Finally, another Android manufacturer steps up (though they don’t want you to know yet).
Motorola is sending out invitations for an event on September 15th that are deliberately mysterious; “Unfortunately, we are not able to give you any more details at present”, says the email; “however, over the coming weeks we will be able to reveal more”. Given that the invitation has the Android robot log on, it’s a fair bet that this will mark the UK announcement of the Motorola ‘Morrison’ and ‘Scholes’ Android phones. The rumours say both will have keyboards and large screens; Morrison looks like an old HTC design with rounded corners (or, say, a much thicker iPhone with a slide-out keyboard) , Scholes looks more like a Sony Experia, with bevelled edges. Rather more important than the case are what the phones will offer over HTC’s Android range, what Android means for Motorola - and what Motorola means for Android.

Back in the day, with the StarTAC, Motorola invented the mobile phone, then watched Nokia take the market away. The RAZR was the definitive feature phone, back in 2004. As Motorola needs more than one successful handset a decade to stay in business, they’ve tried every phone operating system - including going back to Symbian after abandoning it. None of them have turned into signature devices that sell like the iPhone and the BlackBerry and those billions of Nokia handsets (not to mention all the million-selling Windows Mobile devices HTC has come up with). The Android phones come out of a project that was rumoured to pit Android, Windows Mobile and a couple of other smartphone operating systems head to head; Android - or the hype around Android - won that battle. Just as HTC has said half of its handsets next year will be Android devices (a plan that’s unlikely to get the company any more photo opportunities with senior Microsoft staff), Motorola thinks Android will put it back on top. Er, only if the phones are any good.

Good, for an Android phone, has to include running all the Android apps that are on the market for the HTC devices. The Australian company that planned to make the second Android phone ever dropped the idea when it realised the smaller screen it planned would mean problems with apps that expected the same screen size as the G1. Windows Mobile developers and handset makers have dealt with this for years, with multiple screen sizes and resolutions and it’s rare to find software with a button hanging off the bottom of the screen; iPhone developers will have to cope with it if the rumoured Apple tablet really does run iPhone apps on a bigger screen. Windows developers can get a nasty shock when they look at their apps on a netbook and discover key buttons are hidden by the Windows taskbar because they just don’t fit on screen. Part of being a platform is making it easy for developers to put their code on every device and form factor that runs the OS. If the Motorola devices don’t have the same screen resolution as HTC Android phones, we’ll see how well Android enables multiple screen sizes. If they do, that only postpones the question; with so many handset manufacturers dabbling with Android, competing with HTC is going to mean trying different device sizes and styles rather than just making cosmetic changes.

Of course, Motorola isn’t only competing with HTC’s Android phones; leaving aside all the other smartphones on the market, there are still those Windows Mobile devices HTC dabbles in, like the Touch Pro2. I’ve been waiting for this since February and using it for the last few weeks - and it was well worth the wait. It’s got a big screen and a beautiful keyboard and intuitive, easy to use touch gestures (and yes, that is the first time I’ve ever been complimentary about TouchFLO).  It’s fast - I think faster than the 1GHz Toshiba TG01 for a lot of what you actually do on a phone. And it’s clever; you get the phone equivalent of Reply All to email - you can pick and choose multiple people and make your own conference call. You get the PIN for a dial-in conference call up on screen ready to type in. And when you turn the phone over, it turns into a speakerphone with really good speakers - and a mute button for when the cat throws up in the middle of your call and you don’t want anyone to know you’re working from home.  If the Motorola handsets have anything half as useful or innovative, they’ll be well worth a look.

And actually, we don’t need to wait until the 15th to find out what Motorola has on offer; the US event is five days earlier, so the main news will be the price and the operator for the UK.
-Mary

But is the Booklet a page turner? Intel and Nokia’s much-vaunted partnership to create a new generation of what Kai Öistämö, Nokia’s executive Vice President of devices  called “the next wave of mobile technology” powered by Maemo or Moblin mobile Linux and Intel chips must be a pretty long-term venture. We’ve heard nothing more about it since June and the first Intel-powered Nokia device is a Windows netbook, probably designed to compete with Qualcomm’s promised Smartbook Snapdragon devices (lighter, thinner netbooks that really will run Linux), and with Android and Chrome OS netbooks when they come along.

Is it the convergence of phone and netbook that Nokia CEO Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo (OPK for short) hinted at just a few days ago? The 12-hour battery life is good for a netbook (if you can get it without turning off the Wi-Fi and dimming the screen to illegibility); if you have to recharge a 3G phone every night, people complain. It does have 3G and GPS, so it will be interesting to see if the 12 hour battery life includes turning those on. Along with the HDMI output, that’s a similar spec to Qualcomm’s Smartbook, which also promises to be 2cm thick (and quite a bit lighter, at around 900g). Of course the Smartbook is an unproven concept, whereas cheap and cheerful netbooks are big sellers (though Nokia hasn’t put a price on the Booklet yet).

