Microsoft Launches Lumia 530 w/ 4-inch Display

By Ben Woods at TNW:  


Microsoft has today announced a new member of its Lumia range in the form of the low-end Lumia 530, which will arrive from the start of next month in Europe.

Priced at €85 before taxes or local subsidies, Microsoft said it expects the Lumia 530 to go on sale in European countries for a retail price of below €100 when it starts to roll out next month, putting it at the lower-end of the affordability scale for Lumia devices.

Key specs include the most recent version of Windows Phone 8.1, a 1.2GHz quad-core Qualcomm Snapdragon processor, a 5-megapixel camera, a 4-inch FWVGA (854 x 480 pixels) display and a selection of interchangeable colored shells – available in bright orange, bright green, grey or white. The device will also be offered in single SIM and dual-SIM variants.

Alongside the phone, the company also introduced a new mini speaker designed with portability in mind. Priced at €19, the Bang by Coloud may not offer luxuries such as Bluetooth connection, but it does offer connectivity through a 3.5mm headphone jack and promises up to eight hours of playback. Microsoft said it would be available “in the coming weeks”.

Microsoft To Cut 18,000 Jobs This Year

By Bill Rigby at Reuters:  


Microsoft Corp said on Thursday it will slash up to 18,000 jobs, or 14 percent of its workforce, this year as it trims its newly acquired Nokia phone business and tries to transform into a cloud-computing and mobile-friendly software company.

The larger-than-expected cuts are the deepest in the company's 39-year history and come five months into the tenure of Chief Executive Satya Nadella, who outlined plans for a "leaner" business in a public memo to employees last week.

"We will simplify the way we work to drive greater accountability, become more agile and move faster," Nadella wrote to employees in a memo made public early Thursday. "We plan to have fewer layers of management, both top down and sideways, to accelerate the flow of information and decision making."

The size of the cuts were welcomed by Wall Street, which viewed Microsoft as bloated under previous CEO Steve Ballmer, topping 127,000 in headcount after absorbing Nokia earlier this year.

BBM Messenger Is Finally On Windows Phone In Open Beta

By Kaylene Hong at TNW:  


If you thought that BlackBerry’s messaging service landed on iOS and Android several years too late, its (late) arrival on Windows Phone takes it to the next level. BlackBerry teased the launch of its BBM messaging service on Windows Phone back in February, and now users can finally get their hands on a beta version, the company announced today.

The app boasts a native experience that makes use of the Windows Phone user interface and focuses on three areas: Contacts, Chats and Feeds. Swiping left and right will move you between the three pages, while common actions are found at the bottom of the page, and additional controls can be accessed in the menu through the button with three dots.

One of the more unique features BBM for Windows Phone has is the ability to pin a contact to the Start menu for easy access — when you select that BBM contact right from the Start menu, you’ll be taken directly to a chat window with them.

Similar to other iterations of the app, users can chat with one or many BBM contacts and have the ability to share pictures, voice notes, contacts and location. However, the beta version is still lacking stickers — which BlackBerry finally introduced earlier this year – BBM Voice, BBM Channels and location sharing powered by Glympse. BlackBerry says these will be landing in the “coming months.”

There is also a feature known as BBM Groups, which not only has a private group chat, but a shared photo album where group members can chat about pictures, as well as shared calendars and shared lists.

BBM features feeds too, which lets you see when contacts update their status or profile photo (think Facebook updates in a chat app). If you want to chat with your friends about their latest updates, you just have to tap on their name to be redirected to a chat.

BlackBerry is opening up the beta version of BBM for Windows Phone so users can test it and provide feedback, but if you’re waiting for the full release, the company advises you to wait “just a bit longer.”

Microsoft Unveils Real-Time Translation for Skype

Microsoft's new CEO, Satya Nadella, just steered the company into exciting and relatively uncharted territory: near real-time speech-to-speech translation.

"It’s been a dream of humanity ever since we started to speak and we wanted to cross the language boundary," said Nadella.

