Of Phones, Clouds, Service Packs and Other Essential Things

Windows Phone 7

Ok, I’ve talked a lot recently about Windows Phone 7, but as actual phones are being handed out to reviewers and developers in anticipation of a holiday season release there looks to be a lot to talk about here that may (or as some argue may not) affect the smart phone market.

There have been many reviews of the phone today, some of them good examinations of the pros and cons of the device, others obvious hatchet jobs by people who are just not going to accept the device as a legitimate contender in the space no matter what Microsoft offered. But what are the actual facts of what the device does and doesn’t offer.

The phone is a complete, from the ground up, overhaul. It builds on new technologies and UI designs that have been introduced to the marketplace over the past several years and offers up some new envisioning of how a mobile device should act and look. If you have a windows live account (and I think most of us do for some reason or another) you find that simple configuration of the account can lead to an aggregation of information on your phone that you may love or equally may hate.

The device collects specific types of information and pulls them together so that they are all in one place. Contacts, messaging, music, videos, etc. The obvious example are pictures. On other devices, if you want to look at pictures in flicker, for example, you have to start up the flicker application and go view them. Then if you want to look at pictures on Facebook, you leave the flicker application, go to the Facebook application and then view them there.

On the Windows Phone devices, all of your pictures from all of these places will be in one hub application. You can see all of your pictures, your friends pictures, anything you have access to will be accessible from a single place. This is both compelling and equally concerning. That may just be too much data. Having silos of data, like pictures, may be more organizational for some people. Will the experience be a good one for you or a bad one? It is going to depend on the individual.

The experience is a lot of good and bad with it at the same time. Another good example is how you get data on and off of the device. Windows Phone includes a Zune feature of being able to wireless sync your device with your computer over a wireless network. This is simply a great idea. Couple that with access to a Zune Pass for music and a Marketplace that will allow you to purchase music and video and podcasts as well, actually physically connecting the device to your computer with a cable seems passé.

However, if you want to get pictures off of your device? You must use the Zune software. And as good as that software is, things like Photo Gallery and other imaging collection programs are much better at tagging and organizing your photos than the current version of Zune. For an inexplicable reason, Microsoft is not allowing the device to be seen by the system as an imaging device that you can pull data off of, without going through the Zune software first.

The good and the bad. It appears to be the story with this first iteration of the device. Of course, the iPhone had many similar issues with it when it first came out and most of them were fixed with updates relatively quickly. The question is, can Microsoft fix those issues as quickly? Or, honestly, quicker, because they are already playing from behind, leisure is not something that Microsoft can afford at this stage in the game.

INTUNE

Microsoft’s push into the cloud computing arena has been turned up a notch with the beta release (and expansion) of their InTune product. What is InTune? Well, that’s the question many people I’ve talked to have asked when I’ve mentioned this technology to them. It is essentially an online system designed to manage your workstations from the cloud. From inventory to patching, anti-malware to basic troubleshooting, monitoring and policy configuration, this is designed for smaller and mid-sized businesses to manage their workstations without having to build up a group of servers onsite to provide that functionality.

The cost will be $11 per month per device managed by this service and the final version is expected to be available in early 2011. You can learn more at http://www.microsoft.com/online/windows-intune.mspx.

Windows 7 and Server 2008 R2 Service Pack 1 Beta

The beta of Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 Service Pack 1 has been released and is now in testing across the Microsoft-verse. It comes in both a web installer (which loads a small executable and then downloads the files it needs to install later) and an offline installer that includes all files in a large 500M executable.

For Windows 7 users, there is nothing here of note. No new functionality is introduced, it is simply a collection of previous fixes into one file. However, for Windows 2008 R2 administrators, both very exciting to anyone concerned with virtualization. Dynamic Memory and RemoteFX.

Dynamic Memory allows memory on a physical host to be distributed to virtual machines running on that host, well, dynamically.

RemoteFX, on the other hand, is a feature that makes server-side GPUs appear to VDI clients as a local resource and extends rich media to thin clients. It’s an enhancement to the Remote Desktop Protocol in RDS.

You can get SP1 at http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/evalcenter/ff183870.aspx?itpid=mscomsl. Remember, if you choose to install, it is a beta. And make sure to run Windows Update after installation, there is already a fix. Finally, if asked, you ARE a developer.

Windows Live Essentials

Finally, Windows Live Essentials 2011 beta has been released and is a strong and compelling, dare I say essential, collection of software to add to your Windows environment. Let’s take a look at what is new.

First, most of the applications now sport the ribbon interface.

Next, Windows Live Photo Gallery has some welcome enhancements, including adding face recognition to people tagging. This was promised a while back and it appears to actually work pretty well. Select a photo of a person and tag it as them and WLPG will start recognizing that face in other photos and either suggest tagging them or tag them for you automatically.

It also supports geotagging and allows you to provide local information for photos lacking geotags. Enhancements to the editing are included as well as is the ability to use a feature that Microsoft calls Photo Fusing. This allows you to combine the best parts of two, or more, photos into a single image. If you have taken 3 pictures of a group of people and each one has someone blinking, you can now combine those photos into a single one with everyone having their eyes open.

Moviemaker adds several features as well, speeding up and slowing down video and visual effects that include real time previews of the new effects as you mouse over them. Captions are easier to add from within the application and more options for publishing your videos to Facebook and YouTube.

Windows Live Messenger, Writer and Mail are improved as well, including more support for social networking.

But the largest change in this version from the past is the replacement of Live Mesh with an updated Live Sync. Live Sync only offers 2GB of online storage (that comes out of your SkyDrive) but provides the ability to sync across pcs (and pc-mac) directly without going through the online environment as Mesh did previously, as well as offers up remote access between computers running Live Sync. You can also view the status of your devices at devices.live.com.

Overall, the updates to the pieces of Windows Live are welcome and make them even more powerful, especially at their announced price, free. I would recommend everyone take a look at the latest beta (which now allows you to select which parts of Live Essentials you want to install) at http://explore.live.com/windows-live-essentials-beta.

July 30, 2010 Posted in: Uncategorized