Few days ago we posted some cool Windows Phone 7 App demos and we can sense the exponentially increasing excitement among Microsoft fans now that the Windows Phone 7 is about to be released. However, we were not certain of exactly when. Until now.

According to Pocketlint, Windows Phone 7 will be launched on October 11, 2010 in an event in New York and the Windows Phone 7 based devices will go on sale later that month. Loads of devices from major manufacturers like Samsung, HTC, Dell, Asus, LG are waiting for WP7.

Windows Phone 7 is an upcoming mobile platform developed my Microsoft and is expected to be a tough competitor to other mobile OSes like iOS, Android, WebOS and the like.

Ok I am still not sure whether this is authentic or not but it surely is exciting. A video showing the new user interface of the much anticipated Internet Explorer 9 has surfaced the Internet. To believe the video’s description, it is an actual IE9 Beta installation.

Just a few weeks ago, a leaked screenshot of IE9 created stir across the interwebs, specially among Microsoft fans. Now that the official Beta release is just around the corner, one needs a very strong reason to prove this video as fake. Have a look:

Well, what do you think? [src: Softpedia]

As of now, Microsoft has released 4 ‘platform previews’ of the upcoming browser Internet Explorer 9 that showcased some of the highly anticipated features backed up by super efficient Javascript engine named ‘Chakra’ and latest standards like HTML5 and CSS3. But, until now, major UI elements in those builds were mostly missing. We can suspect Microsoft to unveil it on the day of the first Beta release which is in about 3 weeks from now.

However, Microsoft Russia ‘mistakenly’ posted the interface screens on their press website with some hazy information about the new browser. Although it was taken down immediately, many sites have managed to capture a glimpse of what’s coming:

The interface looks hugely ‘inspired’ by Google Chrome and Firefox 4 with major changes like the absence of the title-bar, integration of address-bar and search-bar, slimmer menu bars, etc. IE9 is also expected to include a feature that will recognize ‘protected’ sites as windows applications which can be moved to the task-bar and can be treated independently.

The performance of the ‘platform previews’ definitely impressed me and it’s only about time Microsoft makes a super ergonomic UI for the browser that holds the greatest share in the market. Is it the dawn of the yet another major browser war? What do you think about the new IE9 interface?

Not that I really care about this, but Microsoft did roll out the Live Hotmail Wave 4 afterall. It’s been a long wait for Hotmail fans but now they can ride the all new Hotmail. Here is a video showing the new features implemented in the new Hotmail. Currently I am checking out what’s in store for me and may be you should do the same

Last year Microsoft released its flagship product Windows 7 and it’s been doing really great. And by great I mean seven Windows 7 copies are being sold every second. Amidst all the excitement, Microsoft mistakenly leaked some docs that shows the anatomy of the new version of Windows – Windows 8. Currently the information is too scarce to strongly claim anything about the new Windows but ofcourse, it’s enough to set the imagination rolling.

When?

According to the documents, Microsoft plans to deliver Windows 8 around June, 2012 with the first betas around June, 2011. Presently, Windows 8 is supposed to be going through the planning phase shortly after which, the list of features will be decided. By Dec 2010, the core development based on those features is expected to commence followed by internal code sharing among dev units to make a considerably functional beta product by June 2011.

Next comes, obviously, the bug fixing phase and tweaking the features based on the feedback from the betas. The final product is expected to be ready by June 2012.

Platforms?

Microsoft aims to develop Windows 8 for 3 different configurations, the ‘Lap PC’ which includes laptops, netbooks and tablets, the ‘Workhorse PC’ which I believe to be enterprise PCs used at workplaces and ‘Family Hub PC’ which are home desktops.

What comes alongwith?

It is confirmed that Windows 8 will feature Internet Explorer 9 and Windows Live Wave 5 will roll out simultaneously with the release of Windows 8.

Windows App Store: Similar to the ‘Software Center’ in Ubuntu or the Apple app store, Microsoft aims to launch Windows Store where users can find and download hundreds of application software certified with full compatibility with Windows 8. The app store, what I believe, will also feature web applications and also the applications for the Windows Phone 7, making it the one stop shop for everything Microsoft.

Multimedia:

Microsoft will naturally improve and enhance multimedia in Windows 8 by providing native support to 3D Video, AVC HD, various MP4 web formats, H.264 encoding, MPEG2 decoding / encoding and also HTML5 audio/video.

Hardware support: 

Windows 8 is expected to natively support latest hardware, devices and standards including USB 3.0, Bluetooth 3.0.

New Sensors and Location:

We saw a great leap in man-machine-location interaction in Windows 7 with sensors. Microsoft aims to improve it to another level. Windows 8 will use a new inbox location service, called ‘Orion’, to find geo-location with 50-100 meter accuracy. If you have a dedicated GPS hardware, the accuracy further increases to an unbelievable 3-20 meters.

Support for other sensors include facial recognition, orientation, accelerometer, attention detection, human presence and many more. The leaked document further states the scenarios where these natively supported sensors would make life easy. Imagine walking into the room and the PC automatically detects your presence, starts itself, does a facial recognition and logs you in your own user account. And when you get up and go away from your PC, it shuts itself down…all automatically!