Speaking at Re/Code's inaugural Code Conference (formerly the "D Conference") in Southern California, Nadella and Skype Corporate VP Gurdeep Singh Pall made a Skype call to a non-English-speaking German friend. Then both parties spoke to and understood each other thanks to the live translation capabilities of the Skype Translator pre-beta.

"No one else does this," Pall told me, adding, "It's the first time something like this has been attempted." And it’s probably something we need.

English is not the most commonly spoken language in the world. By some estimates, it's third behind Chinese (and all its variants) and Hindi. However, our increasingly globalized society all but demands that we find a way to communicate across language barriers. Skype already, by Microsoft’s measure, boasts more than 300 million active members and handles roughly one third of international call traffic. Imagine what it could do with built-in voice translation.

Microsoft is not new to the speech recognition game. You'll find the same technology in the recently launched Cortana personal assistant in Windows Phone 8.1 and in the speech recognition that been live on Xbox 360, and now Xbox One, for over a year. Skype Translator, which comes out of Microsoft Research, is actually three technologies: speech recognition, text-to-speech and machine translation.

“The Skype community is big — REALLY big," wrote Peter Lee, Head of Microsoft Research in an email to Mashable."To make Skype Translator a reality, it needed great research to get the science right, and great engineering to make it practical and scalable."




Read the full story at Mashable.

Microsoft Reveals Siri-like Windows Phone Feature

By Anick Jesdanun at Yahoo Tech:

Microsoft unveiled a new virtual assistant for Windows Phone devices Wednesday as it seeks to gain traction in a highly competitive and lucrative market for smartphones.

The assistant, Cortana, is named after an artificial-intelligence character in the company's "Halo" video games. Cortana tries to be chatty like Apple's Siri, while anticipating information you might want, like Google Now.

Cortana is among the new features coming to a Windows Phone update called 8.1. The updated operating system will come with new phones in about a month, including three that Nokia announced Wednesday. It will also be available as a free download for existing phones a few months later.

Microsoft is also updating its Windows 8.1 system for tablets, laptops and desktops. Although Microsoft has been pushing touch-screen controls, the new update is designed to make it easier for those with traditional keyboard and mouse controls. The update, simply called Windows 8.1 Update, is available starting next Tuesday.



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Microsoft Pulls Fake Google Apps from Windows Phone Store

By Emil Protalinski at TNW:

Microsoft today pulled six fake Google apps from the Windows Phone Store, after we contacted the company about the issue. The apps in question were: “Hangouts,” “Google Voice,” “Google Search,” “Google+,” “Google Maps,” and “Gmail – email from Google.”

All of these are published by a “Google, Inc” (instead of “Google Inc.”) and priced at $1.99 each. The only app that Google offers for Windows Phone is its search app, and the publisher is “Google Inc.”

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Office for iPad is Here, Free For iPhone & Android

By Emil Protalinski at TNW: 


At an event in San Francisco today, Microsoft Office General Manager Julia White unveiled Office for iPad, featuring Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. The new apps, which supports viewing but not editing for free, will go live in Apple’s App Store at 11:00AM PDT (2:00PM EST).

You can download them now right here: Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. Also, today wasn’t just about the iPad: Office for iPhone and Android phones is now completely free, Android tablet version coming ‘in the future’.

Word, Excel, and PowerPoint all have a ribbon interface just like the one in Office for Windows and OS X. The trio of apps are much more powerful on the tablet than the smartphone, but naturally don’t compare to the desktop versions.






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Apple, Google And Yahoo Also Can Read Your Emails

By Zach Epstein at BGR:


People concerned with online privacy had a field day last week when it was discovered that Microsoft accessed a French blogger’s Hotmail account and read his emails in order to assess his involvement with an alleged theft of Windows trade secrets. As numerous reports pointed out, Microsoft’s Hotmail and Outlook.com terms give the company the right to access and read users’ emails, and bloggers lashed out at Microsoft as a result. As it turns out, however, Microsoft isn’t the only tech giant that reserves the right to read your private correspondence.

