July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Imagine all the things you’ve ever wanted iOS to do.

Quick settings from the lock screen, widgets that let you make changes in running apps without opening them, true multitasking in which you can see and flip through all open apps, multiple desktops, the ability to download files and store them locally in a user-accessible location, and much more.

Now, make an awesome video showcasing all those. That’s just what Federico Bianco did:

What’s certain about iOS 7 is that we’re going to see something new and updated under the leadership of Jony Ive. He’s not a fan of the kind of skeuomorphic design that Scott Forstall favored – design that connects the new to the old with decorative but unnecessary elements. So we’re pretty likely to see something streamlined, simple, and elegant.

The question is: Will Ive edit iOS while leaving the core of the mobile operating system’s design ethic intact, or will he massively revamp it and come with a new overall concept?

And whether it will contain these or similar elements, only those in Apple know.

Image credit: Federico Bianco/Flickr; Hat tip: Cult of Mac

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Apple may be winning the smartphone battle Stateside, but Android is winning the global smartphone war being fought everywhere else.

Smartphone sales grew 38 percent last quarter to reach 217 million units worldwide, and over 700 million units for the entire year, according to a new report from Strategy Analytics. Of those 700 million-plus smartphones, 68.4% smartphones ran Android as the operating system, while only 19.4 percent ran iOS, Apple’s mobile operating system.

“Almost half-a-billion Android smartphones were shipped in total worldwide during 2012,” the firm’s executive director Neil Mawston said in a statement. “Android is clearly the undisputed volume leader of the smartphone industry at the present time.”

In terms of manufacturing, the global smartphone industry is basically two companies: Apple and Samsung. Apple shipped 135.8 phones last year, all smartphones, of course, while Samsung shipped 396.5 million phones, most of them smartphones. Phone shipments in general reached 1.6 billion in 2012, meaning that smartphones still made up slightly less than half of all phones sold. Nokia still ships a lot of units — 335.6 million in 2012 – but most of them are not modern smartphones.

“Apple grew 29 percent annually and shipped 47.8 million smartphones worldwide for 22 percent marketshare in Q4 2012, dipping slightly from 24 percent a year earlier,” Scott Bicheno, a senior analyst at Strategy Analytics, added. “Combined together, Apple and Android accounted for a record 92 percent share of all smartphones shipped globally in the fourth quarter of 2012.”

The massive numbers obscure that growth, while still torrid, is slowing. While 2011 saw 64 percent in smartphone shipments, 2012′s growth rate was a slightly more moderate 43 percent.

But it’s clear that the market has become a tale of two mobile operating systems: Android and iOS.

The challenge in 2013 for Windows Phone, BlackBerry, and even smaller upstart phone operating systems is simple to grow enough to matter.

photo credit: CanPatsFan via photopin cc

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Donut, Eclair, Gingerbread, Ice Cream Sandwich, and Jelly Bean: It’s enough to make Kate Moss hungry.

Google has released five major Android updates since 2010, most named for some kind of food. Today, Android’s developer site revealed that for the first time, more than 10 percent of Android smartphones in the market are running Jelly Bean, the latest version.

Source: Google

Android system distribution

A major developer complaint about Android has always been its version fragmentation. While iPhone users typically update their devices to new software versiosn from Apple very quickly, Google’s position as the provider of a free and open-source mobile operating system has led to much less power with carriers, who can in many cases block Android system updates.

That’s led to a situation in which the majority of Android smartphone owners are still using older versions of Android. In fact, 47.4 percent are still using Gingerbread, which Google released in December of 2010.

Google announced Jelly Bean in late June last year — a few days before the previous version, Ice Cream Sandwich, reached 10 percent penetration. That took almost nine months, which means that Jelly Bean’s achievement of the same level has happened significantly faster.

That’s at least some good news for developers, who have to keep multiple operating systems in mind while building apps.

Google still has a ways to go, however: In one day, Apple had higher uptake of iOS 6 than Google has achieved in six months.

The developer site for Android also revealed the latest data on screen sizes and resolutions. By far the majority of Android smartphones are now using high-density and “extra-high” density screens, similar to the Samsung Galaxy S III’s 306 pixels per inch, if not quite at the iPhone 5′s 326.

photo credit: Pink Sherbet Photography via photopin cc

Hat tip: The Verge

OK, that is actually not a shock, and is pretty much expected, normal, and standard operating procedure for Apple. In fact, the only shock would be if the company was not working on new models and software.