The Booklet name is probably just a play on being a smaller notebook without the ubiquitous netbook name rather than an attempt to evoke epaper and pre-empt whatever Apple might or might not one day launch as a tablet. Unless the Ovi apps that Nokia is promising take advantage of the power of the PC to do more than they could on a smartphone, it’s all a bit me-too.

Despite being just about the biggest phone manufacturer worldwide, Nokia has been struggling to match the success of the iPhone and the popularity of the App Store; according to the FT, it’s reminding employees of the new focus on apps and services by splashing the number of subscribers to Ovi services onto screens around its Espoo headquarters. And over in Silicon Valley, Henry Tirri, the head of the Nokia Research Center is looking at what kind of innovative services you can create using Nokia’s billions of existing handsets as sensors. Want to know if a road is jammed with traffic or a bar is full of people dancing or if the Starbucks you’re navigating to is probably closed? There are probably enough Nokia devices on the road, in the bar and in the coffee shop (during opening hours for comparison) for a smart service to tell you that the road is solid, the bar is jumping (60% chance it’s salsa dancing) and the Starbucks is dark.

That’s why Tirri sounds convincing when he pitches you a service Microsoft, Google, TomTom and dozens of other companies are working on: it’s about the phones. “Not deliberately but more by serendipity this has developed to be the electronic equipment that’s the closest and most personal, that’s with you most of the time; you really take care of it. This has evolved to be the device it is because of the first killer function, voice and communication. We are simply piggybacking on the fact that these are where people are and we can use them as context generators. We have the most of them on earth; a billion of them. By the law of large numbers we are simply in the best position of utilising context - like Google is on search.”

Context is whether the bar is busy or the shop is open - and it’s what makes services really useful. If there are 15 coffee shops ‘close’ to me, I want the one I can get to without getting stuck in traffic and I want the one that’s actually open, not the one that just says it should be open on its Web site. Is the user trying to VPN in from an Internet cafe already on the plane home? But it relies on those billions of phones acting as sensors and that means not getting in anyone’s way.

Tirri’s team has come up with a battery-friendly way of gathering location information that can generate context, without leaving GPS on all the time; virtual ‘trip lines’ that turn on the GPS sensor at a specific point (approximated from the cell location) to send an accurate position. This neatly avoids the worries of anonymising GPS data (In 2007, Microsoft Research was able to infer the home address of nearly every employee in an ‘anonymous’ location trial; researcher John Krumm only managed to find names for 5% of the employees using Live Search and he had to add false location information to really offer privacy to people offering ‘anonymous’ information about their travels).

If Ovi Maps on the Booklet starts to deliver context, it would be something really different. Until then, it sounds like just another shiny netbook.
-Mary

My workhorse machine is an HP 2710P tablet. It goes pretty much everywhere I go, and so it was the first machine (aside from my test PC) that I set up as a clean Windows 7 install, using the RTM build from MSDN.

First, the good news: As with nearly every machine we’ve taken to Windows 7 virtually everything works straight out of the box. There are Windows 7 graphics drivers for the Intel card ready and waiting, as well as drivers for most of the machine’s hardware, even drivers for the fingerprint reader and the SD card slot.

But there is some not so good news: Some of HP’s built-in tweaks and speciality hardware aren’t supported yet, and there’s some question over whether they will ever get Windows 7 drivers. That’s always a risk when hardware pre-dates an OS. It’s certainly a little annoying when the screen won’t autorotate, and the slider volume control on the keyboard won’t work - but there are workarounds using OS features such as Windows 7’s Mobility Center (call it up with Windows-X) which gives you rotation and volume controls.

Not to worry though, as as Windows 7 builds on Windows Vista, you can get all those functions back using the latest versions of the Vista drivers from the HP web site.

So far I’ve been able to get back rotation and special keys (including the volume slider and mute button), the accelerometer-based hard drive shock protection

You’ll need the following SoftPaqs:

SP43616 - HP Quick Launch screen rotation and special keys
SP38424 - hard drive shock protection
SP39734 - WiFi and Bluetooth manager

These will give you most of what you need. Some set up guides suggest using earlier You’ll also find a couple of devices without drivers in Device Manager. These are part of the Intel AMT device management suite, and aren’t really necessary for most users.

