Has Microsoft Finally Killed Windows XP ?

Is the operating system that refuses to die... dead ?

By Preston Gralla, Computerworld

Microsoft's most successful operating system in its history, Windows XP, refuses to die, no matter how many stakes Microsoft drives through its heart. But now it appears that Microsoft's work is paying off: For the first time, Windows 7 market share has topped that of XP in the U.S.

Computerworld's Gregg Keizer reports that an Irish Web analytics company, StatCounter, says that Windows 7 average daily share of all U.S. usage bested that of XP for the first 10 days of April, 32.2% to 30.7%.

In January, Microsoft said that it had sold 300 million Windows 7 licenses.

For years, Microsoft has been trying to kill of Windows XP. Vista certainly couldn't do it. But now it looks as if Windows 7 may be the silver bullet that does it.

Why should Microsoft care whether XP dies? The obvious first reason is operating sytsem revenue. If people continue to hang onto XP, it means they're not buying newer versions of Windows.

But there's much more than just operating system revenue at stake for Microsoft. Microsoft designs new services, such as Windows Live services and cloud-based services, for the most advanced features of its newer operating systems. If people still use XP, that means they won't be able to use all of these new features, which in turn limits Microsoft's potential audience. That means less revenue from those services as well.

In addition, if Windows XP continues to have a sizable number of users, Microsoft needs to spend more money on XP support. It's hoping for the day when it can reduce the money it spends on XP support.

Even though Windows 7 has topped Windows XP use in the U.S. for the first time, XP still beats it worldwide. Keizer notes that one reason is China, in which a high percentage of people still use XP.

Still, Microsoft must be pleased to see that in the U.S., at least, Windows 7 has finally overtaken Windows XP.

XP isn't really dead yet, of course. It's still the most popular operating system in the world, and the second most popular in the U.S. But it's now clear that it's only a matter of time before it eventually fades away.

Canon Pixma MX360 Inkjet Multifunction: Fax, but Few Frills

By Jon L. Jacobi

Color inkjet multifunction printers don't get much more basic than the Canon Pixma MX360. Priced at just $80 (as of April 8, 2011), it offers small doses of print, copy, scan and fax capabilities, but it has no Wi-Fi or ethernet, no media-card slots, and slowish performance. A light-volume small or home office might not mind any of that--and perhaps not even the pricey inks--but the Epson WorkForce 520 provides better speed and economy for just a little more money.

The Pixma MX360 is easy to set up on both the PC and Mac. The control panel is logically laid out and includes scan-to-PC functionality. Unfortunately, while Canon does a nice job of organizing the icons on the color LCDs of its higher-end models, the same approach falters on the Pixma MX360's two-line monochrome display; the icons are too small and hard to decipher. The Canon Pixma MX420 has a somewhat snazzier design but is nearly identical otherwise.

Paper-handling features for the Pixma MX360 are minimal. To its credit, it does sport a 30-sheet automatic document feeder, as well as a letter/A4-size scanner bed. The ADF even pops open for easy clearing of any paper jams that might occur. The vertical rear paper feed holds 100 sheets of plain paper, an adequate amount. In a frustrating twist, however, although you can scan two-sided from either platform, two-sided printing is manual only, and completely unavailable on the Mac.

The Pixma MX360 is a below-average performer, though acceptable for home use. Text pages with a few simple, monochrome graphics printed at 5.6 pages per minute on both the PC and Mac. On the PC, a half-page photo printed at default settings on plain paper took about 26 seconds, or 2.3 ppm. The same photo printed at better settings on Canon's own glossy photo paper took 45 seconds (1.3 ppm). A high-resolution, full-page photo printed from the Mac limped out at the anemic rate of 0.3 ppm. Preview scans took about 6 seconds, and a full scan required about 50 seconds at 600 dpi.

For the most part, PCWorld conducts performance tests and output-quality judging using a printer's default settings. The Pixma MX360 speeds up quite a bit when you switch to its 'Fast' mode, or draft mode, which also saves on ink.

