Windows 8
Latest
Google adds touch controls to experimental version of Chrome
The latest build of Canary, the bleeding-edge test-bed for Google Chrome, reveals that the company is working on touch-centric features for its desktop browser. By swiping left and right, for instance, users will be able to avoid the chore of hitting the back and forward page buttons -- while pinch-to-zoom and on-screen keyboards are also available to try out. Now, of course, you just need some hardware to take advantage of the new features.
Strategy Analytics: Android beats iOS in Q2 tablet shipments, Windows gains ground
All in all, global tablet shipments were up for Q2, according to new numbers released by analyst firm Strategy Analytics. Factoring in white-box units, the market saw 51.7 million tablets shipped in that time period -- that's up 43-percent compared to the same time last year. A lot of that good news can be chalked up to Android's success. The OS saw a healthy bump from 18.5- to 34.6 million units shipped, a number that has Google's mobile operating system holding 67-percent of the market. The news is a little less cheery on Apple's side of the OS wars, with shipments dipping from 17- to 14.6 million units, decreasing its marketshare to 28.3-percent, according to the firm. Microsoft, not surprisingly, saw a healthy increase in shipments from last year -- though it's still got a ways to go, calling around 4.5-percent of the market its own.
gdgt's best deals for July 22: Nintendo 3DS, RCA HDTV
Ready to save some cash on your tech buys? Then you've come to the right place. Our sister site gdgt tracks price drops on thousands of products every day, and twice a week they feature some of the best deals they've found right here. But act fast! Many of these are limited-time offers, and won't last long. Today's hottest deals include Nintendo's 3DS at one of the lowest prices we've seen, as well as a hot deal on a 32-inch RCA HDTV. Want the latest deals delivered to your inbox? Join gdgt and add the gadgets you're shopping for to your "Want" list. Every time there's a price cut, you'll get an email alert!
OneNote for Windows 8 gains Office 365 integration, touch keyboard improvements
Hot on the heels of the recent iOS and Android overhaul of OneNote comes an update for the Windows 8 and Windows RT versions which adds Office 365 integration and touch keyboard improvements. The app is available in the Windows Store right now and lets you sign into your Office 365 school or work account and sync notebooks right from within the OneNote app. As for the touch keyboard, it's both invoked and dismissed by simply tapping into any empty space, which makes it easier to use. This allows you to switch seamlessly between inputting text and finger painting -- or basically, just focus on your notes. Hit the source link below for the update.
The Weekly Roundup for 07.08.2013
You might say the week is never really done in consumer technology news. Your workweek, however, hopefully draws to a close at some point. This is the Weekly Roundup on Engadget, a quick peek back at the top headlines for the past seven days -- all handpicked by the editors here at the site. Click on through the break, and enjoy.
The Daily Roundup for 07.10.2013
You might say the day is never really done in consumer technology news. Your workday, however, hopefully draws to a close at some point. This is the Daily Roundup on Engadget, a quick peek back at the top headlines for the past 24 hours -- all handpicked by the editors here at the site. Click on through the break, and enjoy.
New Microsoft ad takes another swing at the iPad
Microsoft today unveiled a new commercial which, yet again, takes some shots against Apple's iPad. In the advertisement below, a Windows 8 device is shown against Apple's iPad which is depicted as a stunted device to the extent that it's not capable of full multitasking. Something tells me that the commercial above would elicit a hearty laugh from real baseball scouts. It's also rather comical that the person talking to the scout with the iPad seemingly gets flustered when he can only hear audio and not see video, as if that would realistically bring a videoconferencing conversation to a standstill. Microsoft's latest ad is the latest effort from Redmond to take shots at the iPad, which given its large marketshare, is to be expected. In previous commercials, Microsoft has taken the iPad to task for not being able to run PowerPoint, for not having a zoomable home screen, and for not having SD card support.
Evernote for Windows Touch gets a redesign, two-step verification
Couple of updates to Evernote for Windows Touch users: for starters, the app's hub page has been redesigned for a better fingers-on experience, bringing handy columns for notes, shortcuts created across different platforms and Notebooks. The Windows Touch app now includes support for Evernote Business, as well -- Notebooks created for that side of things will appear in blue, so you can tell them apart from the personal notebooks sitting in your hub. Also new is two-step verification for added security. A full list of updates to the pachyderm-friendly note-taking platform can be found in the source link below.