Alex Hern at The Guardian took the time to actually read the terms we all agree to when we sign up for the various email services offered by big tech companies. Not surprisingly, he found that Apple, Google and Yahoo each include items in their terms of service that give them the right to access and read users’ emails.

As Hern noted, Google’s terms for Gmail require users to ”acknowledge and agree that Google may access… your account information and any Content associated with that account… in a good faith belief that such access… is reasonably necessary to… protect against imminent harm to the… property… of Google.”

Similarly, regarding iCloud email Apple’s terms say that it ”may, without liability to you, access… your Account information and Content… if we have a good faith belief that such access… is reasonably necessary to… protect the… property… of Apple,” Hern noted, adding that Yahoo mail can also be accessed by Yahoo according to the service’s terms.



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Microsoft Will Pay You $100 to Upgrade From XP

By David Nield at Digital Trends: 

If you’re still contentedly plugging away with Microsoft’s 13 year-old Windows XP operating system, the executives at Redmond have an offer for you: Upgrade to a brand new Windows 8 machine, and they’ll put $100 in your back pocket. Head to the online Microsoft Store if you’re tempted.

You also get 90 days of free support and a free data transfer service thrown in, though the deal benefits Microsoft as well as users — with official support for Windows XP ending next month, computers that are still running the operating system will no longer receive the security updates and patches required to keep online dangers at bay.

To qualify for the discount, you’ll need to fork out for a shiny new Windows 8 machine costing $699 or more, and there are a variety of all-in-ones, laptops and tablet/laptop hybrids to pick from (including Microsoft’s own Surface Pro 2). Check the FAQ pages on the Microsoft Store website for more information — you’ve got until June 15 to get your order in.




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Microsoft Just Exposed Email's Ugliest Secret

By Russell Brandom at The Verge: 

If you're hiding something from Microsoft, you'd better not put it on Hotmail.

It came out yesterday that the company had read through a user's inbox as part of an internal leak investigation. Microsoft has spent today in damage-control mode, changing its internal policies and rushing to point out that they could have gotten a warrant if they’d needed one. By all indications, the fallout is just beginning.

But while Microsoft is certainly having a bad week, the problem is much bigger than any single company. For the vast majority of people, our email system is based on third-party access, whether it's Microsoft, Google, Apple or whoever else you decide to trust. Our data is held on their servers, routed by their protocols, and they hold the keys to any encryption that protects it. The deal works because they're providing important services, paying our server bills, and for the most part, we trust them. But this week's Microsoft news has chipped away at that trust, and for many, it's made us realize just how frightening the system is without it.



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Hacked Invoices Show How Much Microsoft Charges the FBI

By Valentina Palladino at The Verge:

The Syrian Electronic Army recently revealed documents that show how much Microsoft charges a secret FBI division to legally collect and view customer information. The SEA, which is known for hacking Western companies and their social media accounts, allowed The Daily Dot to analyze the emails and invoices documenting months of transactions between Microsoft's Global Criminal Compliance team and the FBI's Digital Intercept Technology Unit (DITU) before the group went public with them.

Each time the DITU requested customer information, Microsoft charged anywhere from $50 to $200 for the transaction. Monthly totals reached in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, with the most recent invoice for November 2013 totaling $281,000. Neither Microsoft or the DITU would confirm the validity of the documents, but a specialist told The Daily Dot that he saw no indication that the documents were fake.

It's no secret that Microsoft and companies like it can legally charge for information requests from the government, and the company told The Verge that this is standard procedure. "Regarding law enforcement requests, there’s nothing unusual here," a Microsoft spokesperson said in an email. "Under US law, companies can seek reimbursement for costs associated with complying with valid legal orders for customer data. We attempt to recover some of the costs associated with any such orders."

These documents show how frequently the government calls on tech companies for information, and how nonchalantly they do business. The DITU allegedly requested information from Microsoft hundreds of times a month, and it appears that the government can buy customer information by simply shooting the right person an email.