The Pixma MX360's output quality varies. Monochrome printing is the most appealing: Text is crisp and sharp, and grayscale is nicely rendered. Color graphics printed on plain paper look overexposed, with a warm color palette that tends toward pink. On Canon's own glossy paper, the effect isn't as noticeable, but details are still missing in the lighter areas of photos. You can adjust the colors somewhat using the settings under the Effects tab of the printer driver. Scans tended to appear a little dark, but monochrome and color copies looked nice.

Cheap to buy, the Pixma MX360 is not particularly cheap to operate. A single cartridge delivers all three colors (cyan, magenta, and yellow) and costs $21 for a 244-page standard-yield unit, and $27 for a 346-page high-yield unit. At 8.6 and 7.7 cents per page, that's decently priced color at either capacity. Unfortunately, prices of $16 for a standard-yield black cartridge that delivers only 220 pages, and $22 for a high-yield black cartridge, sour the deal. Those prices work out to 7.26 cents per page (very expensive) and 5.5 cents per page (still expensive), respectively.

For light use in a home office, the Canon Pixma MX360 could be a good buy. It delivers the basics for a low initial investment, with black ink costs only slowly eating into the deal over time.

Sony Ericsson Xperia Arc Review

By: Daniel Webster

Xperia: the brand synonymous with Sony Ericsson’s smartphones for the past few years now. In this review of the Xperia Arc we go through what makes this smartphone innovative, fast, fun, and the next must-have device for any photography or movie connoisseur. The Xperia Arc is the first Android cellphone to implement Sony’s Bravia and Exmor R technology from their popular television and digital camera lines. Read on for our review to find out if the Xperia Arc is the next smartphone you will be selecting. 

UNBOXING

 

The Sony Ericsson Xperia Arc comes bundled with all of the essential items to get started. The unlocked international version comes with a wall charger, a microUSB charging/sync cable, a Sony Ericsson-branded stereo headset, and an 8GB microSD card preinstalled. One item not included which would make the Arc experience even better would have been a microHDMI cable. There is minimal documentation to help keep everything eco-friendly. 

HARDWARE

 

Sony Ericsson has integrated some very innovative features usually only found in Sony’s high-end electronics. The newest advancements come from the Mobile Bravia Engine and Sony’s Exmor R CMOS camera sensor. Derived from the Sony television brand, the Mobile Bravia Engine delivers superior image quality while playing games or watching videos. The Exmor R CMOS sensor allows the 8.1-megapixel camera to capture phenomenal still photos and video in normal and low-light situations.

The Xperia Arc gets it name from the concave rear design. The weight and dimensions of the Xperia Arc are 63x125x8.7 millimeters (2.5x4.9x0.34 inches) and a mere 117 grams (4.1 ounces). The exterior of the Xperia Arc is constructed almost exclusively out of glossy metal-flake-textured plastic, with accents of chrome. 

While the Xperia Arc may not win any top awards for groundbreaking processing power, the smartphone is still capable of handling a vigorous load of applications and tasks. The computing muscle comes from a 1GHz Qualcomm MSM8255 processor. This second generation processor also has the ability to render demanding graphics thanks to the Adreno 205 GPU. The Xperia Arc combines the processor with 512MB of ROM (~300MB accessible) and 512MB of RAM. The secondary memory comes from a 8GB microSD card, which is upgradable to 32GB.

The most impressive feature of the Xperia Arc is the 4.2-inch (106.7mm) glass capacitive multi-touch LCD. Being the first Mobile Bravia Engine smartphone, the Xperia Arc produces true-to-life colors and imagery on its FWVGA (480x854 pixels) resolution screen. The Xperia Arc is even able to playback high definition video files up to 720p (downscaling them, of course). 

The cellular radios keeping the Xperia Arc connected include quad-band GSM, along with dual-band UMTS 900/2100 (LT15i model). Other radios include Wi-Fi b/g/n, Bluetooth 2.1 +EDR, an FM radio, and aGPS. The sensors involve the usual Android necessary digital compass, light sensor, proximity sensor, and accelerometer. The ports are comprised of a 3.5mm headphone jack (also used as the FM radio antenna), a microUSB, and a microHDMI. The camera is capable of capturing still photos at 8.1 megapixel and video at 720p HD resolution (a bit lower than other flagship handsets early this year, which feature full 1080p video capture). The battery is a 1500mAh lithium polymer.

