Microsoft launches new-look MSN for mobile phones
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Microsoft Corp.  launched a  redesigned MSN portal optimized for mobile phones on Sunday,  stepping up its offering at a time when more powerful devices  increase the demand for richer content on handsets.
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Microsoft releases Windows mapping, search, functions for phones.
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Microsoft built a custom Windows Mobile user interface for a new phone that T-Mobile USA expects to announce on Monday, evidence that Microsoft may be getting more serious about pursuing the consumer mobile market.The phone, built by HTC, will be the first in a line of phones from T-Mobile using the new Shadow brand, said David Sholkovitz, marketing manager at T-Mobile.While Microsoft has worked with operators to help modify the operating system to fit their needs, this project represented a new level of partnership, said Doug Smith, director of marketing for Microsoft&#39;s mobile communications business. &quot;I&#39;d say this was one of the deeper partner involvements we&#39;ve had on a new product,&quot; he said.The Shadow, which will hit stores on Wednesday, features a home screen that looks very different than other Windows Mobile phones. Users slide a wheel to navigate through icons on the screen that take them directly to e-mail, their music player and photos. The idea was to make it easier to use increasingly complicated phones, said Sholkovitz.The operator approached Microsoft about ways to alter the home screen in order to simplify it and prevent &quot;feature fatigue,&quot; he said. &quot;We wanted to create a product with the feature set that Windows Mobile products have but deliver it in a simple fashion that was user intuitive and icon based,&quot; he said.T-Mobile, Microsoft and HTC began working on the new user interface in November of last year. &quot;I think this was rare for [Microsoft],&quot; said Farah Houston, product development manager, T-Mobile. &quot;We had access to a lot of resources I don&#39;t think they normally make available. Microsoft is trying to show they&#39;re serious about the consumer market and this is what they&#39;re willing to do.&quot;Windows Mobile, which works in tandem with Exchange to push corporate e-mail to the phones, has a reputation primarily as an enterprise tool. T-Mobile hoped to avoid that image with the Shadow and the keyboard design is meant to help. &quot;When users see a full keyboard they think business and productivity,&quot; said Sholkovitz. &quot;So we made it a hidden slide-out keypad.&quot;During a keynote speech at the CTIA I.T. and Entertainment conference in San Francisco last week, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer described what Microsoft thinks will attract consumers. &quot;Consumers will want phones that span all of their life personas,&quot; he said. &quot;My work life, my personal life, my life with my family, my life with my friends. People don&#39;t want to pull out multiple devices.&quot;Another Microsoft executive echoed a similar thought. &quot;We can do multiple things in parallel,&quot; said Scott Horn, general manager of Microsoft&#39;s mobile group, also speaking at CTIA. &quot;We can do both consumer and enterprise... You will see more devices appeal to the consumer side.&quot;The talk of consumer needs shows how the iPhone is likely affecting Microsoft&#39;s strategy, one analyst said. &quot;There&#39;s no doubt the success that Apple had with the iPhone in terms of appealing to the mainstream end user market as opposed to the business market has not gone unnoticed,&quot; said Michael Gartenberg, an analyst at Jupiter Research. &quot;Microsoft has built these devices to service and solve business needs but Microsoft understands the intersection of business and consumer.&quot;The declining price of Windows Mobile devices will make them more appealing to consumers, said Smith. The Shadow, as an example, will retail for $150 with a two-year voice and data contract. It will work with a new data plan from T-Mobile that costs $20 per month and includes unlimited data use and Wi-Fi access at T-Mobile hotspots.The phone will be displayed in T-Mobile stores along with other lower cost feature phones, not with the higher end smartphones, said Houston.Neither Microsoft nor T-Mobile would comment on intellectual-property ownership for the new software interface on the Shadow.
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Microsoft unveils Windows Mobile 6, an update to its operating system for cell phones and similar devices.
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Microsoft Corp. introduced software on  Monday to manage advanced mobile phones much like personal  computers, taking aim at a business dominated by Research in  Motion's BlackBerry.
