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Is Motorola saving money by skipping Windows Mobile 6.5?

Publié: mai 26, 2009, 9:55pm CEST par Tim Conneally

By Tim Conneally, Betanews
According to documents purportedly leaked by AT&T, a Motorola handset originally slated to run Windows Mobile has changed Operating Systems mid-stream, and will be released with Android by the end of 2009's third quarter. The "Iron Man," or "Heron" as it's called on the AT&T document, includes all the Windows Mobile specs (IE6, Pocket Outlook, Exchange ActiveSync) with the caveat "Specifications subject to change due to move to Android."
Both Motorola and AT&T declined comment today.
Motorola's handset division is expected to weather $1.2 billion worth of cutbacks and restructuring this year, which began last January with a staff reduction of 4,000. Part of that round of layoffs included 77 employees in the company's Plantation, Florida facility, all of whom were working on the Windows Mobile platform. The company said it would no longer conduct development on the platform there.
In the company's earnings call shortly thereafter, Motorola co-CEO Sanjay Jha said, "As you know, Windows 6 series is available in 2009 and ...we believe in 2009 Android is more competitive; more of our effort and focus in 2009 is going to Android, but in 2010 when Windows 7 will become available, we will then participate in a more focused way in Windows Mobile 7 in 2010."
Motorola's enterprise mobility solutions run Windows Mobile almost exclusively, with products ranging from the standard mobile handset to PBX-integrated Wi-Fi devices and fleet computers. However, analysts now suggest that Windows Mobile 6.5 offers no incentive for businesses to upgrade, and that Windows Mobile 7 is the next "must-have," if it arrives on time.
In response to Betanews' discussion with analysts about the subject last week, Avi Greengart, Research Director of Consumer Devices at Current Analysis, defended Windows Mobile 6.5 as a viable OS for consumer use.
"While 6.5 isn't a ground-up rewrite of the OS, the consumer-oriented upgrades aren't trivial, either," Greengart told Betanews. "Prior versions of Windows Mobile -- even those with consumer-oriented skins on top like HTC's TouchFLO -- were designed to be used with a stylus, not a finger. Windows Mobile 6.5 makes big strides in making the OS more finger-friendly. Instead of menus, you get rows of icons, and in the most recent build I tested, scrolling and selection were dramatically improved. I also wouldn't underestimate the appeal of App Marketplace; it was always possible to add apps to the platform, but it wasn't always obvious to mainstream consumers exactly where and how to do that (and Apple has done a terrific job educating the market at large about how a rich selection of apps can enhance the value of a mobile platform). Finally, Microsoft is beginning to better take advantage of its various assets and is integrating more Live services into the OS."
So there is potential for increased consumer interest in Windows Mobile 6.5. But Android has much more explosive interest brewing, according to research, and Motorola looks to be ready to capitalize on that. Strategy Analytics this month, for example, predicted that Android would be the second fastest-growing smartphone operating system behind iPhone this year, experiencing a 79% growth rate.
Strategy Analytics' Director Neil Mawtson said, "Android has fast been winning healthy support among operators, vendors and developers. A relatively low-cost licensing model, its semi-open-source structure and Google's support for cloud services have encouraged companies such as HTC, Motorola, Samsung, T Mobile, Vodafone and others to support the Android operating system. Android is now in a good position to become a top-tier player in smartphones over the next two to three years."
Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2009
LTE competition heats up as Swedish MNO opens first site

Publié: mai 26, 2009, 6:48pm CEST par Tim Conneally

By Tim Conneally, Betanews
In Stockholm, Sweden today, mobile network operator TeliaSonera and wireless infrastructure leader Ericsson unveiled the first site in Sweden's forthcoming 4G LTE network, expected to go live in 2010 with deployments in Stockholm and Oslo.
The process has picked up considerable steam recently. It was only four months ago that TeliaSonera announced its first LTE contracts, which included Ericsson and Chinese telecommunications hardware provider Huawei. Just a month later in the US, Verizon named its LTE partners, which also included Ericsson, as well as Alcatel-Lucent, Starent Networks, and Nokia-Siemens.
A comparable "first site" LTE launch from Verizon has long been expected to occur before 2009 is out. If TeliaSonera and Verizon work on similar schedules, Verizon's inaugural LTE site could be launched in early summer.
Of course, LTE competition in Sweden is a bit hotter than it is in the United States. At the LTE World Summit last week, mobile operators Telenor and Tele2 announced their partnership in a joint company called Net4 Mobility which will roll out its own 2.6 GHz LTE network and share the two companies' 900 MHz GSM spectrum. The joint venture will compete with TeliaSonera to be the first to deploy a nationwide LTE network. Lars-Åke Norling, Telenor's CEO said, "It's going to be a fight between us."
Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2009
Vista SP2, Windows Server 2008 SP2 go live