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New Samsung Ad Burns the Kindle, Surface and iPad

By T.L Stanley at Mashable:

Oh, you poor Luddite, with your keyboard, battery dock and mouse. You call that a tablet? It’s positively Neanderthal. And that iPad? Why can’t it do two things at once? Let’s not even get started on the Kindle, because that dinosaur only lets you read books.


That’s the tart, smug and rather effective message in a new ad that will air on national television for Samsung's Galaxy Tab Pro on March 19. The spot not only shows the souped-up tablet's capabilities (multitask, mainly), but also casts aspersions on other leading devices on the market.

The commercial, which advertises a trio of new Galaxy Pro tablets, comes from agency McKinney. It continues the finger-wagging at competitors for having bulkier products with lower-quality visuals, a quality present in its previous ads. Its tagline: "It can do that?"

People who use lesser gadgets will have to defend them, the ad says, but not without being the target of colleagues' withering stares. Even if your device has the “retina thingy,” it’s still a hunk of junk — according the patronizing looks from folks in the ad.



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US Market: Apple 41.6%, Samsung 26.7%, Android Down

Apple’s dominance as the top smartphone OEM in the US has started off strong in the first month of this year: 41.6 percent share. Samsung is once again gaining share faster than its main competitor, however, hitting a new high at 26.7 percent. Rounding out the top five were LG, Motorola, and HTC.

In the platform wars, Google was still first with Android, and Apple took second with iOS. Yet Google’s mobile platform slipped at the start of the year, while Apple’s continued to plow forward. Rounding out the top five were Microsoft (which managed to sneak into third place), BlackBerry, and Symbian.

The latest data comes from comScore, which regularly surveys over 30,000 mobile subscribers in the US. The market research firm says 159.8 million Americans owned smartphones (66.8 percent mobile market penetration) in January, up 7 percent since October.

During the quarter, here is how the top five smartphones OEMs fared:

On the software side, Google is still dominating, even with Apple’s steady gains. Android lost share most months in 2013, and 2014 isn’t off to a good start:

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Windows 8.1 Might Be Getting A Free Version

Windows 8 wasn’t the renaissance Microsoft hoped it would be. Sure, the total number of Windows 8 users steadily increases every month, but it has no chance of toppling Windows 7 at this point. One reason for that is that consumers don’t want to pay $100 or more to upgrade. Microsoft might soon be remedying this.

ZDNet reports that Microsoft is currently looking into a free version of Windows 8.1 called Windows 8.1 with Bing. It’s reportedly part of a grand experiment as Microsoft sees the writing on the wall – operating systems will one day be free. The company will have to adapt to this reality before it happens, and that’s where Windows 8.1 with Bing comes in.

So, what is Windows 8.1 with Bing? Well, nobody is exactly sure at this point, but they have some ideas. One theory is that it’s an experiment into a free version of Windows 8 that would only come with Bing services. All the other applications you usually get with Windows, like Skype, OneDrive and Office, would all be available as paid-for add-ons. In other words, Windows 8 would be free while applications can be added on through separate purchases as needed.




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BBM coming to Windows Phone

BBM is coming to Windows Phone. Nokia's Stephen Elop announced at his company's Mobile World Conference 2014 press event that the popular service will be available to Windows Phone users, but did not give a specific launch date. The instant messenger app first went multi-platform last year, when it appeared on iOS and Android in October.


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PlayStation 4 Dominates Xbox One With Nearly Double The Sales

The PlayStation 4 outsold the Xbox One in the US last month, according to retail sales data tracked by NPD. Sony says that the PS4 was the top-selling console for January and remains in first place worldwide, but hasn't released the actual number of moved units.

Journalist Geoff Keighley, who spoke to PlayStation SVP Guy Longworth, earlier reported that Sony sold nearly twice as many PS4 consoles as its "nearest next-gen competitor" — assumed to be the Xbox One — and PlayStation marketing VP John Koller confirmed the reports to the official PlayStation blog. "Since we launched on November 15th, we’ve sold every PS4 available in the US," he said.



