Noble’s Antitrust Claims Against Microsoft

February 1, 2012 | By Pradeep

Barnes & Noble, the maker of Nook e-reader & tablet products refused to sign an licensing agreement with Microsoft for infringing patents. Their Nook products runs on Android platform which clearly violates no.of patents that are owned by Microsoft. While OEMs who make more than 70% of the Android devices have already entered into an patent agreement with Microsoft, B&N refused to do so. Microsoft filed a case against B&N for patent infringement and B&N in response filed an anti-trust claim to ITC stating that Microsoft is asking for high licensing fees, etc,.

Today ITC granted Microsoft’s motion to dismiss B&N’s anti-trust claims against it. This is going to be a big blow to B&N since it was their only hope in the case against Microsoft. The Barnes & Noble’s “patent misuse” defense against Microsoft trial will start next Monday (February 6). Lets see what happens..

Read more about it in the source link below.

Source: FOSS Patents

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US Developers: Win Awesome Prizes By Taking On 30 to Launch Challenge From Microsoft

January 31, 2012 | By Pradeep

30 to Launch is a new program for Windows Phone developers powered by Microsoft Platform Ready (MPR) group. You have to sign up for the challenge and complete a Windows Phone app and publish it in marketplace. Also there will be an opportunity to register for App Hub for free in week 2 of the challenge.

Contest Prizes:

Four (4) Grand Prizes. Each winner will receive a Prize Package consisting of the following items:
? Samsung – 46″ Class 3D / HDTV
? Samsung – 2.1-Ch. Home Theater SoundBar System with Wireless Subwoofer
? Two DVDs for 3D Movies
? A pair of 3D Viewing Glasses
? Xbox 360 4GB Console with Kinect
? Two Xbox Games
The total Approximate Retail Value (ARV) of this Package is $3,000

Five hundred (500) incentive prizes. Each winner will receive one (1) Nokia Lumia 800 phone. Approximate Retail Value (ARV) $500.00

Get ready and start your app development soon. Try to be in the first five hundred people and win the awesome Lumia 800.

More contest details here.

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Winners Of Microsoft Imagine Cup Grants Program Announced

January 29, 2012 | By Pradeep

At the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Microsoft announced the winners of the inaugural year of the Imagine Cup Grants program. As part of the program, the winning teams will get $75,000 (U.S.) as well as software, cloud computing services, solution provider support, premium Microsoft BizSpark account benefits and access to local resources such as the Microsoft Innovation Centers. Microsoft will also connect grant recipients with its network of investors, nongovernmental organization partners and business partners.

This year winning team projects were Windows Phone app designed to diagnose malaria, a Kinect-based system for physical therapy, a real-time sign language translator for classrooms, and a device to bring independence to quadriplegics by enabling them to operate computers on their own. The demo of the Windows Phone app to diagnose Malaria can be seen above.

You can read more about this grants program here.

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Apple Still Considers Microsoft In Smartphone Race

January 25, 2012 | By Pradeep

During the Q1 2012 analysts call, Apple CEO Tim Cook commented on Microsoft’s smartphone efforts. Apple crushed analysts estimates and reported a blow-out record quarter after the markets closed today. Apple reported a record $13.06 billion profit on record $46.33 billion in revenue for Q1 2012. Yes, its not a typo. This is the highest quarterly income by any technology company in the history. iPhone alone generates more revenue than the whole of Microsoft and Apple’s profit is more than double of Microsoft’s.

Ok, enough of number crunching. Its blowing my minds. During the analysts call when asked about whether phone market a two-horse race between iOS and Android, Tim Cook said that “There’s a horse in Redmond that always suits up and always runs, and will keep running.” He also went on to say that, “We’ll ignore how many other horses there are — we just want to be the lead one.”

Microsoft faces a very tough race against Apple in smartphone/tablet area. Hope it continues to compete strong.

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Microsoft’s Aaron Woodman: New features will be coming at a faster pace to Windows Phone

January 23, 2012 | By Surur

Aaron Woodman, Director of the MCB at Microsoft

Techradar have posted the result of an extensive telephone interview with Microsoft’s Aaron Woodman, director of Microsoft’s Mobile Communication Business in which he promised to deliver hardware and software innovation faster, if it made sense.

