Windows

Microsoft My Phone Premium Service Pricing Confirmed

On a posting yesterday on the Microsoft My Phone forum, a worker from Microsoft confirmed that once the trial for Premium services ends that you can buy the service in full for $4.99.

There is no word on a UK pricing in the thread, but I have posted to ask this to them. The thread is here for anyone interested:
http://social.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/MyPhone/thread/0a1b9a27-9c8a-433c-9eba-5f064f089f44/

The best bit for me is that this looks to be a one time only price, as my original concern was that this was going to be a monthly subscription service.

The fee will be payable via the Windows Marketplace either on the device or from your My Phone account online.

Let’s jut hope that they can fix the locate my phone feature for the Touch HD:
http://social.microsoft.com/Forums/en-AU/MyPhone/thread/5bf44059-ddb0-45cf-a069-45171293138a

Windows Phone (Windows Mobile 6.5)

Windows Mobile 6.5, now called Windows Phone is the latest mobile OS revision from Microsoft, and it’s a vast improvement from 6.1

I’ve been using it in Beta form on my Touch HD for about six months courtesy of the folks on XDA-Developers and Miri’s WM6.5 ROM for the Touch HD.

The first thing you notice is the Today screen, now referred to as Titanium. This has been inspired by the Zune interface. The whole thing has designed to be finger friendly and require a stylus as little as possible.

Read more…

Sprawl of Windows Phone

Yesterday (if your American or today if your British) is the official launch of Windows Phone, Windows Phone Marketplace and Microsoft My Phone.

I’ve been using Windows Phone (Windows Mobile 6.5) and Microsoft My Phone for sometime now – Not the Marketplace though as this only opened today.

I’m going to review all three starting with Windows Mobile 6.5, then Marketplace and finally My Phone.

Enjoy x

Sky+ HD Multi-Room Shared Planner

I got some anonymous information last night from a friend about a service Sky are considering introducing here in the UK.

The service looks as if it’s going to be called Sky+ HD Multi-Room Shared Planner – What a mouthful.

The premise of it is that you have multiple Sky+ HD boxes in your house, and you can share recorded TV amongst those boxes throughout your house. The service also touts that you will be able to connect to your Sky+ HD boxes via your PC and access that content also.

Read more…

Sky HD for Windows Media Center a Possible Reality?

You will have all seen my post previously on Windows Media Center Envy over the US treatment and our lack of.

CEDIA (Custom Electronics Design & Installation) is a show taking place in one month, and Engadget HD have an article on their predictions for announcements at the show at http://www.engadgethd.com/2009/08/10/cedia-2009-windows-media-center-predictions/.

I love Engadget because if something gets posted it quite often happens to be true, so what do you think happened to my excitement level when I read this excerpt:

We don’t expect the US to have all the fun, so here’s a crazy prediction for the UK. Currently recording premium HD content on the other side of the Atlantic isn’t really an option. There is one Sky TV hack that works, but isn’t for the faint of heart as it requires constant maintenance. Well the other day we were looking through our old pictures from the eHome tour and noticed something new. Right next to a PC labelled “Draco” is a PC labelled “Horseshoe.” Now we weren’t able to find any indication of what project horseshoe was, but the same PC had another sticker with DVB-S/T on it. This just happens to be the encoding Sky TV uses. This combined with the recent partnership announcements with Microsoft and Sky has us thinking that this little white box in the picture below is actually a Sky TV HD tuner for Media Center, but we’ve been wrong before.

If the picture in the article and the text is to be believed then Microsoft’s work with Sky to include Sky Sports content within Xbox Live could be part of a larger introduction to the eHome way from Sky and we could be seeing Sky finally allow people to use Media Center with it’s TV services without almighty hacks.

If this does come, I tell thee – I care not how poor I may be or what happens, I shall own it!

Windows 7 RTM

Well I got my copy of Windows 7 RTM yesterday and I installed it during the evening.

The experience was really good.
I installed 64-bit Ultimate after toying between Ultimate and Enterprise, but I wanted to be able to play with Media Center.

Including the time to install a Dell BIOS update the whole process took less than an hour from a DVD – More like 45mins.

Read more…

Extend Windows Explorer Thumbnails

This is something that has bothered me a lot recently as I have been using Photoshop for Wedding photo’s and this and that, and this tool would I’m sure save countless designers some time, especially if your not hot on file naming conventions.

http://lifehacker.com/5302051/thumbview-adds-thumbnail-support-for-unsupported-images

The idea is to allow Windows to thumbnail up to 19 additional image formats including PNG, PSD and TIFF to name a few.

I haven’t personally tried it yet, but the nice people at Lifehacker claim it was fast and didn’t cause a performance hit which is what we like to hear.

WWDC 2009 Apple Vs. Microsoft Showdown

Today’s Apple’s WWDC show, where they launch there best yet. Now that the big announcements are out and all the Mac boys have oohed and aahed at them, how to they really stack up against Windows?

I’m not going to cover everything as I’m not going to get into hardware etc. All of the quotes are taken from Engadget on this thread: http://www.engadget.com/2009/06/08/phil-schiller-keynote-live-from-wwdc-2009/

Read more…

Roll on the Release Candidates

Well Microsoft have certainly been busy little bee’s with Windows 7 as a lot of my recent blogs show, but today is the next milestone and not just for Windows 7.

Microsoft today released Windows 7 RC, Windows Server 2008 R2 RC and also the Service Pack 2 for Windows Vista.

Vista users using RTM with the blocker tool will be disappointed to note that this tool has now been removed and will have to upgrade to SP1, however I personally think you should just go all the way to SP2.

Going along with the whole RC & SP release, last week also saw the release of Office 2007 Service Pack 2 which has a lot of stability and performance improvements, which for some will be welcome although I never really see any problems except perhaps in Outlook opening a huge attachment.

Windows 7 RC is available in x86 and x64 builds and is available currently to all TechNet and MSDN subscribers, as is Server 2008 R2 RC, however Windows 7 RC will be making it’s way to the public in the next few days.

Office 2007 Service Pack 2 and Windows Vista Service Pack 2 are both available from the the Microsoft Download Center at www.microsoft.com/downloads.

Have a great weekend.

SideShow Missing in Windows 7 Build 7068

SideShow is probably one of the most underrated and under used features in Windows Vista, and I was really glad Microsoft kept going with in in Windows 7 especially as the Windows Mobile client still works well especially for PowerPoint Remote Control.

As I got my new phone yesterday I thought I’d install the SideShow client on it and see how PowerPoint Remote looks on the beautiful WVGA display.

To my horror, Microsoft have removed SideShow from Build 7068 of Windows 7. It was defiantly there in 7000 so where has it gone?

According to Seven Forums, it’s also missing from Build 7048 x86 but still present in the x64 build. As I’m running x86 I can’t look to see if it still exists in the 7068 Build for x64, but I’m guessing it might be gone also.

I really hope this is just temporary and it comes back for the next build.