Publié: mai 26, 2009, 6:48pm CEST par Scott M. Fulton, III

By Scott M. Fulton, III, Betanews
Download Microsoft Windows Vista SP2 32-bit RTM from Fileforum now.
Download Microsoft Windows Server 2008 SP2 32-bit RTM from Fileforum now.
It's no longer a test: You can now apply Microsoft's complete updates to 32- and 64-bit versions of Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008, in the release-to-manufacturing form. If you've been testing the recent beta of Vista SP2, you will need to uninstall it first from the Programs and Features control panel. From the dialog box on your system, look for update number KB948465, choose that and click Uninstall.
UPDATE: You could run into a little problem if you installed Vista SP2 and then tried out vLite as a way to slim it down. Apparently some testers have issued complaints or feedback notices, and Microsoft has just issued a bulletin addressing their concerns: Apparently if you removed components from Vista SP2 Beta using vLite, you can't then uninstall those same components again prior to installing the SP2 RTM.
Internet Explorer 8 is not part of this Service Pack. That's not a change from before, though some individuals may rightly be skeptical. Following Microsoft's new policy regarding the marketing and distribution of its Web browser, IE8 is distributed separately.
News of the Service Pack's RTM release comes as Microsoft found itself correcting a holiday blunder, after having issued a bulletin that appeared in testers' inboxes saying that the Windows 7 beta program ends June 1. That's not quite right, as Brandon LeBlanc found himself stating very early this morning: On July 1, not June, the bi-hourly shutdown process for Windows 7 Beta 1 will begin -- meaning, each session will start timing itself for a two-hour maximum. Beta 1 will start completely shutting down on August 1. However, that's for Beta 1, not for the Windows 7 RC. That more updated build (7100) is still being distributed, and it will not start terminating itself in August like Beta 1.
Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2009
To Bing or not to Bing?