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Foursquare Cuts $15M Deal with Microsoft

Foursquare is announcing that it has received $15 million in funding as a result of a partnership with Microsoft. The deal will see Foursquare contributing to the Bing platform’s location and context layers on both Windows 8 and Windows Phone.

The funding will be rolled into Foursquare’s previous raise of $35 million in December, bringing the total to $50 million. In addition, a licensing deal has been struck for the location data, but the financial terms of that haven’t been disclosed.

This is not a simple licensing deal for Foursquare’s location data. Instead, Microsoft will be getting the data and much deeper access to its contextual layers than any third party via Foursquare’s API. Holger Luedorf, Foursquare’s head of business development, tells me that this is a multi-year agreement that includes both data and technical components that will integrate with Microsoft’s Bing platform on both Windows 8 and Windows Phone.

Foursquare will expose more functionality to Microsoft’s team than any other platform has access to. Luedorf says this includes Foursquare’s location targeting system that utilizes phone sensor data to pinpoint user locations and points of interest.



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Why Microsoft Might Actually Release an Android Phone

Nokia’s “Normandy” Android handset has become something of a curiosity for many smartphone fans who see it as a “what-could-have-been” for Nokia if it had decided to not go exclusively with Windows Phone. ZDNet’s Mary Jo Foley, however, thinks that Nokia’s Android phone is more than just a novelty, however — it might be a hint of what’s to come from future Microsoft phones now that it’s on the cusp of buying Nokia’s handset division.

Why in the world would Microsoft release an Android phone, you ask? As Foley explains, a heavily modified Android that incorporates a lot of Windows Phone’s design choices and that prominently features many of Microsoft’s mobile apps might be a great way of gaining a foothold into some emerging markets.

“Microsoft wants to be a devices and services company,” Foley explains. “If you buy a handset that runs at least some Microsoft services and apps, Microsoft is guaranteed to earn at least some revenues from that transaction. If a user foregoes Windows Phone as it stands now in favor of an iPhone or Android phone, Microsoft will likely make far less from that potential customer. Of course, Microsoft’s preference would be for that handset to be all Microsoft, with a pure version of Windows Phone OS inside. But an Android core with Microsoft apps and services is the next best thing, isn’t it?



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Android Is No Longer Enough For Sony

Sony has confirmed in an interview that a single mobile OS strategy is not good enough for its mobile goals anymore, even if the collaboration with Google has been fruitful, bringing several interesting Android-based Xperia flagship handsets to consumers in recent years. “We are continuing our discussions with other partners, including Microsoft, as part of our partnership with this company on the broader Sony spectrum,” Sony Mobile Europe head Pierre Perron told TechRadar in an interview. “We don’t want to be a single OS manufacturer, I don’t think it’s a viable position in the long term.”

However, Sony is also interested in what it can offer on top of the Windows Phone platform, the exec said. “[Working with Microsoft] is an interesting proposition for us in the PC environment, and we continue our engagement with them, Perron added. “We are exploring this as part of our discussion in mobile space too. One thing is using the platform [Windows Phone] itself, and another is ‘what can we deliver on top of it?’”



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Windows Phone 8 Gets Xbox Video, Xbox Music

Are you a Windows Phone 8 user that desperately needs official Microsoft apps for everything in your life? Well, the last two holdouts – video and music – are finally getting official apps.

Microsoft announced today that Xbox Video is finally available on Windows Phone 8. Like the app on PC and Xbox One, Xbox Video for Windows Phone 8 allows users to stream or download any number of movies and TV shows to their device. The app also pulls Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic ratings for those who just aren’t sure if they would like Pacific Rim (Spoilers: You will).

As for TV shows on Xbox Video, Microsoft touts the ability for users to purchase a season pass. This allows to pay a single upfront fee and download each new episode of a TV series as soon as it airs.

inally, Xbox Video for Windows Phone 8 offers SmartGlass functionality with Xbox 360 and Xbox One. You can use the app as a remote or to pull information about the film while watching it on your TV via your console.



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