More details about Windows 8 are sure to surface in the coming weeks. All the information above has been gathered and compiled from the information available from Mashable, MSFTKitchen, Paul Thurrott and CNET. We will keep you informed about the latest Windows 8 news.

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Soon after Microsoft unleashed Kinect (formerly Project Natal), tons of blogs and websites came up with its expected price hovering mostly around $150. Yesterday, Kinect sensor for Xbox made its official entry to the Microsoft Store and is indeed priced at $149.99.

However, there is a note that says the prices are subjected to change. But, that’s a rare case scenario. For those who don’t know, Kinect is an additional sensor to Microsoft Xbox that brings in unprecedented gaming experience. Requiring no traditional game controllers, Kinect does a full-body tracking of the gamer, captures the movements and then manipulates the game accordingly. Kinect is compatible with all Xbox 360 systems with a minimum 175MB of memory.

I’d say No. Yes, that was my answer when I first created a Hotmail account 10 years ago and it is the same now. It’s been around half a year since we are hearing about the Live Wave 4. There has been a lot of talk all around the internet and Microsoft did roll out some videos featuring the Wave 4 – the revamped Windows Live Essentials suite and Hotmail. But is it really worth the wait? Especially when we have better options already at our disposal?

To be very frank, when I first saw the official video of the Hotmail Wave 4 featurette, it urged me to at least check what’s in store for me. But all I have been seeing since months are the never ending screenshots of the Wave 4 on sites like LiveSino and random posts on Microsoft blogs about the upcoming features without getting the real taste of it. Now that the Hotmail Wave 4 is said to have been rolled out a couple of days ago, it’s pathetic to see no one (at least I don’t know of anyone) actually getting the update. Is it so hard for a giant like Microsoft to deal with any kind of difficulty whatsoever, to roll the update simultaneously for all users?

I have never been a ‘Live’ fan. The interface and the navigation of the whole ‘Live Services’ arena is very mediocre and that’s just me using a euphemism for downright horrible. Ah.. and not to mention the occasional requests from strangers to join your network. I hoped the Wave 4 update will be able to atleast rectify the glitches, let alone new features, but looking at the delay being caused just to slip out an update, I seriously doubt the level of efficiency of Microsoft.

What are your views about Live Hotmail Wave 4? Is it really worth the wait? Will it be efficient enough to compete with the security and swiftness of Gmail?

Recently we did a post about a seemingly fake site offering pre-orders for Microsoft’s Natal. There we even quoted what might be the actual price tag of the same. Turns out, our estimate was right – Yes, Microsoft’s Project Natal is likely to be released on Oct 26th with $149 price tag for the stand-alone unit.

A ‘trusted source’ of a Game Industry Network, Edge-Online, reported the exclusive news and also stated that the motion sensing camera will also be bundled with the console for $299. This is certainly awesome because, right now, the XBox 360 Arcade system itself is priced around $199. Add to it the motion sensing camera (the Natal standalone unit) priced at $149, the whole bundle could have been around $350. So my point is, Microsoft did get the pricing right.

Also, the standalone unit, won’t certainly be called ‘Natal’. I am sure Microsoft would have thought of a much cooler, market-friendly name for it and should officially unveil more details at the world-premiere event on June 13th.

The first two weeks of June this year will be pretty exciting. With Apple’s WWDC on June 7 where the iPhone 4G await its grand ceremony followed by Natal’s world-premiere on June 13th, we are surely going to have a nice time.

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Seems like Microsoft doesn’t want to mess up on anything with IE9 by making it as much compliant with the web standards. After CSS3 and HTML5, it’s VP8 to get Microsoft’s support. And this really matters because Internet Explorer has a significant user base and IE9 is going to be huge. For those who don’t know, VP8 is a highly efficient video compression technology, developed by On2 Technologies (now owned by Google).

WindowsTeamBlog confirmed today that IE9 will support VP8 video along with H.264. It read,

…we want to be clear about our intent to support the same markup in the open and interoperable web. We are strongly committed to making sure that in IE9 you can safely view all types of content in all widely used formats. When it comes to video and HTML5, we’re all in. In its HTML5 support, IE9 will support playback of H.264 video as well as VP8 video when the user has installed a VP8 codec on Windows.

Do notice the clause- ‘when the user has installed VP8 codec’. This means that VP8 support will not be out-of-the-box. However, what matters is the support for an evolving web technology. It surely goes without saying that IE9 will hence support WebM. For WebM, this is the time to rejoice as it has two giants, Google and Microsoft, on it’s side. We have covered a post on WebM where you can also find the download links to the nightly builds of major browsers supporting WebM.

Without beating about the bush, let me just put my shock and awe into words. A Swedish site, WebHallen has already started allowing people to pre-order the Microsoft’s Project Natal device for about $200. A Twitter user, Dovella, first pointed this out.

Now let me tell you folks, if this were Ebay or Amazon, I would shout out loud, but this doesn’t seem like a ‘real’ deal. For one, Natal is so big a project that Microsoft wouldn’t just allow pre-ordering without creating a stir in the inter-webs and second, I don’t think Microsoft would price it that high. We assume Natal to be priced at around $130 to $160.

We don’t have a word from Microsoft as of yet, apart from the fact that Natal will be out in October this year. We can expect an official announcement in a couple of weeks. Till then, it’s advisable to refrain from sites offering pre-orders.