Publié: mai 26, 2009, 5:51pm CEST par Scott M. Fulton, III

By Scott M. Fulton, III, Betanews
Focusing on Microsoft's dilemma over how it can compete against Google in a market that Google now solidly owns, blinds one to the bigger problem facing anyone trying to do business on the Internet today, including Microsoft: No one really has a clue as to how the damned thing works.
Arguably, Google may be closer to discovering the clue than anyone. But its clever marketing tactics, which lead the technology press to cover color changes to the Gmail toolbar and the shifting of department names from the bottom to the right side of the corporate logo as strike-up-the-band events, indicate to me that Google is just as indecisive about a viable long-term business plan as everyone else. It's just better at masking that fact.
Google has built its empire on cleverness. Its very name is symbolic of its approach to business from its outset: Throw all available resources at working the problem, until a solution eventually sprouts forth someplace. It isn't an efficient approach to business, but like a password-cracking algorithm, it doesn't have to be. Besides, who else is going to not only come up with a better solution but fund it, manage it, advertise it, and nurture it to health?
Cleverness shrinks in the face of genius. Since the advent of the Web, there's been a palpable anxiety over whether someone in his basement laboratory would stumble upon (to borrow a phrase from a former Google competitor) a realistic formula for long-term business success, that would trump everyone else's clever ploys. It's like the Grand Unified Field Theory -- it's a formula that people believe exists out there in the ether, unwritten. Except that in this case, it's probably simpler, and that gives people cause for concern.
You see, the big problem with the Internet as a medium is that it really hasn't been designed yet. No one knows a way to build a service that is useful and reliable that people will continue to need and want for the foreseeable future, and build a brand around that service. In lieu of a real formula, publishers have come to rely upon the fickle finger of Google for their livelihoods, to steer some fraction of this nebulous mass of traffic in their general direction. And since Google itself doesn't really have a programmed technique for executing this primary business function of the Internet, the task of guessing how Google obtains prime placement for search queries and high-level placement for stories in Google News, or how it obtains the relative value of phrases in AdWords, has become a cottage industry.
It is this field of uncertainty, of not knowing how this thing really works, that gives Google its power. Through no fault of its own, Google is a socialist empire. It thrives upon the equal distribution of resources among its vast multitude of loyal citizens. The New York Times clamors for space alongside The Boy Genius Report in the daily war for territory on Google News, the modern era's Pravda. (This while the real Pravda competes for aggregator space too, with headlines like this from today: "Dog gives birth to mutant creature that resembles human being.") It sets the value of terms, phrases, and concepts on a scale that masquerades as an open market, but whose own customers are never given a clear picture of their dynamics. And it espouses a dogma of equitability that's soothing and appealing to a populace in the throes of a revolution.
But the Internet revolution is ending, and everyone knows it. In the absence of revolution, it takes more than a clever messaging authority to lead an empire. It's time for a capitalist approach, and who knows where that will come from?
Meanwhile, journalists who have become conditioned to covering the minutiae of search engine marketing and Internet portals, are buzzing this morning about Microsoft probably shifting its emphasis from the meaningless "Kumo" domain name to the meaningless "Bing" domain name. And while "Bing" does have the virtue of sounding more like a viable verb -- I can't imagine myself ever Kumo-ing the nearest dry cleaners -- focusing on the branding problem steers attention (perhaps intentionally) away from the bigger issue: The next great search engine must efficiently lead the seeker directly to what she's searching for, must lead demand to supply, must direct client to server. It must be capable of doing what Google, even throwing more servers into its infinite mix, has cleverly avoided ever having to accomplish: simply answering the question.
It could, if it were engineered to do so, not with brute force but with logic. There's a feeling out there that whoever gets the logic gains the keys to the kingdom.
That's why there's more than a pinch of tension and anxiety over the Wolfram Alpha project: because folks know that Google's brute-force approach to connecting a question to a possible answer could someday be outmoded by a brilliant mathematical solution. If a search engine could efficiently answer the query, "I'm five minutes late to an appointment, what's the quickest route to the venue that passes by a store where I can replace my necktie?" then not only would users flock to the service, but (far, far more importantly) businesses would pay good money to be part of the answer to that question.
Newspapers that are suffering today because they can't transfer brand loyalty to the Internet, and which today depend on gaming Google with superlative headlines to get them by from day to day, would probably gamble a great deal of money toward funding a solution that's more than clever, but genius.
Which brings us back to Microsoft, and the giggles, sneers, and coughs generated whenever the term "genius" is brought up in association or mere juxtaposition with the manufacturer of the Zune. It's never had to display real genius in order to succeed, which could by why many believe that Microsoft could yet be clever -- that it could convince the market that it's closer to a real solution, a real business model, than Google or anyone else.
The reason I doubt it -- at least today -- is the same reason I doubt Google has a mission plan when its blogs boast of the shifting of the words in its logo. When we're too easily led to focusing on the minutiae of the matter -- whether to call it Kumo or Bing or Splong or Fyadqorst -- it's probable that there is no big picture for us to be losing sight of. We're discussing no less than the invention of the wheel, and as Angela Gunn's favorite author Douglas Adams put it in a true work of genius, we're arguing over what color it should be.
Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2009
A rocky start for Nokia's Ovi Store

Publié: mai 26, 2009, 4:54pm CEST par Tim Conneally

By Tim Conneally, Betanews
Fulfilling the promise it made in February, Nokia has opened its Ovi Store to most of the world before the close of May. Users of any of 50 different Nokia handhelds can either download the Ovi Store mobile app by selecting the icon in the device's Download Folder, or by navigating to store.ovi.com in their browser.
Like the app stores of competing devices, The Ovi Store offers both free and paid content such as games, videos, podcasts, productivity tools, as well as web-based and location-based services and applications. Apps can be purchased either through operator billing or through direct credit card billing.
Currently, carrier billing is only available in Australia, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Russia, Singapore, Spain and the UK. It is not yet available to United States users, but today AT&T announced that it will be opening the Ovi Store to US customers "later this year."
Though many Nokia handsets are supported, the site breaks down apps into five device profiles: 5800 XpressMusic, 6300, E71, 8GB N95, and "Any Phone." And since the Ovi Store was built from the foundations of other Nokia services, such as Download!, WidSets, and the now-defunct MOSH, there is already a sizable catalog of available content.
Users of these services, however, have noted that among this content, there is almost nothing new and exclusive, referring to it as "mostly crappy wallpapers and ringtones." Further aggravating users is the store's generally poor performance since its launch early this morning.
In theOvi team's blog, product marketing head Eric John wrote, "Shortly after launching the Ovi Store at 2 am ET, we began experiencing extraordinarily high spikes of traffic that resulted in some performance issues for users accessing store.ovi.com and store.ovi.mobi. We immediately began to address this issue by adding servers, which resulted in intermittent performance improvements. We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused Ovi Store users."
Nokia's Ovi Store is the third of the major mobile content stores to open since Apple opened its iTunes app store in July 2008, following the Android Market and BlackBerry App World, and constitutes the fourth in a market which analysts expect only has room enough for five.
Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2009