Tag Archives: windows8

Asus’s Windows RT based Vivo Tablet Priced at $599!

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While many of us are expecting the pricing of ARM powered tablets running Windows RT operating system to be considerably lesser than Their Windows 8 counterparts,but the manufacturers think otherwise.

Asus who recently revealed its Windows 8 offering with their Range of notebooks with their dual display offering starting from$1299,also revealed the pricing for Windows RT based Vivo Tablet,which is priced at $599, that too without the keyboard dock which would burn a couple of hundred buck more!

The Tablet packs in a Quad Core Tegra 3 chipset along with the 2GB of RAM,on a 10.1″ display with resolution of 1366×768,with 32GB of storage capacity.The tablet is available for preorders over newegg,Staples and other Stores,with Sales starting from 26th October.

if we compare this pricing to the base price of ipad it is still $100 more than that and even when compared with its own Android transformer counterpart which costs $499, raises some doubts about exactly how much does Microsoft charge for the Windows RT license.

It would be interesting to see if Microsoft quotes a smaller pricing range for the Surface RT tablets which are slated for release along with the public release of Windows 8 on26th October,which would eventually give the Surface tablets an upper hand against its brothers.

Source:[TheVerge]

Dummies Contest for a Surface Tablet,Hints at a $350(or less) Pricing?

Dummies has been one of the most popular books brand from the late 90′s,well known for its how to books on almost everything,ranging from setting up a PC to developing your first application for the same and many other things in life.

With Windows 8 public release around the corner its just aout time for how to books on the same,Dummies is coming with two books this season with one being “Windows 8 for Dummies” and “Surface for Dummies” and not just that they are holding a giveaway this time around  not just for the books but with a grand prize of Free Surface Tablet !

What makes it more interesting is that,the Contest hints at the Surface pricing as well,with Approximate  Retail value of the prize is being listed as $350.If we cut the books from the total price of the contest then it would bring the pricing further down to an approximately $300 price tag.

Though there is no official word on the Surface Tablet pricing,but as we already know that a couple of weeks ago Steve Ballmer hinted about the $300-800 price range for the surface RT tablets,so this might very well turn out to be the pricing for the entry level surface tablet.

The contest will run Through the last day of the year 31st december 2012 and is only restricted to 50 states in the United States including D.C ,UK and Canada(excluding QueBec).

You  can enter the contest from the official Dummies Contest Page.

Via[Neowin]

Windows 8 to Have a PDF Reader Out Of the Box[Rumor]

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Gone are the days when we used to download the Adobe Reader to open up the PDF files on our Windows XP,Vista or even windows 7 for that matter.

Come Windows 8 we won’t be needing any installations for the Adobe reader after a fresh Windows 8 installation,according to newly leaked screenshots of Windows 8 showing up the start screen UI along with a number of Metro Apps courtesy PCBeta shows up the Reader app and according to the claims the Reader app can be used to open the PDF files.

 

Image Credits[PCBeta]

So if the recent news about the No Plugin Environment for the ARM based devices and the Metro based Internet Explorer 10 is any indication,this might very well turn out to be true.With this no plugin environment they are saving up on the power consumption to make those portable devices more energy efficient as well as giving choice to the desktop app users a choice to use the plugins from the desktop version of the Internet Explorer 10 according to their needs.

 

Long Wait For Windows 8 Tablet Could Cost Microsoft Dearly

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When it comes to Microsoft and their “Tablets”, there has been some undoing which has led to some sort of delay. According to marketing research firm Forrester’s reports, consumer interest in a Windows tablet, even one running Windows 8, has reduced significantly in the last 6 months.

According to the study, Windows 8 is just going to be too late to make an impact. It is suspected to be that, Windows 8 will be, at best, a fifth-rate player in the Tablet Wars, behind even RIM’s BlackBerry PlayBook or HP’s short-lived TouchPad. This could be a valid concern; by the time Windows 8 hits the market, Apple would have already released the third version of their iPad, along with other competitors like Samsung’s Galaxy Tab.

