Microsoft's phone talk is all business
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Rather than touting fancy new features that compete head-on with the iPhone, the software maker is courting the people who help businesses decide what phones to buy--the IT geeks.
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Microsoft Corp.  unveiled plans  on Sunday to work with hardware manufacturers to deliver on the  company&#039;s ambitions to use its software to simplify how workers  communicate with one another.
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One technology promises to harness the power of the Internet for voice communications. Its competitor has been around for a century, and has an industry shorthand that needs two adjectives -- "plain old telephone service" -- to describe just how boring it is.
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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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AMSTERDAM - US software giant Microsoft is aiming to get its audio and video software into mobile phones before it is beaten to the 650-million-handsets-a-year market by rivals like Apple.
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Earlier this week, Microsoft unveiled its vision of "unified communications" in the enterprise, with one executive saying that the tools "will transform business communications as fundamentally as e-mail did in the 1990s." But what does unified communications really mean for the enterprise?
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The auto giant is planning one of the largest VoIP installations to date by any corporation.
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US software giant Microsoft is aiming to get its audio and video software into mobile phones before it is beaten to the 650-million-handsets-a-year market by rivals like Apple.
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Microsoft Corp.  sees the shift by business organizations to Web-based phone systems running on its software to generate "billions" of dollars in revenue for the company, a top executive said on Tuesday.
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(InfoWorld) - Nearly one year after Skype stole the headlines at the 3GSM World Congress with itsÂ plans to offer a mobile versionÂ of its Internet phone, a couple of nimble startups -- and not the Net telephony pioneer itself -- appear to have found a way to make this type of service work, both technically and commercially. Earlier this week, JajahÂ announced aÂ new mobile VOIPÂ serviceÂ that allows smart-phone users to make low-cost and, in some cases, free international calls. Customers simply enter Jajah's mobile Web portal through their handset's browser, enter their user name and password and then make a either a free or low-cost call. The launch of Jajah Mobile Web comes on the heals of a mobile VOIP (voice over IP) offering by Fring, which, unlike Jajah, requires users to download software and install it in their Internet-enabled handsets. The Fring service gives mobile users access to P-to-P (peer-to-peer) VOIP offerings such as Skype and Google Talk. Microsoft appears to have its finger on the pulse of mobile VOIP, too. Next week in Barcelona, the U.S. software giant will unwrap aÂ new version of its Windows Mobile OSÂ that will supposedly enable carriers and device maker to add VOIP functionality to Windows Mobile devices. All these announcements -- and the many more expected at this year's 3GSM World Congress -- come as Skype, which essentially stunned the mobile phone industry last year with its VOIP plans, acknowledges technical and commercial hurdles. In a recent interview in Finnish newspaper, Skype co-founder and CEO Niklas ZennstrÃ¶m spoke of "technical obstacles" and conceded that efforts to make Skype work had been taking "much longer than expected." At the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas last month, Eric Lagier, Skype director of business development for hardware and mobile, called the lack of attractive flat-rate fees for most mobile phone services a key commercial hurdle to mobile VOIP usage. He said the company didn't want to be in a position of claiming that its service is free, but facing users who at the end of the month are docked with a huge broadband usage fee. At last year's 3GSM World Congress, Skype and the Hutchison 3 Group (Hutchison 3G)Â announced a partnershipÂ to provide what they had hoped to become the world's first commercial VOIP service for mobile phones. Hutchison 3G, which operates IP-based mobile broadband networks in several European markets, was one of the first mobile phone operators to embrace VOIP, a technology many in the industry view as a major threat to their cash-cow voice business. But industry experts admit that challenges remain.Â One hurdle in providing quality VOIP serviceÂ over mobile handsets is the uplink, which is currently too slow to support quality voice calls, John Giere, chief marketing officer at Alcatel-Lucent, said in an earlier interview. To increase uplink speeds, operators of GSM (Global System for Mobile Communications) networks, which dominate Europe and many parts of Asia and Latin America, will need to upgrade their networks with HSUPA (High Speed Uplink Packet Access) technology, which will give operators "the bidirectional capability they need to run real VOIP," he said. The high-speed technology is not expected to become commercially available in volume until the latter part of 2007 or early 2008. Operators are presently busy rolling out the downlink counterpart HSDPA (High Speed Downlink Packet Access).
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The SDA Music (pictured) phone is the first Windows Mobile Smartphone to be release by the operator and gives not only allows access to Microsoft applications like Outlook, but also can be used to relax after work thanks to the integrated audio player.
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VoIP is the belle of the telecom ball. Jotting her onto their dance cards are such well-dressed suitors as America Online and AT&#38;T
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Microsoft introduced a desktop computer application that aims to seamlessly integrate e-mail, instant messaging, video conferencing, traditional phone service and Internet-based calling.
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Microsoft releases Windows mapping, search, functions for phones.
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Microsoft has some serious questions to answer....
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Are we ever sick of talking on the phone. (Sorry, Mom!) After trying out six VoIP services on both cable and DSL lines, on workdays and weekends, while surfing the Web or staring at the
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A complex remote-control work around has achieved what every geek wants: running Skype on an iPhone.