SOFTWARE

Sony Ericsson has enriched the user experience of the Xperia Arc by blending Android 2.3 Gingerbread with its proprietary Xperia user interface.

Many default Android applications have been skinned to mimic the XPERIA UI. The included Timescape app makes it easy to view status updates and messages by just swiping a finger up or down on the panels. The Xperia Arc’s video playback is optimized with the assistance of the Mobile Bravia Engine that not only displays clear and crisp video but also allows the playback of 720p HD video files. Other software titles include Asphalt 5, Let’s Golf, LiveWare Manager, Media server, a lite version of OfficeSuite, the Sony Ericsson PlayNow app, Postcard, and TrackID. The unit we reviewed is the Chinese Xperia Arc and has a few other Chinese apps likely unfamiliar to many.

Seeing that there are some applications reminiscent of the Xperia Play, Sony Ericsson may incorporate the PlayStation Suite onto the Arc in the near future.

CAMERA

Having incorporated Sony’s Exmor R CMOS sensor, which is normally found in its digital cameras, the Xperia Arc captures phenomenal still photographs along with excellent 720p HD videos. 

The Exmor R CMOS sensor is larger than most smartphone cameras, thus more light is able to be absorbed producing higher quality photos, particularly in low-light situations. The Xperia Arc’s camera also has a single LED flash. 

PERFORMANCE

 The Xperia Arc is both robust at opening applications and managing tasks with little lag. Video playback is especially smooth even while playing rapid movement or screen transitions. The Xperia Arc scored higher than other comparable Android 2.3 smartphones. The benchmark results yielded average scores of; Quadrant Standard – 1658, Linpack for Android – 38.5 MFLOPS, and Smartbench 2011 – 1340.

BATTERY LIFE

Sony Ericsson must have taken a cue from the Energizer Bunny for Arc, as the battery just keeps going and going. On average the Arc was able to provide enough power for a couple of days with normal application, talk, email, message, and game use. The phone gets all this power from a capacious 1500mAh lithium polymer. Sony Ericsson claims that the battery should provide around 7 hours of talk and 400 hours of standby time. 

 CALL QUALITY/ NETWORK SPEED

Operating on AT&T’s network in the Seattle metropolitan area, the Xperia Arc provided excellent call quality and coverage, even in areas that sometimes drop calls on other smartphones. The noise cancellation technology worked so well that the individual on the other side of the call was oblivious to the highway sounds. Audio was clear and concise with the earphone speaker, speakerphone, and wired stereo headset. 

 

To test the network speed would be unfair because this particular Xperia Arc is the international unlocked version (LT15i), which is unable to utilize any North American 3G/4G bands.

PURCHASING AND AVAILABILITY

The Sony Ericsson Xperia Arc is available in the international unlocked version (LT15i) from Negri Electronics for $689.50. The North American variant, which will have 850/1900/2100 3G bands should be available in the coming months. Stay tuned for more information about release dates.

PROS

+ Screen Quality
+ Camera
+ Battery Life
+ Thin and Light
+ Noise Cancellation

CONS

- Mostly Made of Plastic
- No microHDMI Cable Included
- Some Apps Cannot Be Uninstalled
- MicroSD Card Position

CONCLUSION

As the first Sony Ericsson smartphone to employ Sony’s television and digital camera technologies, the Xperia Arc is rather charming. Anyone who places photography and video playback at the top of their must-have smartphone criteria will be delighted with the Xperia Arc. 

Although beauty is in the eye of the beholder, many would agree that the Arc is both attractive in appearance and performance. That being said, it would have been nice if Sony Ericsson had manufactured the Arc with a bit less plastic.

Intel, on The Outside, Takes Aim at Smartphones

By Laurie J. Flynn

 

With an “Intel Inside” sticker affixed to their PCs, computer buyers in the 1990s could hardly avoid knowing whose microchip was making their machines work. The campaign made Intel one of the most recognizable brands and cemented its position in the PC industry. 