In the first quarter of 2011, a whopping 46% of consumers said that they would prefer a Windows tablet with an interface designed for touch over any of the competing products. Now only 25% of consumers are interested, and it might drop even more before Windows 8 hits the stores sometime next year.

This might again be the case of Microsoft arriving too late to make an impression. Only time will tell whether it will make any sort of  impression on the tablet market or it will be a disaster. Considering how quickly the Kindle Fire came and changed analyst’s projections, who knows what will happen between now and then. Rest assured, if Microsoft doesn’t make it quick they might miss the bus.

windows8developerpreview

[Rumor] HP Testing Windows 8 on TouchPads

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For what we all know HP discontinued their lost child HP TouchPad a couple of months ago as a result of failure  in the initial stages of the tablet sells which were underwhelming sighting the death of the Web OS based Tablet,but when they sold their TouchPads for dirt cheap prices and it worked quite well ,so much so that they even gave the final production a go before the end of the year.

Now we are hearing what possibly could be an amazing news for TouchPad lovers, HP is rumored to be testing out the upcoming version of Windows i.e Windows 8 on their TouchPads as reported earlier by Fox News Channel anchor Clayton Morris,

This is what Clayton Morris  wrote on his official blog ,”Sources at HP tell me the hardware team has been busy doing proof of concept work testing Windows 8 Preview Edition on the fire sale devices. Internally there’s been discussion about reviving the defunct tablets or building new devices with Windows 8 in mind.”

As we all know many of the hackers around the globe are already trying to bring the Android port on the TouchPad,the windows 8 move from HP might very well turn out to be true after seeing the consumer interest in the newly redesigned version of Windows running on Metro UI.

Via[neowin]

 

windows 8 landscape mode

Optimizing Windows 8 For Portrait Mode

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We have seen a lot of Windows 8 Demo’s over the past few weeks after the build conference,but almost all of the videos we saw were in the Landscape mode,mostly because of the demo devices which were provided were widescreen one’s and the Landscape orientation is the ideal one for such screens.

But as we all know Tablet experience doesn’t just end with the landscape mode,there are certain conditions or apps or for that matter games where we have to use the portrait orientation as well.Steven Sinofsky on the building windows 8 blog explained how did they manage to optimize the Landscape as well as portrait Orientation for a complete experience on Windows 8.

One of the reasons behind choosing the Landscape Mode for the demonstrations was,Windows 8 is going to be running on the largest screens in the world to the smallest screens fitting in your hands,that is it will be running on the desktops and the laptops and not just the tablets,so landscape mode is the default mode on those kinds of machines.

Then again the preferences of choosing between the modes again goes with the users personal experience and usability preferences.While landscape mode is preferred mostly for viewing the videos with the widescreen experience,the preferences changes when one is browsing through portrait pictures or reading an ebook or for that matter browsing through website(that again depends on what user wants).

So to focus on both the orientation Microsoft created some goals :

  • You can easily rotate your tablet to best suit your task or ergonomic posture.
  • Rotation in Windows is fast and fluid.
  • Windows rotates predictably across the system and apps – keeping the user in control.
  • Developers can easily build high quality and intentional landscape and portrait layouts, depending on the experiences they want to enable.

So to make the transition in the modes efficiently and smooth without any glitches microsoft worked it out by streamlining the path of this transition, from the accelerometer hardware up through the graphics stack to the app.One of the most important parts during which the transition takes place is the animation which projects the transition from landscape to portrait or vice versa,so to make it look smooth and responsive Desktop Window Manager was used to make these kinds of animations.

Checkout the Landscape to Portrait Transition in action:

Image and Video Credits Microsoft

AMD FX Processors Show Improved Performance On Windows 8

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Recently AMD unveiled its new line of AMD FX Processors which go by the name of Bulldozer. The chip is first of its kind made for desktop processor for consumer PCs with an eight core set-up. However, the early reviews for the new Bulldozer processors tell a different tale.