The Daily Roundup for 07.04.2013
You might say the day is never really done in consumer technology news. Your workday, however, hopefully draws to a close at some point. This is the Daily Roundup on Engadget, a quick peek back at the top headlines for the past 24 hours -- all handpicked by the editors here at the site. Click on through the break, and enjoy.
Switched On: Touchy subjects
Each week Ross Rubin contributes Switched On, a column about consumer technology. In 2002, the first LCD-based iMac succeeded the translucent PowerPC G3-based models that the original Bondi Blue iMac begat. The new generation was much more striking than the one that had placed Apple on the comeback trail. The iMac G4 mounted the display on a balanced arm similar to a Luxo lamp while the motherboard resided in a hemispherical base. This allowed the display to be adjusted to a wide range of heights and angles and each of the two main sections to be "true to itself." Alas, the design had its limits. It's difficult to imagine today's ample 27-inch iMac displays balancing off such a mount. Furthermore, after the switch to Intel, processor thermals improved to help enable the slim iMac of today. The idea of efforts being true to themselves (at least until nearly compromise-free convergence is possible), however, has stayed a hallmark of Apple. For example, the company would resist adding video to the iPod for years after competitors had the feature.
Gauging the scale of the post-PC opportunity: "Mobile Is Eating The World"
Speaking at All Things D in 2010, Steve Jobs famously predicted that "PCs are going to be like trucks": specialised devices that only appeal to people with particular demands of their computing experience while ordinary people would come to prefer smartphones and tablets for all their computing activities. Last month, Enders Analysis consultant Benedict Evans gave a presentation at BookExpo America entitled "Mobile Is Eating The World." In it, he laid out a thorough series of metrics that suggest, when taken as a whole, that the scale of the post-PC opportunity is somewhere between 'ginormous' and 'staggering' -- and that Jobs's vision is coming inexorably to pass. Now, I don't want to spoil the whole thing. I urge you to read the slide deck for yourself. But I am going to cherry pick a few of the figures I found most interesting to whet your appetite, and add in some of my own ideas as to what this all could mean for the future. Before that, though, an aside about analysts. There's a strong meme circulating amongst Apple blogs that analysts are idiots and their writing to be universally shunned. Like most strong memes, this one presents a simple narrative; like most simple narratives, this one is wrong. Reality is far more nuanced than that. There are good analysts and bad analysts, as with people in all walks of life. Certainly, I cannot understand why Gene Munster is obsessed with the Apple TV, an idea that makes no sense to me. Evans is one of the good guys though. The scale of the post-PC opportunity Evans starts out by talking about just how big the post-PC device market could be in the future. Total global PC sales in 2012 were 350 million; there are 1.6 billion PCs in use, most of them shared between multiple users, and they are replaced every 4-5 years. For mobile devices (including smartphones, feature phones, and tablets), 2012 saw 1.7 billion sales -- almost five times as many as there were PCs -- to a total of 3.2 billion users, almost always used only by one person, and typically upgraded every two years. In other words, mobile is a whole different ballgame to computers, and it always has been. Dwell on those figures for a moment -- 3.2 billion means almost half the planet has a mobile device today (almost all of them low-end feature phones, of course). Still, mobile sales have outnumbered PC sales for decades; that's old news. What's changed about mobile is the rise of the smartphone and (to a slightly lesser extent, because it started later) the tablet. Since 2007, although feature phone sales have been declining slightly, smartphone and tablet sales have grown very quickly. Today, smartphones make up about one in every three phones sold, and that ratio is continuing to move in smartphone's favour. Furthermore, unlike PC sales -- broadly stagnant for several years now -- there is no sign of growth in phone sales slackening off. There's still half the planet to go, after all. So where does this lead? Evans predicts that in the next five years, we'll see no change in the size of the PC market -- but explosive growth in the smartphone and tablet space, three to four times bigger than where they stand today. That'll put tablet sales well above combined sales of desktop and laptop PCs, and smartphone sales far above that again. So it seems Jobs was right. The scale of opportunity in mobile technology is huge. But how well positioned is Apple to benefit from this? And what of its competitors? Is Microsoft withering on the vine? In a slide entitled "the irrelevance of Microsoft", Evans paints a stark portrait. As little ago as 