HTC Unveils Beautiful Touch Diamond Phone
HTC announced the latest phone in its growing high quality Touch series, the Touch Diamond, which comes with a pretty piano black finish, some cool new interface elements on top of Windows Mobile, like “lets users sort and view e-mail like stacks of letters, receive animated weather forecast graphics, and look at pictures as though they’re in a roll of film”, as well as a 3.2 megapixel camera, GPS and HSDPA.
Live Messenger Facebook Application
Microsoft has released an official Facebook application that lets you access Windows Live Messenger and chat with your Live IM contacts on Facebook. Visitors to your Facebook profile can send you IMs right from the page.
MS’s Greg Linden on News Personalization
I always find what Greg Linden has to say interesting, but now that he works on god-knows-what at Live Labs at Microsoft, it takes on even more importance. Read his paper on personalizing and customizing the news.
New Zune Probably Won’t Block Downloaded TV Shows
There was a rumor going around that Microsoft was planning on an agreement with NBC that would put NBC’s shows on the Zune in return for a form of active DRM that actually blocked non-copyprotected downloaded copies of NBC shows from being loaded and watched on a Zune. It was a pretty horrible idea, and Microsoft is making it very clear that they had no such plans.
Microsoft Discontinues SPOT Watches
Microsoft’s technology push to get smart watches with MSN Direct updates delivered by radio frequencies has ended, with MS discontinuing the product due to it never catching on with consumers. I always wanted one, though the large size and limited selection whenever I shopped for them kept me putting it off.
Grand Theft Auto IV Breaks Sales Records
GTA IV broke Halo 3’s sales record, selling 3.6 million units on day one, totaling $310 million in revenue in a single day (compared to Halo’s $300 million). That of course, is double what the highest opening weekendrecord for the film industry is. First week sales were $500 million.
Zune Video Store Starts Rolling Out Microsoft started delivering a video store for Zune owners, releasing a version 2.5 Zune store update that allows users to download TV shows for now, and later movies.
Get IE8 Activities In Firefox
One of the new features in Internet Explorer 8 is Activities, which lets you contextually use the information on a page with other services, and because it uses some generally open formats, someone’s already adapted it for other browsers. This Firefox extension lets you practically seamlessly use Activities in Firefox, so check it out.
Microsoft’s Extreme Server Makeover Check out this video, spoofing Extreme Home Makeover for the IT world. It’s weird in places, but just watch it, k?
How To Tell If Your PC Supports Hibernation Milo explains how to use POWERCFG.exe to tell if your Windows Vista PC supports hibernation mode, as well as what other power modes your PC supports. It’s an extremely useful tip if you’re running into some power troubleshooting issues.
Halo 3 Heroic Map Pack Now Free
If you’re getting bored of playing Halo online, you’ll be pleased to know that one of its map packs is now free. The price has been dropped 100% on the “Heroic” map pack, giving you three new multiplayer maps for the sweet price of nothing. Enjoy.
Microsoft Releases Popfly Game Creator
Microsoft released a game creator that lets you use Popfly, their free mashup creation tool, to create Silverlight-based games that can run on webpages, Facebook, the Vista Sidebar, pretty much anywhere.
GTA IV Breaks UK Sales Record
Grand Theft Auto 4 sold 631,000 copies on launch day in the UK alone, beating San Andreas’ record from four years ago by over 100 thousand units. The Xbox 360 version beat the PS3 version by 101,000 copies sold, and 360 console sales were up 125%.
Microsoft announced tonight it will not be going forward with its plan to buy Yahoo, after it was clear the two sides could not agree on a price, and Steve Ballmer elected not to risk his entire career on the deal.
Here are some links about the news:
Here’s Microsoft’s press release announcing the decision. It’s clear that Microsoft raised its offer to $33 (effectively adding $4 to the deal, based on stock value, or $5 billion, and Yahoo wanted another $4, a total of $10 billion over the original offer, which Microsoft believed was unworkable.
Now with the deal off, it looks like Yahoo could announce a deal to give its ad business to Google as early as this week. Perhaps Microsoft plans to let Google get Yahoo, and thus almost the entire market, then try to bury their big competitor under an avalanche of antitrust complaints.
