Harsh news for social addict guys: It seams that Microsoft Kin phones(One and Two) will not be shipped this fall in Europe. We don’t know yet if this means the end of Kin project, but this will be a loss almost surely for Microsoft and his customers. Meanwhile, in US, Microsoft will continue to sell the phone through Verizon and support customers.

“We have made the decision to focus exclusively on Windows Phone 7 and we will not ship KIN in Europe this fall as planned. Additionally, we are integrating our KIN team with the Windows Phone 7 team, incorporating valuable ideas and technologies from KIN into future Windows Phone releases. We will continue to work with Verizon in the U.S. to sell current KIN phones.”

The sensor connects to any Xbox 360 device and through it’s camera, audio and motion sensors tracks 48 points of body movements.

With this new add-on you have the ability to control every move inside the game: “You simply step in front of the sensor and Kinect sees you move, hears your voice and recognizes your face.”

A demo of Project Natal has been announced last year during E3 and everybody was eager to see if this was as Microsoft promised. We were able to see Milo being raised in front of the TV or a family which could play a Formula 1 game.

Starting today, Kinect is the official name of the sensor and some of the details can be seen directly from the games that were featured during the event:

• Kinectimals is a pet simulator that let’s you interact with over 20 virtual animals(cats, lions, cheetah, tigers).
• Joyride is a racing game that can uses your hands to control the steering wheel.
• Kinect Sports is a new sports game(remember Wii Sports) that includes boxing, bowling, beach volleyball, track and field, soccer and table tennis. Every game action is controlled with the move of your body. For instance in the demo, we could see 2 players during an obstacle course that were running and jumping with their own bodies in front of the Kinect sensor.
• Dance Central is made by MTV Games and seamed to be one of the most entertaining game featured at E3. From the demo we could see that you can dance and perform at guitar same time with two more players. Looks like a Guitar Hero/ Rock Band futuristic style.
• Star Wars is a game still in development, but looked quite interesting. We could see a Jedi handling the laser sword with his both hands.
• Kinect Adventures featured a demo with a river rafting game that could be played by four people.
• Your Shape: Fitness Evolved an advanced Ubisoft fitness game.

As we saw last year from the demo of  “Project Natal”, the Kinect sensor will also feature a Menu interface and at the E3 event we could see Twitter, Facebook, Zune and Netflix icons there and also a movie playbacked and skipped with user own hands.

Microsoft Kinect will be release at November 2010 and has an estimated price close to $150. Remember, this is just the motion sensor, an Xbox 360 console is also required.

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With this Kin, Microsoft wants to forward social networks to the next level and get a valuable part of the mobile phone consumers.

To merge social life with real life, Microsoft even made an experiment and picked a girl called Rosa to visit her social friends. The social experiment can be followed on Facebook. Now let’s get back to the social phones.

As we see in the screen shot taken from the official Kin website, both phones come with a sliding QWERTY keyboard and a bright, clear touchscreen. A 5 or 8 megapixel flash camera is on the back of each model with great low light shooting ability. Kin One(5 megapixel) shoots videos in SD quality, while Kin Two(8 megapixel) shoots them in HD quality. The other difference between One and Two is the internal memory 4Gb vs. 8 Gb and the speakers which are mono vs. stereo. Both phones use the media player powered by Zune.

Microsoft described Kin as the phone which brings three user experiences from PC:

-Kin Loop is the name of the home screen and is the place where you will always be updated with latest social things(status, messages, feeds, photos) from your friends. It’s the same screen we described when we announced Windows Phone 7 Series.

-Kin Spot is the place where you will be able to share(videos, photos, text messages, Web pages, location and status updates). A dot spot will appear in the bottom center of the screen indicating that there you should put your things and then choose the friends you will like to share with.

-Kin Studio is the most interesting thing and features your social life in a browser. All photos, contacts, videos, call history are backed up and you can view it like a timeline.

Latest cool thing we want to present is the Zune experience. With a Zune subscription you will have access(over 3G or Wi-Fi) to everything from your Zune Library: Music, Videos, FM Radio and podcast playback.