However, it is somewhat surprising that Apple has allowed devices with the new model designator to venture uncloaked into the digital world. According to The Next Web, developers are seeing “iPhone6.1″ and references to iOS 7 in app analytics logs — from an IP address apparently originating in Cupertino.

This is NOT iPhone 6.

Which could easily be explained, of course, by Apple testing popular apps with updated versions of its mobile operating system on prototypes of the company’s upcoming phones.

Given the company’s penchant for privacy, however, one would expect Apple to spoof an older phone’s identifiers, thereby concealing the new hardware and software from public awareness.

Unless, of course, the fruity California company is turning over a new leaf and entering a new era of corporate transparency.

Now that would be a shocking bit of news.

Image credit: Ciccarese Design

Microsoft today kicked off the launch of its Windows 8 Consumer Preview with a media event in a swanky Barcelona hotel.

Windows head Steven Sinofsky kicked off the event by describing the vast amount of devices and users the company is targeting with the Windows 8 operating system. The company’s goal with the OS spans across tablets of all sorts: business desktops, consumer tablets, and more. He revealed that Microsoft has made over 100,000 major code changes to Windows 8 since the Developer Preview was released in September.

(You can get your hands on the Windows 8 Consumer Preview now. Also check out our extensive preview of the Consumer Preview.)

Sinofsky then handed the show off to Julie Larson-Green, Windows VP of program management. She showed off the basics of the OS, as well as how fluid the Metro interface is. Things seem a lot smoother than the Developer Preview. She said that the new Start screen is built to support hundreds of apps, while the Windows 7 Start menu could only show a handful.

Antoine Leblond, vice president of Windows Web Services, showed off how the OS ran on a typical computer with a mouse and desktop. Simple tasks like copying and pasting have been drastically improved in Windows 8. Now, you can easily manage copying multiple files at once. He also showed how easy it is to move between the Windows 8 Explorer view back to the Start screen. Basically, it looks like you won’t miss the traditional Start button too much.

While showing off the Windows 8 Store, he stressed that Microsoft designed it to make apps incredibly easy to discover. Leblond said that Microsoft has been working more than ever with developers to bring their programs to the Windows 8 Store.

Sinofsky announced the eight winners of Microsoft’s “First App” contest: Cookbook, SigFig, Elements Weather, FlipSaw, Pew Pew, and Physamajig. As winners, the apps will be included with the Windows 8 Consumer Preview. Sinofsky stressed that all of the apps currently available for Windows 8, including third-party apps, are still technically in beta, so we shouldn’t make final judgements on them just yet.

Michael Angiulo, corporate VP of Windows planning and ecosystem, next came on stage to show off some Windows on ARM (WOA) devices. He stressed that Windows on ARM “is the same Windows” — though as we’ve already covered, that’s not necessarily true. Notably, WOA devices won’t be able to run non-Metro Windows applications — so long legacy software.

Sinofsky said that Microsoft developed a new class driver for Windows 8, which allows all sorts of hardware to work seamlessly with the OS without needed a separate driver. He said that 80 to 90 percent of printers will work automatically. “It just works,” he said.

They proceeded to show off different types of Windows 8 hardware, including ultrabooks, more powerful laptops, and desktops. One ultra book sported a motorized mechanism to reveal full-sized ports, something that the MacBook Air and other ultra-portables give up on. (Honestly, that mechanism looked whack.) The Lenovo Yoga, an ultrabook that can convert into a tablet, looked far more useful.

One of the more intriguing devices was a big-screen monitor that could be rotated flat, allowing you to use it like a Microsoft Surface display. They also showed off a ridiculously large 80-inch touchscreen running Windows 8, with a specially bonded Gorilla Glass display that allows for group collaboration. (A very rich group, I’m sure.)

Sinofsky said that Microsoft will follow its past release schedules with Windows 8: next up is the Release Candidate version, then the Release to Manufacturer (RTM) version. After that, Windows 8 will finally be available to the public.