2009, almost all online access was done via PCs and as almost all PCs run Windows that meant Microsoft's share of the "connected device" market was pretty large: 80% or so. But as more and more smartphones and tablets have been sold, which almost entirely run non-Microsoft OSs, so that share has steadily declined ever since. It's now down to 25% or so. Certainly, in terms of things like determining web standards, Microsoft is a much diminished influence. Does that bode ill for the company, however? Don't forget that although Microsoft's share of the connected device market has declined, that's mostly because the overall market itself has grown. PC sales, as I remarked above, have been largely static through this era, and therefore so has Microsoft's revenue from Windows licences. It had a revenue of $18.8 billion in the first quarter of 2013, and $6.06 billion in profit. Not too bad, right? This is because most of the mobile growth has been in smart phones, and very few people are buying a smart phone to use as a PC, so (so far) the affect of the growth in mobile tech haven't been felt in Microsoft's markets. However, in the last two years, tablets have also been growing explosively (although far behind smartphones) and this is a product category that can replace a PC. So PC sales have, finally, switched from stagnating to declining, and there's the real threat to Microsoft's bottom line. There's also another element to this story, which is Microsoft's other cash cow: Office. Office sales largely work through a sort of institutional inertia: the main value is that everyone uses it, so everyone shares files around in its formats, and no third party app has ever managed to do a flawless job of opening and working with those formats without munging the layout, breaking the fonts, or some other irritation. But today we're in a world where less than a quarter of people are using Microsoft devices online, and so less than a quarter of people online can choose to work on Office. Most of those of those people are on phones, of course, where it doesn't matter much -- only the brave and foolhardy are doing complex word processing on a smartphone. But many of them are also on tablets, and that could be a problem for Microsoft as tablets eat into laptop and desktop PC sales. Now, this is a line of reasoning that leads you to the conclusion that Microsoft should port Office to the iPad. I used to have a hunch we'd have seen this happen by now, but so far, it's chosen not to do so, and instead use the existence of Office as an extra selling point for its Windows RT and Windows 8 tablets. In other words, Microsoft is prioritising protecting Windows PC and tablet revenue over protecting Office revenue. It remains to be proven if that was a smart call or not; perhaps the release of Office 365 for iPhone means Microsoft's resolve is weakening, although I'd argue that's not quite the same thing. Few people would choose to use a smartphone rather than a PC for document editing, so the two products don't really compete; whereas people might well perfer to use a tablet to a PC, so the competition has more direct consequences. The "Four Horsemen" Evans's lists "four horsemen" of the post-PC world: Apple, Google, Samsung, and Amazon. (He sees RIM and Microsoft as rapidly becoming irrelevant and never gaining relevance, respectively.) How does Evans see competition between these companies today, and how does he see it playing out in the future? Consider the business of selling devices. In this, Apple and Samsung rule supreme: not in terms of units (Apple and Samsung combined sell less than 30% of all handsets), but in terms of profit (Apple and Samsung hold more than 95% of the profit in the entire handset industry, with the lion's share of that going to Apple). Note that it's a mistake to believe that this somehow means Android is a failure because Google doesn't make any money on it. Remember that from the very outset Android was supplied by Google to the handset OEMs (HTC, Motorola, Samsung, etc) for free. If one's plan is to make a lot of money, one doesn't generally start by giving things away. Android was never supposed to generate any direct revenue for Google. Google makes money by serving up ads, and to do so effectively it needs people using its various products -- search, email, maps, coughReadercough. Android was designed to ensure that no-one like Apple could establish a stranglehold on the future mobile market and freeze Google out. Or, as Erick Schonfeld wrote for our sister site TechCrunch, "search is Google's castle, everything else is a [defensive] moat [around it]". Evans also believes there will be significant growth in low-end Android tablets, with 7" screen sizes and prices below (often far below) the $330 price point for a poverty spec iPad mini. There could be as many as 125m cheap Android tablets sold in China alone in 2013, he claims -- compared to 120m tablets sold in the entire world in 2012 (of which 66m were iPads). However, as many others have pointed out, Evans underscores that Apple products seem to lead the market in usage, far