TechWay

When Kinect was re-announced at Day 0 of the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3), Microsoft released no pricing for the Xbox 360 addon. Now, in addition to GameStop, Amazon, Best Buy, and Walmart are all taking the liberty of pricing $150 for the device without any hesitation. Even though it’s not an official pricing, and even taking into consideration that pre-order prices can change, it sure makes the dreaded $149 MSRP look very real.

Source: Amazon, Best Buy, Walmart

One of the selling points of Windows 7 when it came out was the irresistible touch pack, a suite of applications designed for multi-touch, which only just came out as an optional user download. Before today, only OEMs had access to the suite, deciding whether they wanted to include the pack with their PC. There were leaks, but there no official release to the general public. You still will need a touch screen, not a mouse for the free apps to work. The pack is divided as three games and three Microsoft Surface apps, designed for Windows 7.

The download is a whopping (but understandable) 240MB, and is available at the Microsoft download site.

Source: The Windows Blog

What you see above is the Earth Hour style of Bing…which is today’s pictures only with lights off. Quoting ourselves from two posts ago, “it’s nice that Microsoft wants to spread the cause of saving the environment, but for those who did their research will know that it will use more energy to show black on flat panel screen that it does for other colors.”

Click the jump to see how it looked like a few hours ago (or simply scroll down). Read the rest of this entry →

Bing has announced yesterday that it will turn off the lights on their search site by making it darker, similar to what Google did 2008. It’s nice that Microsoft wants to spread the cause of saving the environment, but for those who did their research will know that it will use more energy to show black on flat panel screen that it does for other colors. Microsoft does note this by saying that “While a darker version of our page doesn’t save any energy over the regular version, we wanted to do our part to help spread the word“, but they add insult to injury by not removing the black until 9:30am Pacific tomorrow. This goes great for their company image, but why do the opposite of what you actually want represent?

The image above is Bing’s image for the day, but not what they will use for Earth Hour. The Earth Hour site will be shown at 8:30pm Eastern time.

MIX 2010 started, and one thing quickly grabbed everyone’s eye: Windows Phone 7 Series Marketplace, and it’s sexy. Besides from its charming good looks, it has support for ad supported content, operator billing, and credit card charges. There’s also a try before you buy option similar to what Android has to offer, but developers get to pick the terms and the fine detailed things, like time of trial. The UI looks identical to rest of the well-polished OS and has a panoramic view where the user can see categories and titles, as well as get more information on their app that they’re seeking, including pricing, screenshots, reviews, and ratings.

Who are among the first to launch their apps for Windows Phone 7 Series? Well, these guys:

AWS Convergence Technologies, WeatherBug, Citrix Systems Inc., Clarity Consulting Inc., Cypress Consulting, EA Mobile, Fandango Inc., Foursquare Labs Inc., frog design inc., Glu Mobile Inc., Graphic.ly, Hudson Entertainment Inc., IdentityMine Inc., IMDb.com Inc., Larva Labs, Match.com LLC, Matchbox Mobile Ltd., Microsoft Game Studios, Namco Networks America Inc., Oberon Media Inc., Pageonce Inc., Pandora Media Inc., Photobucket Inc., PopCap Games Inc., Seesmic, Shazam Entertainment Ltd., Sling Media, SPB Software Inc., stimulant, TeleCommunications Systems Inc., Touchality LLC and Vertigo Software Inc

A nice, smooth set of first developers, but unless the platform gets lots of good apps quickly, it won’t be going anywhere. One of the biggest selling points on the iPhone is apps, over 140,000 of them. When a consumer is deciding whether to buy a WP7S phone or iPhone, one thing that they’ll think over is apps. Since apps extend what the phone can do, the consumer might be attracted more to the iPhone if the app catalog is as skimpy as the Zune HD’s catalog.

Oh, and it’s the only way to install apps on your Windows Phone.

We’ll know more soon, and keep checking back for the latest.

At The Engadget Show, Aaron Woodman, director of consumer experiences for Microsoft’s mobile division, shocked the world by pulling out a LG prototype phone running Windows Phone 7 Series. You can view all the pictures of the phone here.

There’s not much for specs, but it is a trifle bit thicker than an iPhone or Nexus One, has six hardware buttons, a slide out QWERTY keyboard, and a 5MP camera. He wouldn’t confirm it had any Mac support, but he didn’t toss it to the curb. At least now we have an idea for the future of Windows Mobile hardware.

Update: There’s also a short snippet of it being on the Engadget Show. See below.

Source: Engadget.

Microsoft’s Arc mouse is a real wonder. Presumably designed to accompany the Arc Mouse, it has a crazy warped design – and that’s it, oh, and there’s no number pad. Another pic and blockquote after the break.

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Click the jump for split-second coverage of the Ballmer keynote. Keep in mind I wasn’t in the actual room and was relying on a stream, which censored some parts of GameRoom and Halo: Reach. Either way, we got most of it covered, so why not take a peek?

Update: And that’s a wrap! Click the jump to see the archive!

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Ballmer is set to talk at CES in about one hour and twenty minutes, and if you’re not in Las Vegas right now, you can watch the live press stream here (Stream closed). Updated Read the rest of this entry →

If you don’t remember, Microsoft’s appeal was denied in the case against them filed by i4i, and now Microsoft has to stop selling Microsoft Office Word on January 11. The patent that was violated (manipulating a document’s content and architecture separately) did not seem to be used in OpenOffice, and previous or current Microsoft Word copies, owners of which can breathe easy. Click the jump to see what Microsoft wants to do to keep Word in a store near you. Read the rest of this entry →