As Microsoft stated, Kin One and Kin Two will be available in US from the beginning of May and in the rest of the world starting this autumn. A price has not been revealed yet.

Brought to life through partnerships with Verizon Wireless, Vodafone and Sharp Corporation, KIN is designed to be the ultimate social experience that blends the phone, online services and the PC with breakthrough new experiences called the Loop, Spot and Studio. KIN will be exclusively available from Verizon Wireless in the U.S. beginning in May and from Vodafone this autumn in Germany, Italy, Spain and the United Kingdom.

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Internet Explorer is one of the browsers that we all had to use some day when we didn’t knew we had another alternative to browse the Internet. In modern days IE browser is used just to browse towards Mozilla site and get Firefox browser. Statistics say that, we don’t.

At the beginning Microsoft didn’t understood Firefox success, but lately Bill Gates boys seemed to use their brains a little more and find a solution. Internet Explorer 9 uses some of Mozilla Firefox or Google Chrome secrets. How cool is that? Is not, really.

From Microsoft page about this latest invention we find out that Speed, HTML5 and Graphic are the new words for IE9 engine.

It seams Microsoft joined HTML standards in August 2009 and start to send his specialists on World Wide Web meetings. The idea behind HTML standards is to get an alternative on those kind of sites that told us “You should use Internet Explorer in order to see this page”. So soon we will be able to see this kind of sites even if we use Google Chrome, Opera or Mozilla Firefox.

A faster Javascript, CSS3 and Direct 2D technology seems to be the Microsoft’s all-in bets that they will make a browser faster enough to battle the usual ones.

A fail example from previous version of Internet Explorer( 8 ) can be seen in the following picture. The browser itself got the FAIL tag written(from acidtest), so we didn’t modified anything.

The preview of the Beta version can be downloaded from Microsoft website, but be careful, who knows. The browser works only on Vista or 7 systems so don’t bother to try to install it on XP. If you are angry on Microsoft, you can buy a T-shirt from this address and support the community.

We will try to keep you updated as soon as we find out more about this new browser because now this thing is not ready for surfing.

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The most expected announcement of day and maybe the congress, is the one made by Microsoft who made a preview of how Windows 7 series phone will look. The new OS has been presented by Microsoft CEO, Steve Ballmer itself and brings some quality updates.

In the left picture we see that the start screen is a collection of live updates coming from several sources such as phone, social networks, mail, pictures, xbox live games, zune music, internet explorer and so on. The start screen can be customized by user who can move or add different tiles.

Every phone that will have Windows 7 series, will come with 3 hardware buttons: Back, Start and Search. The search button(Bing) will reveal relevant web or local information based on your query.

Hubs bring together related content from the Web, applications and services into a single view to simplify common tasks. Windows Phone 7 Series includes six hubs built on specific themes reflecting activities that matter most to people: People, Pictures, Games, Music+Video, Marketplace, Office.

• People hub features live updates(feeds) gathered from social networks.

• Picture hub show photos synced from PC, taken with the camera device or a feed with latest photos made by your friend and available on social network.

• Games hub gives you Xbox Live games,  scores, avatars.

• Music and Video hub will work just like a Zune and will provide 3-party apps experiences. It plays the content from a user PC, online music and FM radio stations.

• Marketplace hub delivers apps and games.

• Office hub will give you access to Office, OneNote and SharePoint Workspace and help you to read, edit and share documents.

As Microsoft says this isn’t a next chapter in the smartphones, this is a new beginning. The first (Windows 7 series) phones will be available by Holiday 2010.

Partners from around the world have committed to include Windows Phone 7 Series in their portfolio plans. They include mobile operators AT&T, Deutsche Telekom AG, Orange, SFR, Sprint, Telecom Italia, Telefónica, Telstra, T-Mobile USA, Verizon Wireless and Vodafone, and manufacturers Dell, Garmin-Asus, HTC Corp., HP, LG, Samsung, Sony Ericsson, Toshiba and Qualcomm Inc. The first phones will be available by holiday 2010. Customers who would like to receive additional information about Windows Phone 7 Series and be notified when it is available can register at http://www.windowsphone7series.com.