And trust me, this is not one Windows release to be ignored. From the looks of it, Windows 8 is a sign of Microsoft’s approach to operating systems for the next decade.

VentureBeat is holding its second annual Mobile Summit this April 2-3 in Sausalito, Calif. The invitation-only event will debate the five key business and technology challenges facing the mobile industry today, and participants — 180 mobile executives, investors, and policymakers — will develop concrete, actionable solutions that will shape the future of the mobile industry. You can find out more at our Mobile Summit site.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

The new Windows 8 operating system shows a design sensibility and a clarity of purpose not often seen in a Microsoft product.

I’ve spent about a week with the “consumer preview” of Windows 8, which is available to the public today (you can download the Windows 8 consumer preview for free here). I’ve been testing it on a Samsung tablet, with a separate wireless keyboard and mouse, lent to me by Microsoft. What follows is based on my week-long review.

Here’s what you need to know about the next Windows before you download the consumer preview.

Windows 8 is trying to do everything for everyone

The operating system’s coherence and attractiveness are especially surprising given the enormous number of constituents it has to serve: Windows users in all their maddening variety, computer manufacturers, chip makers, software developers. Even people who live “in the cloud” and couldn’t care less which operating system their device is running still need an OS; they just don’t want it to get in the way.

Of course, all these competing demands are exactly what produced monstrosities like the vast numbers of toolbars in earlier versions of Microsoft Word, or the self-defeating complexity of Windows Vista’s security notifications. Microsoft has a lot of customers, and it’s provably good at capturing and holding on to those customers, but in the process, its products have a tendency to get fugly.

Given those challenges, it’s amazing to see how gracefully Windows 8 pulls off the complicated acrobatic feats expected of it. It doesn’t quite stick the landing, Mary Lou Retton-style, but it delivers a solid performance that suggests even better things to come.

In short, Windows 8 is a promising multi-touch tablet OS, an improved mouse-driven desktop and notebook OS, a cloud client, and a new application development and delivery architecture, all in one.

It’s far from ready for production use, but it is an ambitious step towards a Windows that might not even be called Windows any more.

It’s got a radical new interface

The past few versions of Windows have made interface changes that seem relatively subtle: More animations, more transparency, and so forth. Windows 8 is a striking departure.

Microsoft is doubling down on the “Metro” design language first seen in Windows Phone 7. That means big, bold, multicolored tiles. Many of those tiles update themselves with current information, and not just digits (like the number of unread messages), but actual data (like what your next appointment is, and when it is).

The Start screen display is speedy and pleasingly animated, and I like it.

More significantly, Metro-optimized apps run full-screen. There’s no ability to stack up windows and only very limited tiling options (if you want, you can put one app in a narrow panel on the left and a second app on the remaining 2/3 of the screen).

And there are no toolbars, no menus, no floating palettes. When you’re looking at an app, the whole screen is nothing but content. If you’re browsing the web, you don’t see Internet Explorer: You just see the web page you’re looking at. If you’re reading email, the emails fill the screen. And so on.

If you need to control apps, you swipe in from the top or the bottom of the screen, or right-click on the app, and menus will appear. You can also access “charms,” which are icons to do basic things like adjust settings or share the current page, by swiping in from the right. And you can switch between apps by swiping in from the left, so each app becomes its own full-screen panel.

It’s simple, attractive, and clean-looking. It’s also a little baffling at first. The Microsoft guys who demonstrated the OS to me clearly want people to explore, play, and have fun discovering nifty new gestures as they go. But when you’re trying to find the settings applet that will let you connect to a Wi-Fi network or add an external keyboard, this interface can drive you up the wall.

But what about legacy Windows applications, the kind that you’re probably using right now and have been using for the past decade? Windows 8 supports those too, in “windowing” mode, which looks just like Windows 7. In practice, the “old Windows” view becomes just another app panel, and you can swipe to and from that view just like any other app.

Oh, and there’s no Start button, as we reported a few weeks ago.

You can control it with a touchscreen, mouse, or keyboard

Microsoft has taken pains to make Windows 8 accessible to almost every conceivable input method. The Samsung device I tested it on is a multitouch tablet, and I found the interface fast and responsive to all the gestures I expected: tap, swipe, pinch-to-zoom, and so on.