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Windows Mobile brand will replace Pocket PC and Smartphone labels.
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InfoWorld - Microsoft Corp. said it has boosted the security mechanisms built into its newest mobile phone operating system, responding to the needs of business customers who will use the phones to access sensitive corporate data.
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Microsoft Corp.  unveiled on Wednesday a new set of Web-based services allowing users of its MSN service to publish and track each other's blogs, or online journals.
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Microsoft has announced its new version of its Windows operating systems for mobile devices and said it won new Asian partners hoping to gain more market share from competitors, Symbian and Nokia.
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(Article Central) Software giant Microsoft Corp. introduced a beta version of its new MSN Toolbar Suite, with new desktop search functionality that allows users to find almost any type of document, media file
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(InfoWorld) - For business users who want Microsoft Office on their cell phones, Windows Mobile 6, the upcoming version of Redmond's mobile operating system to be unveiled next week, will be a must-have upgrade. Mobile 6 comes with mobile versions of Outlook, Word, Excel and PowerPoint. With the continuing increase in sales of smartphones at the expense of handheld devices, Office makes a lot of sense, especially for synchronizing with desktop files, according to Rob Enderle, principal at the Enderle Group. Carriers and handset manufacturers who believe they can put the limited memory and storage to better use, however, are out of luck. Microsoft Office still comes with Mobile 6. According to John Starkwether, a product manager in the Mobile and Embedded Devices Division at Microsoft, Office is part of the package. Starkwether conjectured that if a vendor really wants to exclude Office from the operating system, an accommodation might be possible. Additional upgrades to the mobile OS include Microsoft's Direct Push Technology with automatic synchronization of Outlook calendars, tasks, and contacts using Exchange Server. For security and management, Mobile 6 will also give mobile network managers the capability of remotely wiping out all data from a device should it be lost or stolen. Other security features include certificate options and storage card encryption. Business users will also be pleased with the inclusion of mobile versions of the .Net Compact Framework and SQL Server in order to access a company's standard line of business applications remotely. The Office applications are the most robust to date for the limited capacities of a cell phone. Spell checking in Word, though, is not included. E-mail viewing will be easier on the eye with formatting, tables, and pictures viewable as originally generated. One-click options for e-mail, such as "reply all", moving a message to a subfolder and "delete" have been added to accommodate the restricted functionality of a small device. Windows Vista users on the desktop will be able to swap music, pictures, movies and Outlook information between the Vista PC and the mobile device. Windows Live will integrate mail, messenger, search, contacts, and spaces. Call history is now placed inside the individual contact card. Enderle said that although there was "a lot of great stuff" in Mobile 6 Microsoft still has to focus on ease of use. "Compared to the Apple iPhone with its simplified interface, Mobile 6 is still complex to use," Enderle said. Devices with Windows Mobile 6 will ship worldwide in the second quarter.
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Hoping to drive users to its new MSN Search service, Microsoft (Quote, Chart) announced it will release a new beta of its messenger client with an embedded search bar.
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Microsoft has made the newest version of its mobile OS faster, sleeker and much more Vista-like than previous versions.