New features like NFC and wireless charging and other advancements will come faster now that the operating system is more mature, says Woodman. “Even a year ago when we first brought the product to market we still had some key gaps that we had to cover to get competitive and that’s taken a lot of time. I feel like we’re there now, so that frees up resources to look at those innovative pieces.”

“We’ve decided to focus our energy on hardware optimisation. On a single core, I feel like we have better performance than a great deal of the dual core devices out there without having to sacrifice or balance things like battery life.”

“If you look at Android, you see the greatest time to market advantage, just because there’s greater flexibility in some of what the OEMs can do, but it doesn’t always execute as great quality. The first several dual core devices actually didn’t even use the second core.

“They didn’t really expose that second core to ISVs and even today not a lot of ISVs actually optimise for dual core systems. But they sure as heck put it on the back of every box and on the placard and consumers make choices [based on that].

He promised NFC when the software to support it is complete.

“… the question will be what we do in software to bring that to life. That will be a highly curated design and it will be high quality and it will be consistent with the user experience,” he said.

He did not however think 3D screens were that useful.

“You can expect us to do great innovation at the hardware level and at the software level and at a faster pace but we will still come back to prioritising something that’s meaningful to end users and not just shoot for the new. I saw an Android phone that has a ’3D without glasses’ screen. Well, that’s definitely cool!” he said.

“There’s no doubt about it. I’m not sure how useful that is especially in a model where you still have to touch the device and now you have a 3D thing and that makes it difficult to build a user interface – but it’s really neat. So we’re focused on trying to find the centre of those pieces.”

It seems Nokia will both drive and enable the faster implementation of hardware features.

“And Nokia has now said ‘all of my innovations that I can think of that will differentiate me at the hardware level will be focused on this platform’; that’s going to bring a great amount of innovation.”

“It’s going to push us to start to prioritise some of those innovations with hardware that we might have deprioritised because we weren’t sure whether we would see a hardware partner take advantage of it in that time frame.”

Regarding the recent Update brouhaha he insisted nothing has changed for the negative.

“Folks got a little alarmed by the blog post but there is no change in policy. We have always worked with carriers to test updates.

“There’s no change in how we’re doing it – and our track record is pretty darn good. The fact that there are multiple packages coming, some of which are firmware specific to a given device and we’re having all these more pops… For the maintenance releases that we’ve got coming it didn’t make sense for us to continue to maintain this big table.”

“We solved that underlying problem in the Mango timeframe and now, especially because we’re going to these maintenance releases – some of which apply to your phone and some of which don’t – it doesn’t make any sense to keep updating the table.”

Read a lot more at TechRadar here.

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Microsoft posts humorous “How to get work done using only a Windows Phone” video

January 19, 2012 | By Surur

Doug Thomas from Microsoft’s Office Casual blog has posted this video showing how work can be accomplished by only using a Windows Phone.

Ironically not much work actually gets done using the Windows Phone, something Microsoft may want to pay attention to before the 19% of the workforce who use Microsoft smartphones jump ship too.

The video demoes:

Live Tiles

Groups

Me Tile

Facebook & Social Networking

Part 2 is coming next week.

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Loose-lipped ZTE executive reveals the cost of Windows Phone, and it ain’t cheap

January 18, 2012 | By Surur

At the launch of the ZTE Tania a ZTE executive has told TrustedReviews that it costs between £15 and £20 for the company to license Windows Phone 7 from Microsoft.

The number has always been a closely guarded secret, but has always been believed to be in the $10-15 range. If is is in fact t £15-£20 ($23-$30) it is likely close to the most expensive single component of a Windows Phone.

Even more interesting however is that Microsoft is believed to be collecting patent royalties from Android OEMs in the same range as their Windows Phone license fees, which would mean Microsoft could be collecting several hundred million dollars in royalties just from the US market each year.

Do our readers think Microsoft is overcharging and that this may be damaging the motivation of OEMs to sell Windows Phones, and also keeping the cost of the handsets high? Let us know below.

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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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