Reviews from web sites such as TechSpot confirm that the new chips don’t even match up to the  performance given by an older Sandy Bridge-based chips from AMD’s main rival Intel.

In light of such comments,AMD has come ahead and notified everyone that these processors do give increased performance on Windows 8 in a new slide promoting the AMD FX processor.According to Xbitlabs , the slide shows that the chip, running on the developer’s preview version of Windows 8, shows better performance running games when compared to Windows 7. The slide shows a two percent increase in Windows 8 when playing Deus Ex: Human Revolution, a four percent increase while playing Battlefield 3 and Call of Duty Black Ops, and a significant 10 percent increase while playing Left 4 Dead 2.

Although,there’s no info on what kind of PC setup was used to run these gaming benchmarks. According to AMD,  the performance boost while running games in Windows 8 is due to the OS’s new scheduler which handles processors with multiple cores more efficiently.

In the end, there are no PC games that can currently access the full eight processors that the new Bulldozer chips have. As of now, it seems that the new AMD FX chips are still not able to match up with Intel’s current line of processors.

windows8developerpreview

[Rumor]Dell and HP in the Race to Bring Windows 8 Tablets As Early As Q3 2012

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It was almost over a month ago when we saw the first glimpse of the Windows 8 the successor to the Windows 7 O.S at the Build conference,with the new Metro UI inspired by the Windows Phones and Start Screen which was tailor made for Tablet usage,not just that but the whole Operating System was highly optimized with reduction in runtime memory usage for better utilization on every machine be it a low configuration one or a high end one.

Though we don’t really have any tentative dates for the official Windows 8 Launch we are always upto covering each and every news for Windows 8,the new entrant in the never ending list of rumors is the upcoming Tablets based on Windows 8 coming as Early as Q3 2012 and we hear that two of the biggies are in the race to bring the Windows 8 Tablet,companies we are talking about here are Dell and HP as reported earlier by Digitimes.

As we all know HP discontinued the Web OS based tablets earlier this year so it was only matter of time till we get to hear about a platform shift from them and if Dell joins in the race we’ll have at least 3 biggies to watch out for Windows 8 based Tablets since we already have Samsung in the running.One more thing to note down here is if the Q3 launch for the tablets then we can expect a parallel Windows 8 launch coinciding with the tablet launch.

 

Microsoft Wastes no time in Launching Skype Site After the Acquisition

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Microsoft launched its new Skype website today.The new site mentions what all new things are going to be introduced,and how Microsoft will take it to another level.

Microsoft announced that Skype is an entirely new business division within Microsoft. Steve Ballmer said that “Skype is a phenomenal product and brand that is loved by hundreds of millions of people around the world” and that Microsoft “look forward to working with the Skype team to create new ways for people to stay connected to family, friends, clients and colleagues — anytime, anywhere.”

Skype CEO Tony Bates will assume the title of president of the Skype Division of Microsoft immediately, reporting directly to Ballmer. The Skype division will continue to offer its current products to millions of users globally. Longer term, Skype will also be integrated across an array of Microsoft products to broaden Skype’s reach and accelerate its growth as a fundamental way people communicate online. Skype employees will continue to be located around the world in offices including Estonia, the Czech Republic, Russia, Sweden, the United Kingdom, Luxembourg, Japan, Singapore, Hong Kong, and the United States.“By bringing together the best of Microsoft and the best of Skype, we are committed to empowering consumers and businesses around the globe to connect in new ways,” Bates said. “Together, we will be able to accelerate Skype’s goal to reach 1 billion users daily,” Bates said.

Microsoft had already promised on making Skype available for its Windows Phone 7 users Mango update and it seems that they will eventually fulfill their promise.However, Microsoft has wasted no time adding Skype to its wide range of products although, if you want to download Skype you will realize that it still directs you to old Skype page.

Checkout the Microsoft Skype Site