But Windows 8 is not just a tablet OS; it’s also a PC OS. Accordingly, all those colorful Metro-styled tiles have to work on computers that have mice instead of touchscreens. Microsoft has provided mouse gesture equivalents for every touchscreen gesture, though they’re not always identical: For instance, to bring up those “charms” or system commands, you swipe in from the right edge of the screen, or move the mouse pointer to the lower right-hand corner.

Windows 8 also contains a wealth of keyboard shortcuts, including the classic alt-tab for switching between apps (thank goodness, as that gesture is hardwired into my left hand by now). The company says you should be able to do anything in Windows with any one of these input methods, or a combination of the three.

The system breaks down a bit when you wind up on an old-school Windows screen and you’re using your fingers on the touchscreen. Many buttons and links designed for mouse-only use are way too small to hit accurately with your fingertips, and there’s no way to zoom in. Frustrating.

Add a Kinect, and you can add voice commands and whole-body gestures to the operating system’s vocabulary.

Microsoft has completely overhauled the underlying system

Windows 8 is more than a mere facelift. It’s clear that Microsoft has spent a lot of time rebuilding the underlying architecture of the operating system. I haven’t delved into the particulars of the underlying system, but here are a few indicators of how deep the changes are.

•  Microsoft has introduced a new kind of high-level application programming interface (API) that it calls “contracts,” which aim at simplifying communication between apps for common activities. For instance, there’s a “sharing” contract. Any app that wants to offer something to share (like a web page, a picture, or a document) only needs to code its app to be compatible with the sharing contract. On the other end, apps that can be shared with (like email programs, or a Twitter client) simply need to be compatible with the sharing contract on the receiving end. Neither app needs to know anything about the other app’s APIs, they only have to work with the contract in order to be compatible with any current or future apps that also work with that contract.

• Windows 8 uses your Windows Live ID to authenticate you, and provides many options for syncing data (like your desktop wallpaper or Internet Explorer favorites) so that these options can follow you whenever you log in to any Windows 8 machine. That integration points to a future where your desktop account lives partly in the cloud, partly on a variety of devices — and presupposes a deep level of architectural compatibility with cloud-based data.

• Windows 8 will run on ARM microprocessors — the kind currently found in many tablets and smartphones — as well as the Intel architecture chips that the current Windows uses.

• Apps in the background take up zero processing resources, with very limited exceptions for downloading data or playing music. To make that feasible, every Windows Metro-compatible app has to be ready to shut down completely in 5 seconds or less.

•  Windows 8 boots faster than any desktop OS I’ve used in the past 20 years. It takes about 10 seconds from cold start until the login screen appears. Once you log in, it’s only 2 or 3 seconds until you’re looking at a usable, fully responsive Start screen.

There will be a market for apps

I can’t say much about the actual market or the apps in it, because the Windows Store wasn’t available until today. The only apps on the tablet I tested were the ones pre-installed by Microsoft, and those aren’t necessarily the same ones that will be on the shipping version of Windows 8.

What Microsoft has said is that it will be easy to create Windows 8 apps using current Windows development tools, XAML and C#. But it will also be easy to build apps using HTML5 and JavaScript, the company promises; indeed, several of the demonstration apps, like the maps application, are basically simple wrappers around existing web sites or web applications. One developer even found that he could re-use 90 percent of the code from a Windows Phone game when porting it to Windows 8.

Lots of developers appear to be interested in the possibilities. Microsoft says that 3.5 million people downloaded the Windows 8 developer preview (the version before this one), which came out in September.

Security and management will make Windows 8 attractive to businesses

Built-in security features such as a trusted boot architecture that should prevent a huge number of malware attacks will help reduce Windows’ exposure to viruses and Trojan horse software.

There are other nice touches that will simplify IT management. For instance, remote access is built-in to Windows 8, as it has been in previous versions. No big deal, right? Except that Windows 8 will run on any device, which means you could use your Windows 8 tablet to log in remotely to a Windows 7 machine across the country and diagnose problems without even getting up from the comfy couch in your IT dungeon.

The Windows Live-based login scheme means that it will be even easier to separate user accounts from physical hardware; you can log in to any computer with your ID and all your preferences and apps will follow you. Add Skydrive or another network storage source, and your data will follow you too.