out of proportion to sales; depending on the exact metric you believe, anything up to 80% of all tablet web traffic comes from the iPad. I've yet to find an explanation that entirely addresses this. It's easy to list factors -- some Android tablets are shipped but never sold to end users; some of them are awful, and after a few weeks end up gathering dust; some of them are used regularly, but for much smaller amounts of time per day than iPads; some of them are mostly used for purposes other than web surfing (e.g. in-car satnav and entertainment centers); some of the metrics are biased towards English-language sites, whereas Android is huge in China. But to my mind, none of that convincingly adds up to the size of the difference in the stats. Perhaps I'm wrong, though, and that's all it is; or perhaps there's some other factor I've overlooked. Please let me know your thoughts in the comments. The ecosystem is key Selling devices isn't the whole of it, though. For Google, Android devices itself are only a means to an end -- a way to make Google services more accessible and attractive to end users. It's about building and supporting an ecosystem. Evans finishes on differentiating between ecosystem types and sizes between the key software platform players: Apple with iOS, Google with Android, but also Facebook and Amazon with its as-predicted-by-me (why yes, I am still smug about this; thanks for asking) Android fork. He (rightly) points out that Apple is qualitatively different from the other companies discussed here. For Google, Facebook and Amazon the platforms are designed to facilitate and increase customer engagement with their services -- ultimately, to either serve them adverts or enable them to buy things. Apple, however, remains primarily a hardware company that uses a strong software ecosystem as a hardware differentiator rather than a end in its own right. If you're inclined to disagree with that, remember that iOS updates are free and OS X updates are cheap -- but iPhones and Macs are neither. Apple's main profit driver and main focus remains hardware sales. The bottom line Three years ago, Jobs predicted that mobile devices would come to compete with and ultimately domainate over PC sales, coining the phrase "post-PC" to cover mobile devices that overlap with PCs -- so, smartphones and tablets, as opposed to feature phones. He tied a significant chunk of Apple's future to this vision, by concentrating much of its effort onto iOS and the hardware that runs it. There's plenty of evidence that Jobs was right, and as these trends continue, so companies that are involved in this space -- Apple and Samsung being the most obvious -- will continue to thrive. If you like his data, I humbly urge you to follow Benedict Evans on Twitter and subscribe to his weekly newsletter, where he routinely shares his insight and data like this. I would also like to extend my personal thanks to Mr Evans for allowing me to reprint some of this slides in this writeup.
Bing Translator app comes to Windows 8 with offline support
The Bing Translator app has been available on Windows Phone for some time, but today it's heading over to Windows 8. According to a post on the browser's Search Blog, the program was built "from the ground up" for Windows devices, and it utilizes the Share Charm to let you translate text from within any Windows 8 app. Otherwise, it works much the same as on other platforms: by using your gadget's camera to parse more than 40 languages (of course, you can type text to translate as well). The Translator app also includes offline support, so you can download language packs for use without a WiFi connection. Check it out for yourself by heading to the download page in the Windows Store.
Halo: Spartan Assault breaks off peace for Windows 8 PCs, tablets and phones
Microsoft has announced the impending arrival of Halo: Spartan Assault, an omni-directional top-down shooter for Windows 8 devices. Set between Halos 3 and 4, the space-hoop stopgap will be available this July for an "estimated retail price" of $6.99, though the Windows 8 version (supporting PCs and tablets) will be sold separately from the game made for Windows Phone 8. As with other twin-stick shooters, Halo: Spartan Assault hinges on maneuvering your character out of harm's way while aiming and firing back in 360 degrees. The game retains controllable vehicles, established franchise weapons (see: canon canons) and covenant enemies, but moves the perspective to high above the battlefield and replaces the controls with a touch-screen interface. It's obviously more simplistic than Halo proper, and certainly more likely to be mentioned in an article with Microsoft's range of Surface tablets. Halo: Spartan Assault is developed by 343 Industries and Vanguard Games (Greed Corp, Gatling Gears), and comes complete with leaderboards, weekly challenges, and connectivity rewards for Halo 4, firstly in the form of new Spartan emblems. It will also be accompanied by a three-part prequel comic series called "Halo: Initiation." If dragging thumbs across a capacitive screen isn't ideal, you can play the Windows 8 version of Spartan Assault with a mouse and keyboard. According to Microsoft, "Halo: Spartan Assault will add support for the Wired Xbox 360 controller for Windows on Windows 8 PCs, tablets and Surface devices shortly after launch, via a title update."%Gallery-190251%
