windows 8

The Seattle Times interviewed CEO Steve Ballmer recently and the man behind Microsoft is sounding quite confident about this year’s upcoming launches.

During the interview, Ballmer gave his impression of how momentous this year’s launch line-up will be for Microsoft and he even pulled out two Lumia 920 phones from his pockets. Many have speculated wildly on this interview in relation to Surface pricing, so we thought it was time we looked at what exactly was said…

New name-changes to Windows 8 could come down to Windows Phone 8 in China

Less than 24 hours ago, Microsoft opened up the much anticipated app submissions to the Windows 8 store. However, the great news has been thwarted by Microsoft's new app naming policy.

We have already seen with the initial announcement of Windows Phone 8 that Microsoft is much more serious about building enterprise features into their next OS. Along with better security through full device encryption and secure-boot technologies Microsoft will allow business to deploy apps directly to the phone.

Currently the only way to manage a Windows Phone device is through the ActiveSync framework but this isn’t able to provide the level of granularity that micro-managing Systems Administrators need. Microsoft has now revealed that their In Tune product will provide the one stop shop for device management for Windows Phone 8 and also WinRT tablets. Hopefully this should mean much wider adoption of Windows Phone in the enterprise considering it will play nicely with existing Microsoft technologies.

Could we finally see a Windows 8-powered NOOK?

With Amazon wooing the world late last week with their new Fire and PaperWhite tablets (and eReader), many have been left wondering what Barnes & Noble’s response would be. The online book retailer has slashed prices recently on their NOOK tablets, paving the way for a new holiday refresh and release.

Now, sources to the site Digital Trends have confirmed with them that in late September in Union Square, New York, the company will unveil a new Nook tablet rumored to be powered by Windows 8.

By now it’s old news that the Zune Desktop as we know it will be phased out—in fact we’ve seen features already removed over the last few months.  What was to replace it though was always a bit of a mystery though there are only so many options available.

Now an image has leaked out of what appears to be the ‘companion app’ for Windows Phone and Windows 8—think of it as Zune Desktop the next generation. There's really not too much to the image though we suppose it is better than nothing.

Is this a new Nokia Tablet with Windows 8?

It appears that Nokia may have more than just new phones to show off next week in New York City. According to the site WPDang, internal images from Nokia show what appears to be a full on Windows 8 Tablet in a "a mysterious Banner map" hidden on the site.

The actual device body is mostly out of view but instead what we see is a rather large display with Windows 8 tiles, including one for ‘Desktop’. In addition, what appear to be new high Symbian devices are also shown, meaning Nokia may not yet be done with that OS yet either.

Of course this could be an error in a render, though we would like to think that Nokia would not make such an obvious an amateur mistake...

Listening to podcasts on the go is one of my favorite pastimes, a great way to catch up with the latest news or a special interest. For those of us who reside outside of North America, podcast support has been a bit limited to say the least. Unlike our pals in the US, we cannot subscribe to podcasts through the marketplace on either Zune desktop software or directly using the phone. Annoying, but Mango at least introduced a half-workable solution. Unfortunately, after the Tango update it’s no longer possible to use that either.

To subscribe to podcasts prior to Tango, first we needed to set them up in the Zune desktop suite. Once subscribed, simply plugging in the phone and synchronising would pass the podcast to it. Podcasts would the automatically download without further PC interaction. Alas, this is now not the case. What’s going on?

Mark your calendar, October is shaping up to be a busy month for Microsoft. Rumors have surfaced for release dates for both Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8.

Okay... we've known for some time that the general availability for Windows 8 is October 26th. It now appears that on October 25th, there will be a Microsoft launch event for Windows 8 and the Surface RT in New York City. No specifics on the event as of yet but Windows 8 and the Surface tablets should become available at midnight following the event.

Samsung has just announced their range of Windows 8 devices. We have already touched on the ATIV S and Tab rumors earlier and now we know a whole lot more about what Samsung has in store. Samsung is no strangers to producing Windows PCs and looks like they are taking their duties very seriously with this latest line up.

The three devices we’re most interested in are the ATIV Tab, Samsung's super thin WinRT device, the ATIV Smart PC Pro and ATIV Smart PC running the full fat version of Windows 8. Aside from the ATIV tab they will have the detachable keyboard that’s looking to be the in thing with Windows 8 devices.  These three new tablets join the ATIV S Windows Phone to complete the Samsung ATIV lineup.