As long as PCs were dominant, Intel was dominant. But it’s now a new world in which tiny hand-held computers, more commonly known as smartphones, are outselling personal computers. 

And usually, there is no Intel inside. 

Instead, the processors in smartphones and tablets these days are more likely to be made by companies that few consumers would recognize, like Qualcomm, Nvidia and Marvell. And those companies are fighting to gain market dominance in much the same way Intel did with chips for personal computers: by making what’s inside the phone matter to consumers. 

“It’s become an arms race, like the early days of the PC industry,” said Chris Jones, vice president and principal analyst at Canalys, a market research company. These chip companies are racing to improve the speed and performance of their processors so they can boast of having the fastest application processor on the market. With smartphones and tablets increasingly performing the tasks of full-size computers, they have an additional obsession: making energy-efficient chips that will prolong the battery life of a mobile device. 

So far, the obsession with speed and energy efficiency has paid off for everybody but Intel. The PC chip giant has been conspicuously late to the mobile market, having canceled plans to ship a smartphone version of its Atom processor after a demonstration of it running in an LG phone over a year ago. 

The difficulty for Intel, say analysts, has been to get its chips’ power consumption down to a level reasonable for a phone. Still, Paul Otellini, Intel’s chief executive, vowed recently that Intel-powered smartphones would be on the market before the year is out. With those phones, Intel hopes to rebuild credibility in a business some customers had thought it would never get right. 

But meanwhile, the company has just recently lost its mobile champion, Anand Chandrasekher, the 24-year Intel stalwart who has long headed up the company’s mobile processor development, including the wildly successful Centrino product that made Wi-Fi a household name. 

While industry analysts were divided on whether Mr. Chandrasekher had resigned or had been pushed out, they were in agreement on one thing: The company has a lot of catching up to do in the mobile market. “It’s clear that Intel’s mobile business is not going as well has they had hoped,” said Linley Gwennap, an industry analyst and head of the Linley Group in Mountain View, Calif. “But this is not an indication of a change of strategy, just of leadership.” 

Intel executives quickly assured the industry that the company remained committed to smartphones, despite the sudden departure of Mr. Chandrasekher. 

Competitors say they will be ready for Intel when it arrives. “I always assume they’ll show up,” said Michael Rayfield, general manager of Nvidia’s mobile group. “All I can do is innovate rapidly to stay ahead.” 

Intel’s competitors are also hoping that a recent decision by Nokia, the largest phone maker, to use Windows Phone 7 rather than the Symbian operating system, will help them fend off Intel, given that the Microsoft program is currently optimized for ARM-based cellphones. “Nokia used to be a nonopportunity for us,” said Jen-Hsun Huang, chief executive of Nvidia. “Our market opportunity just got 33 percent bigger.” 

Qualcomm has the same idea. Anything that expands the “Microsoft phone ecosystem,” said Steven M. Mollenkopf, executive vice president and group president at Qualcomm, based in San Diego, is a “positive thing for Qualcomm.” 

In contrast to the PC market, in which Intel and Advanced Micro Devices slugged it out through the 1980s and 1990s, the list of companies supplying chips for smartphones is long. Qualcomm, Texas Instruments and Samsung lead the market with a combined market share of 87 percent — with the biggest share of that belonging to Qualcomm. Nvidia, Broadcom, Samsung, Marvell and others are vying for the remainder, according to the market researcher Strategy Analytics. 

Faster Turbo In Updated Opera

By Seth Rosenblatt

The version of Turbo that debuts in Opera 11.10 is up to four times faster than before, according to the company.

(Credit: Opera)

The latest stable version of Opera 11 debuts today with a faster Turbo, an expanded Speed Dial, and some plug-in tweaks. Opera 11.10 for Windows, Mac and Linux, also makes a handful of other changes to the browser, notably adding in more HTML5 support, mail client improvements, an updated rendering engine, and better battery management on laptops. 