Before talking about the new Taskbar, we want to speak a little about boot time in Windows 7. After we first open the computer, this is the phase when the PC loads it’s bios and then starts to boot the operating system that is installed on the hard drive. We discovered and we can confirm the fact that a system boots up faster when Windows 7 is installed. Is something close with what we all experienced at the first days after we installed XP and the system wasn’t load with  programs. It’s useless to compare it with Vista boot up time, because we all know it took more than 30 seconds to finish.

Taskbar

After the boot phase completes, Windows opens and we can finally use our computer. You should see the desktop looks something like this

Looking at the taskbar, the first thing that you discover is  his transparent effect which now expands your desktop wallpaper inside all bars or taskbars that you’ll use. Also the taskbar is taller than Xp or Vista and pointing your mouse to a taskbar icon will show you a thumbnail preview of open files or programs. Right Click-ing the applications from the taskbar will unveil a Jump List, which offers you the option to choos something related to that program. Show Desktop/Aero Peek button is now moved on the right side of the taskbar after the clock/date infos. Weather are placed in quick launch or the notification area zone, the icons can be reordered as we want.

Windows 7 introduce a new concept called Aero:

-Aero Peek effect shows a preview of the desktop, by minimizing all windows, but keeping their transparent bar shapes.

-Aero Snap help you if you intend to expand your window on half of the screen, left or right for comparison reasons for example. If you want to maximize back the window you should drag it to the bottom or top of the screen should restore it back.

-Aero Shake works like this: let’s say we have 4-5 program windows opened; if we hold click on the bar of one window and shake it the rest of the windows will minimize. To restore them back we shake that window again.

Start Menu is situated as usual on the left side of the taskbar and has a new effect when the user moves the mouse over it. It contains on the right side last used programs and on the right side Control Panel, Documents, Music. At the bottom is the Search box and the Shut Down icon which has been replaced with a link that tells you what action you can do(Shut Down, Restart, Log Off, Stand By). You can easily switch between them because near this link is an arrow that allows to choose the default one.

But stay a little because Windows 7 is not all about a simple taskbar, Microsoft added a lot of cool features and we hope that in the coming weeks we will have the time to cover them all.

Stay tune!

Windows Vista was the previous operating system that Microsoft claimed to be a new wave inside our computers. We all know Vista has been just a pain in the arse: lack of drivers, resource killer, security problems and a lot of related issues destroyed our faith in Microsoft’s operating systems(XP).

Introduction

Windows 7 is a simplified version of previous operating system made by Microsoft(Xp + Vista). It comes with several fixes and tweaks to make our experience smoother and close to what we all expected.

Versions

You will find in stores 3 different types of Windows 7, each having more or less features:

• Home Premium is the cheapest version available(from 120$) and perfect for those who use their personal computer to do usual things and features: speed, improved desktop navigation, Internet Explorer 8, Windows Media Center.

• Professional is the middle version with a price starting from 200$ and has basically Home Premium features + more: Xp Compatibilty Mode, Domain Join, Full Backup/Restore.

• Ultimate is the highest version of Windows 7 available(from 220$) and includes 35 language packs and Bitlocker feature(data encryption).

System Requirements

Not all of us will be able to use Windows 7 on our computers, but we don’t have to panic because is not pretentious as Vista was. If you want to run it you will need:

• Processor: 1Ghz (x32) or (x64) processor
• Physical Memory: 1GB RAM (x32) or 2GB RAM(x64)
• Internal Memory: 16GB (x32) or 20GB(x64)
• Graphic Device: DirectX 9

We opened this new topic about Windows 7 in Software so in the coming weeks you will discover here some of the top features that will hopefully make this new Microsoft operating system become a success.

Will Bill Gates and his stuff find the path to deliver the perfect experience to world-wide users?

Did the user opinions count when Windows 7 was built?