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(InfoWorld) - Microsoft Corp. launched a redesigned MSN portal for mobile phones, with improved navigation and optimized display of Web pages. Users of many Web-capable phones can navigate to the mobile.msn.com site and from there access a variety of Microsoft online services such as Windows Live Hotmail and Windows Live Messenger. PC users can visit the page to check if their phone is supported. MSN Mobile users can also read sports news from Fox Sports, check on the weather forecast, search the Internet and view maps. They can use Windows Live Local to search for local businesses and receive results including maps and directions. The site is designed to offer features similar to MSN.com for PC users. The new MSN Mobile also improves the way that pages are displayed for mobile users. MSN detects the phone a user has and then delivers pages that fit the device's screen, Microsoft said. Microsoft first launched MSN Mobile out of beta in May. Microsoft hopes to strike deals with operators to integrate MSN Mobile into their own portals. Operators in Europe have been more eager than their U.S. counterparts to form such partnerships with strong online brands like Yahoo Inc. and Google Inc. U.S. operators often prefer to offer Web content and services under their own brands. Making a deal with MSN Mobile means that operators can display advertisements to mobile Web users, using technology based on Microsoft's recent acquisition of ScreenTonic, a developer of a mobile advertisement system. Microsoft is competing against online giants Google and Yahoo, as well as various startup companies, to deliver advertisements to mobile users. Because there are many more mobile phone users than PC users around the world, these online services companies see the potential for significant revenue from mobile advertisements. MSN Mobile is currently available to phone users in the U.S. and Microsoft plans to introduce the new portal around the world throughout this year.
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Microsoft Corp. MSFT.O unveiled on  Wednesday a new set of Web-based services allowing users of its  MSN service to publish and track each other's blogs, or online  journals.
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(InfoWorld) - Microsoft Research workers showed off some of their projects, including several that find new uses for mobile phones, on Monday at a summit in Redmond, Wash. Eric Chang, director of incubation at Microsoft's Advanced Technology Center in Beijing, described Fone+, a product that lets users connect their mobile phones to a TV, a keyboard, and a mouse. Fone+ would let users take advantage of the growing processing power in mobile phones that enables more computing functions but would allow them to use phones to access the Internet with a full keyboard and on a larger screen. The product would be aimed at regionsÂ such asÂ China, where PC penetration is still quite low but mobile phone ownership is high. Users could also connect other devices, such as external storage, to the phone through the cradle. The phone could connect to the Internet either wirelessly or through broadband wired connections, Chang said. While some parts of China have broadband, others are covered by at best GPRS or EDGE, relatively slow mobile connections, he said. Chang expects to demonstrate the application Tuesday at the summit. The application appears to have caught the eye of Microsoft executives such as Craig Mundie, chief research and strategy officer, who mentioned Fone+ at a conference earlier this year. Another researcher showed off applications that combine physiological sensors with mobile phones. One application developed and tested by Nuria Oliver, a researcher at Microsoft Research, combines a heart-rate sensor with a music-tempo analyzer to let runners use music players in their mobile phones to set their workouts. With MPTrain, a user first chooses a workout on the phone that might include two 10-minute periods of intense exercise interspersed with periods of slower exercise. The application then analyzes the music in the user's phone to choose songs based on their tempo and length, matching the chosen workout. "The phone knows where your heart rate should be based on the workout you want to do," Oliver said. "It determines whether you need to slow down, speed up, or keep the same pace and based on that selects the right song to induce you to run at the right pace," she said. She tested how well a song encourages a runner to change pace and found that music works remarkably well, compared to runners trying to pace their workout on their own without music. Oliver has also developed and tested an application that can be used by people who suffer from or think they might suffer from sleep apnea. People with sleep apnea repeatedly stop breathing as they sleep, often many times a night, and perhaps for a minute or longer. Wearing a small sensor on a toe that communicates with a mobile phone over Bluetooth, a user could sleep at home and monitor their heart rate and level of oxygen in their blood. Most people with sleep apnea undergo tests when they are hooked up to many sensors on their bodies and must sleep in a hospital for one or two nights. Oliver's application would allow users to remain in the comfort of their own homes and monitor their sleep for longer periods of time, allowing them to note how different factorsÂ such asÂ food or stress may affect their sleep, she said. The researchers showed off their projects at the Microsoft Research Faculty Summit, a conference where Microsoft invites members of academia to discuss issues in computer science research. Microsoft Research, a group comprising 700 researchers in five labs around the world, works on a variety of projects that may ultimately become Microsoft products or be sold to external sources.
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Microsoft on Tuesday will announce new mobile management server for wireless access, management and security, while Palm and others will announce compatible Windows Mobile devices.