Halo: Spartan Assault revealed for Windows Phone and Windows 8, we go hands-on
Between the Xbox One, Steven Spielberg's latest TV project and the approach of E3, fans have been eagerly awaiting the announcement of a new Halo game. 343 Industries has heard their pleas, but its answer is somewhat unexpected -- the next game in the legendary franchise isn't for Microsoft's next-generation game console, but for the company's mobile and tablet platforms. Built specifically for Windows Phone and touch-enabled Windows 8 devices, Halo: Spartan Assault hopes to offer the essence of Halo in a portable format. Engadget stopped in at the game's launch event to take a look. "In a nutshell, it's a top-down twin stick arcade-style action shooter," explained Dan Ayoub, executive producer at 343 Industries. "Really, a brand new way to play Halo." Ayoub told us that the game was designed to push the limits of phone and tablet graphics, stressing the Halo franchise's history as a trailblazer on Microsoft platforms. "We wanted this to be no exception," he said, inviting journalists at the event to try the game for themselves. We picked up a nearby Surface Pro slate and tucked in. %Gallery-190250%
The Daily Roundup for 06.03.2013
You might say the day is never really done in consumer technology news. Your workday, however, hopefully draws to a close at some point. This is the Daily Roundup on Engadget, a quick peek back at the top headlines for the past 24 hours -- all handpicked by the editors here at the site. Click on through the break, and enjoy.
The Daily Grind: How's your Windows 8 gaming experience?
We don't often use The Daily Grind to ask the community for advice, but hey, what the heck. I've got to upgrade to Windows 8 for a non-gaming application, and I'm trying to decide whether to roll the dice and do it on my primary (i.e., gaming) desktop or relegate the new OS and the problem child app to one of my less desirable but more expendable PCs. My hesitation stems from a substantial backlog of Steam games, both new and old, that may or may not function under Windows 8. I'm also curious if anyone has any experience running AAA MMOs like DC Universe Online, Star Wars: The Old Republic, TERA, and others on Windows 8. And no, this isn't a Windows-8-sucks thread, at least from my perspective, it's more of an informal poll. So, in a nutshell, how has your Windows 8 gaming experience been thus far? Has everything gone swimmingly or have you had any issues? Every morning, the Massively bloggers probe the minds of their readers with deep, thought-provoking questions about that most serious of topics: massively online gaming. We crave your opinions, so grab your caffeinated beverage of choice and chime in on today's Daily Grind!
Dell VP says forthcoming XPS 11 will be a Yoga-style hybrid
It's Computex week, which means the technology world is ready to talk up the PCs it'll be pushing out between now and January. Dell's Kirk Schell has let it slip that the company will be beefing up its mobile offerings with an 11.6-inch laptop that should arrive in time for the holidays. According to the Wall Street Journal, the Dell XPS 11 will come with a high-definition display that can be folded backwards to use as a tablet -- which would have been exciting, but for the fact Lenovo got there first.
The Weekly Roundup for 05.27.2013
You might say the week is never really done in consumer technology news. Your workweek, however, hopefully draws to a close at some point. This is the Weekly Roundup on Engadget, a quick peek back at the top headlines for the past seven days -- all handpicked by the editors here at the site. Click on through the break, and enjoy.
The Daily Roundup for 05.30.2013
You might say the day is never really done in consumer technology news. Your workday, however, hopefully draws to a close at some point. This is the Daily Roundup on Engadget, a quick peek back at the top headlines for the past 24 hours -- all handpicked by the editors here at the site. Click on through the break, and enjoy.
Xbox One's 'Snap Mode' lets you use two apps simultaneously
Phones, tablets and game consoles typically offer single-screen experiences, that is, one app on screen at a time. Microsoft is challenging that idea, announcing what it calls "Snap Mode" at its next-generation Xbox event, taking a stab at home console multitasking. It's essentially a port of a well-known Windows 8 feature: separate apps can be pinned to the edge of the television's screen in isolated panels, allowing gamers to use Xbox apps while playing a game, or watch TV while simultaneously using Internet Explorer . Combined with the lightning-fast app switching Microsoft showed off on stage, it's definitely a big step forward for couchside computing. Check out our Xbox One reveal liveblog right here.