The changes to Opera Turbo and Speed Dial are the most apparent changes in Opera 11.10. The Norwegian company says that Turbo is four times faster than before, and Opera spokesman Thomas Ford said that those speed improvements are likely to filter down to Opera's mobile versions since the improvements were made to Turbo's servers. The gains were achieved in part by adopting support for Google's WebP image format, which resulted in higher image quality in Turbo mode. This still allowed sites to render 35 percent smaller and 15 percent faster than in Opera 11, according to Opera's internal benchmarks. 

Speed Dial, the feature that Opera developed to show frequently visited site thumbnails in a grid format, can now be configured to show an unlimited number of dials. The layout is customizable, and a new slider helps users zoom to show more or fewer dials by default. 

Other changes include the improved plug-in support that now offers to download and install plug-ins like Adobe Flash if missing from your system, a feature long-present in other browsers; partial HTML5 File API support, which means that Opera ought to be added soon to the list of official browsers that support Gmail; Web Open Font Format support, for next-generation font rendering; and search hijacking protection. 

MAP has been improved in the built-in Opera Mail e-mail client, so that it better manages "special status" folders such as Trash, Spam, and Sent Items.

 

Speed Dial can now handle an infinite number of thumbnails, and can be zoomed in or out.

(Credit: Opera)

 

 

 

Vudu Streaming Comes To Web Browsers

By John P. Falcone

The Vudu video-on-demand streaming service has long been available on a wide variety of connected home entertainment products, including networked TVs, Blu-ray players, and even the PlayStation 3. But now subscribers will be able to watch Vudu movies through computer Web browsers, too. 

As with rivals Netflix and Amazon, the Vudu browser experience is pretty much the same as what you'll find on those other Vudu venues--the identical content library (albeit limited to standard-definition, thanks to studio restrictions) at the identical pricing. The video should work on any computer browser (Windows, Mac, Linux) that's compatible with the latest version of Flash. (In-browser Vudu streaming should be active at Vudu.com later today.) 

Watching premium video in a Web browser is hardly a unique offering--plenty of providers from Hulu to Facebook already deliver similar services. But for Wal-Mart Stores-owned Vudu, adding PC screens to the mix adds yet another way to access videos you rent or own. 

Where else might we see Vudu in the future? Vudu general manager Edward Lichty told CNET that "any device that can connect to the Internet is something we want to be on." When asked specifically about products like the iPad, he replied that he suspects you'll be seeing Vudu on tablets this year, but added "we have nothing specific to announce" at this time. 

Other interesting tidbits: Lichty said 80 percent of Vudu customers are also Netflix subscribers, but they use Vudu to watch new releases that aren't available on Netflix streaming. And--while Vudu is the only Internet-delivered video service that offers 3D content, Lichty indicated that 3D streaming on Vudu is "fairly modest" to date.

Control Your Phone With A Magnetic Ring

By newscientist.com

(Image: Nokia)

These days smartphones let you do practically anything, but you still have to reach in to your pocket to use them. Now, researchers at Nokia aim to solve that problem with a magnetic ring dubbed Nenya, after a ring found in The Lord of the Rings, that you can twist around your finger to control your phone.

The ring itself looks like a standard piece of jewellery, but is actually a strong magnet. Moving the ring causes changes in the surround magnetic field, which are picked up by a bracelet worn by the user that connects to their phone via Bluetooth. You rotate the ring to pick from a number of options, which could be memorised, played as audio through headphones, or displayed on a screen, then push the ring towards your fingertip to select. The options could include asking a caller to hold, or updating your location on a social network.

Users can turn the ring with either their other hand or the same hand, though the latter is more difficult. The researchers conducted two small trials and found that people could accurately position the ring in roughly 45 degree increments, suggesting that a ring-controlled menu could contain up to eight options. They will present their findings at the Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems in Vancouver, Canada next month.

There are few problems to solve before you can start ringing your phone, however. The bracelet is currently a rather bulky and unattractive device, but the electronics inside could be incorporated into a watch or jewellery bracelet, and the system also detects the ring when users move about, which could execute unwanted commands. There's also the issue of walking around with a great big magnet on your finger, with the potential to attract nearby metallic objects and damage credit cards or hard drives.