Microsoft also promises that there will be a version called Windows 8 to Go, which will put the entire operating system on a bootable USB stick. Plug it into any compatible machine (even a Windows 7 machine), boot from the thumb drive, and you’ve got your entire computing environment right there. When you log off and remove the drive, it leaves none of your data behind.

It’s not quite there yet

This is a “consumer preview” release, which would have been called a beta in previous days. It’s free to download, because Microsoft is using you as a guinea pig, and they hope you’ll give them feedback. But basically, you’re getting what you pay for.

The Metro interface is confusing unless you’ve been shown some key gestures, like how to swipe in from the edges of the screen and which corners to send the mouse pointer to. My guess is that Microsoft will need to add some kind of hinting, or maybe pop-up videos or interactive help dialogs: “We notice you’ve spent the past five minutes jabbing aimlessly at the screen. Can we help you find something?”

There are missing pieces: For instance, Flash support is incomplete, and that means you can’t play every video on YouTube, for instance.

Not all the apps, even some by Microsoft, got the memo about leaving the controls off the screen. For instance, the maps app has a persistent toolbar at the bottom and a search bar at the top. Neither one ever disappears. If the Bing Maps team can get away with this, you can bet other developers will be pushing the limits too, and then it’ll be toolbars all the way down again.

Some of the gestures aren’t consistently implemented: For instance, you can swipe in from the left of the screen to see every running app plus an icon that will take you back to the Start screen — unless you only have one running app, in which case nothing happens.

It’s way too hard to find your way to the system settings. There needs to be a Metro-styled settings app, complete with a prominent tile, right on the Start screen.

Also, it’s a bit buggy. Sometimes the system just stops responding. Weird things happen sometimes with beta software.

You can pretend all the new stuff doesn’t exist

Switching between Metro and classic Windows is still awkward, and probably always will be, to a certain extent. It’s kind of how running DOS applications in a window used to be: Microsoft wants to provide support for legacy applications, but they coexist uneasily with the new paradigm. This difference is especially pronounced this time around, because Windows applications are legion.

But suppose you just really hate all those colorful, animated tiles, and want nothing to do with Metro at all? Apart from the Start screen, you can probably avoid Metro entirely — for now. Just open up a desktop window and carry on using Windows the same way you did before, with all your old apps. Of course, the Start button is gone, but that’s no big deal, just push your mouse pointer into the lower left corner where it used to be.

My prediction is that people will spend most of their time in the Windows environment, not Metro, until a few years have gone by. However, Metro will become more ubiquitous slowly, as Windows spreads to tablets, if Microsoft is able to increase its market share among smartphones, and if app developers jump on the Windows Store bandwagon.

Eventually, Windows users will be living in a majority-Metro world, with more tiles than windows.

And who knows? Maybe, eventually, Microsoft will drop the name “Windows” altogether.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Sensing slow momentum with Ice Cream Sandwich and a growing push for Microsoft’s Windows 8, Google might launch Android 5.0, a.k.a. Jelly Bean, in the second quarter of 2012, according to Taiwanese publication DigiTimes.

Based on its previous launches, it would make sense for Google to introduce Jelly Bean in the second quarter, but not necessarily launch it. Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich was introduced in the second quarter of 2011 at Google’s I/O conference, but it did not get completely official til its legit debut in October. Google’s I/O conference this year is scheduled for late June 27, so it could easily debut Jelly Bean there.

Android 5.0 will reportedly add even more emphasis on tablet features, and it could offer dual-boot functionality between Android and Google’s Chrome OS. Google is coaxing vendors into offering dual-boot abilities between Android and Windows 8. The company might also attempt to bring Android 5.0 to the notebooks and netbooks.

Jelly Bean could face serious adoption challenges, however, based on what we’ve seen with Ice Cream Sandwich adoption. Motorola, for example, has already indicated that it will be taking its time to update many devices to Ice Cream Sandwich. Most of Motorola’s phones and tablets won’t see Ice Cream Sandwich until the third quarter, at least.

Windows 8 is likely to launch late in the third quarter of the year. Microsoft’s new OS will attempt to bridge the gap between desktop and mobile with the ability to support touch screens and switch between traditional apps and touch-friendly Metro apps.

Android love photo: Lai Ryanne/Flickr

Regulators had put the deal on hold in both the U.S. and EU pending investigation for possible antitrust issues.

“We’re happy that today the European Commission approved our proposed acquisition of Motorola Mobility, which we announced in August,” wrote Google VP and deputy general counsel Don Harrison today on the company blog.

“This is an important milestone in the approval process and it moves us closer to closing the deal. We are now just waiting for decisions from a few other jurisdictions before we can close this transaction.”

The proposed deal put a $12.5 billion price tag on the Motorola property. Motorola also introduced a hefty $2.5 billion breakup fee, showing that company’s concern that the deal might not get through federal regulators.

Officials with the U.S. Department of Justice and other international governing bodies were initially given pause by Google claims that, even after the acquisition was complete, Motorola would not be given unfair advantages, such as early access to the Android codebase, over other Android handset and tablet manufacturers.

EU regulators halted the acquisition process in December 2011 when officials asked for more time to conduct a thorough review of the deal.

However, Google has proven — at least to EU officials — that it is in the company’s best interest to carefully skirt any antitrust activities in order to maintain the peace in the Android ecosystem while gathering the legal stockpile of patents necessary to protect Android manufacturers from the myriad lawsuits in which many are currently embroiled.

“The combination of Google and Motorola Mobility will help supercharge Android,” said Harrison in conclusion. “It will also enhance competition and offer consumers faster innovation, greater choice and wonderful user experiences.”

Rumors are swirling that the Justice Department may approve the acquisition as soon as this week, but for now, those rumors have yet to be confirmed.

Image courtesy of laihui

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Microsoft’s Windows Phone platform now has more than 50,000 apps available — a significant milestone, but one that still puts it far behind Apple’s 500,000 iOS apps and Google’s more than 380,000 Android apps.

At least things seem to be picking up for the platform on the app front. It took Microsoft over a year to reach 40,000 apps on Windows Phone, but only 40 days to add another 10,000, reports All About Windows Phone. But apps alone won’t sell consumers on Windows Phone, especially during its do-or-die year of 2012.

So what’s keeping the platform, which is reportedly still seeing slow sales, from finding the success of the iPhone or Android? As former Windows Phone general manager Charlie Kindel sees it, the real problem with Windows Phone doesn’t stem from hardware or software (which he deems “superior” to the competition), but instead is due to Microsoft’s inability to play nice with carriers.

The company has imposed strict hardware restrictions on hardware partners, which has led to only a few devices being developed, and it has removed carriers entirely from the Windows Phone update process. Those two elements have led to carriers preferring to push Android and iOS devices, instead of Windows Phone.

“Carriers own the marketing money and spend billions a year,” Kindel wrote in a blog post yesterday. “The money is provided by the other sides of the market: OS providers & device manufactures, but the carriers get to spend it; they are the aggregation point where the money actually gets spent. The carriers choose what devices get featured on those TV ads.  They also choose what devices to train their RSP (retail sales professionals) to push.”

While I don’t deny that carrier marketing efforts have influenced Windows Phone sales, the situation seems much more complicated. First of all, Microsoft was way too late to the game, launching Windows Phone at the end of 2010, while the iPhone and Android hit the market in 2007 and 2008 respectively. MG Siegler argues that particular point nicely.

Kindel also fails to mention the explosive failure of Microsoft’s Kin phones earlier last year, which surely turned off many consumers to any future Microsoft mobile platform. I also think consumers are more savvy than the marketing sponges Kindel takes them for. He assumes people will buy what carriers tell them to, when in reality having a product that is clearly superior to the competition (which Windows Phone certainly isn’t) is more important.

You can say that Windows Phone is superior as much as you like, but so far Microsoft has failed to prove that to consumers.

One of the big reasons Microsoft has failed to make much of a splash with the platform is that it’s going after the same market as the iPhone and Android, when it should be focusing more on users who haven’t yet considered smartphones. I previously argued that Nokia’s Lumia 800 is an incredibly important device for Microsoft, but in many ways its cheaper sibling, the Lumia 710, is just as significant.

The Lumia 710 opens the door to a wider market of users who don’t want to spend over $100 on a new phone (T-Mobile will offer it in the US for just $50 with contract). And its inexpensive hardware also makes it more suitable to the prepaid market, a quickly growing segment in which Microsoft desperately needs to find a foothold.

Microsoft’s partnership with Nokia also makes it well positioned to expand Windows Phone into international markets as well — though those will admittedly be less lucrative than dominating the U.S., Europe and Asia.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

BlueStacks, which lets users run Android applications on most Windows PCs, has raised $10.6 million in its first round of funding.

The round was disclosed in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The filing did not indicate which firms participated in the round.

BlueStacks is similar to Parallels Desktop for Mac, which lets Mac users run an instance of the Windows operating system in a window. Both operating systems are basically running simultaneously, so the user doesn’t have to reboot the computer to start a different operating system as some other operating systems require. BlueStacks is compatible with all x86-based PCs.

Users can turn a Windows tablet into an Android tablet, although such a device/OS combination would probably run less smoothly than a tablet actually built for that purpose. The software handles both touch interfaces and mouse input to interact with the applications.

Three of the largest mobile operating systems have hit traditional computers. Apple’s latest operating system, Lion, brings a lot of features from its iPhone operating system to the Mac. Hewlett-Packard also still plans to bring WebOS, the mobile operating system for its Pre line of phones and its TouchPad tablet, to PCs.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Jon Rubinstein, the former CEO of Palm who now runs the business as a unit of computing giant Hewlett-Packard, has gotten endless ribbing for his claim that he’s never touched an iPhone.

Rubinstein, before joining Palm, was a longtime Apple executive, including a stretch of time when the iPhone was under development.

He defended his comment in an interview with AllThingsD’s Kara Swisher, explaining that he didn’t want to be “tainted” by the user experience of another device in developing Palm’s WebOS devices.

“Did I ever use an iPhone as my personal device? No,” said Rubinstein. “Have I touched one? Yes.”

Rubinstein went on to explain why he sold Palm to HP.

“We saw a way to get to profitability, but we didn’t see a way to get to scale,” said Rubinstein. “We’d be a small, successful company, but I don’t think that’s long-term sustainable. … HP has tremendous scale.”

Rubinstein wouldn’t comment on the other companies who engaged in acquisition discussions with Palm, referring to them as “Companies A, B, C, D, and E” — a nod to Palm’s SEC filings which had similarly vague references.

HP “needs to be in mobile,” said Rubinstein. “This is something they had to do. HP needs to be in control of its own future.”

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Devoted Windows smartphone hackers had just one week of blissful operating-system freedom.

That was the length of time that ChevronWP7, the first jailbreak tool to be released for Microsoft’s new mobile operating system, Windows Phone 7, was live before being shut down after the developers had a conversation, they say, with the software giant.

Released on November 25, ChevronWP7 was a piece of software designed to allow developers to load apps onto a Windows Phone 7 device without going through the official Windows Marketplace, Microsoft’s version of Apple’s App Store for iPhones. This meant developers could come up with homebrew solutions for it. (ChevronWP7 developers say they weren’t trying to encourage piracy, a common criticism of jailbreaking tools.) Today, on December 1, ChevronWP7 was discontinued, effective immediately.

According to a blog post by developers Rafael Rivera, Chris Walsh, and Long Zheng, Brandon Watson, who is the director of developer experience for Windows Phone 7, contacted them. Apparently Watson and the gang of three talked about the unlocking tool and came to a “mutual understanding” of the developers’ desire to create homebrew opportunities for the developer community and users at large. They also came to an understanding about the need to shut down the unlocking tool at once.

However, Watson seems to have left the door open for an official version of the sideloading app to be developed further. The ChevronWP7 blog post says: “To pursue these goals [creation of homebrew apps] with Microsoft’s support, Brandon Watson has agreed to engage in further discussions with us about officially facilitating homebrew development on WP7.”

So, this is not the cease-and-desist language that one would expect from a giant corporation—even though we don’t know what was the tone of the discussion that led to the mutual understanding. And Microsoft did condemn the Kinect gaming control hack in early November, saying it does not condone the modification of its products. However, this time it seems like Microsoft is willing to let people tinker with their mobile OS, which is a smart move that may actually encourage more developers to jump on the WP7 bandwagon.

[Photo credit: Andrew Morrell Photography]