You can find the drivers for these in these two SoftPaqs: SP38312 and SP38313

The installers for these drivers won’t run under Windows 7. However the files will unpack into folders under C:\swsetup. In Device Manager right-click on one of the two unsupported devices, and choose “Update Drivers”. Choose to install from a local folder (and make sure the “use subfolders” option is selected). Pick C:\swsetup and let Windows install the device driver. Do the same for the other AMT device driver.

And that’s everything you need for a fully configured Windows 7 machine.

Enjoy.

–Simon

I found this forum thread very useful when setting up my machine

Remember macro viruses? Trojans and bots have taken over from them in the virus top ten, but there could easily still be binary Office documents lurking in your business’s fileservers with unwanted code in them. The XML file formats introduced with Office 2007 mean you know when a document has a macro by the file extension (an XLSX file can’t have code in, an XLSM can) but even though XML files are smaller as well as more secure, not everyone wants to spend the time to convert a backlog of many years. So to protect you from anything worrying, Office 2010 introduces a Protected View that locks documents when you open them, and runs in an isolated, low-integrity  process with a restricted token (rather like combining the protected mode that IE 8 runs in with the secure desktop you see with UAC elevation prompts - Protected View uses the same User Interface Privilege Isolation).

As the Office engineering blog post puts it, “For a malware to actually be able to run in Protected View it will first need to find a way around DEP, ASLR, GS and our new 2010 Office File validation checks.  After all that, the malware would need to find a way to break out of the sandbox.”

The Office team is confident enough in Protected View that opening and previewing attachments from Outlook will get less annoying; you won’t have to say yes, you trust every different type of document to open and preview individually the first time you come across it. It seems like a welcome security measure that will make life easier too. Sadly, as implemented it’s currently a productivity blocker that will be turned off or loathed by every user that comes across it.

On my system at least, every single document I open in Office 2010, binary or XML, from the office network is opened in Protected Mode and tagged as coming from ‘an unsafe location’. That’s supposed to be for documents downloaded from the Internet (”When a file is downloaded from the Internet the Windows Attachment Execution Service places a marker in the file’s alternate data stream to indicate it came from the Internet zone,” says the Office Engineering blog) and I’m kind of offended that Microsoft is telling me that our network isn’t secure - it is Windows Server 2008 we’re running. I’m also losing time on every document, having to click through before I can start editing.

I tried turning Protected View off; you can’t. You can go into the Trust center, ignoring the sign that tells you not to go in there and not to change anything, and tell Office to trust network documents (again, ignoring the warning that a network is a scary place and you shouldn’t be trusting it) but that didn’t fix it. I had to manually add the file shares on the server, mount point by mount point. You can’t just give office the name of your file server and trust the whole thing; Office refuses to mark the root of the server as safe.

This isn’t supposed to happen, says Microsoft. In some cases, the proxy settings are to blame (check out The LIZ and Proxies: the surprising connection for an explanation by Eric Lawrence of the IE team of why proxies are involved in the intranet at all. We don’t use a proxy. Maybe the Local intranet setting in Internet Options isn’t set to ‘Automatically detect’? It is, as it happen. 

Ah, says the Office team; it’s a bug, and they’re working on it. That’s good news; if I only have to put up with this until the beta of Office 2010 this autumn, that’s fair enough - you expect problems when you use a ‘technical preview’ (or alpha code as we used to call it).

But the fact that Office 2010 is relying on Internet Explorer options that may or may not apply if you don’t have Internet Explorer on your system is a little worrying (Firefox doesn’t use security zones, for example). And Simon, who is joined to the domain doesn’t see Protected View on network documents. So the underpinnings of Protected view seem to be a tangle of Internet Explorer, Active Directory and Microsoft network settings; that’s fine for an all-Microsoft business - like Microsoft. It’s less useful for the rest of the world where heterogeneous networks are the norm and security is important - but will always get demoted if it gets in the way of getting your job done. Let’s hope the bug fix does more than just tweak things; Protected View uses a spiffy new architecture inside Windows and it needs to take a clear and manageable approach to defining what a ’safe’ or ‘unsafe’ location actually is, or it’s going to be unpopular and insecure (cue everyone copying documents onto their laptop to edit them without the nagging and leaving them in the pub car park).
-Mary
 

Backward compatibility is a millstone around the neck of OS vendors. Just look at the trouble Microsoft had with Vista. Not everyone has the courage - or the following - to dump huge portions of its installed software base in the way Apple has in its transitions from 68000 to Power PC to Intel. That’s why virtualisation is such a useful too, it allows the latest hardware to run older less well-supported operating systems. Microsoft is using it to give Windows 7 users a virtual XP machine with its XP Mode (and its MEDV Enterprise Desktop Virtualisaton tools). But what if you want to run really old software?

That’s where the gamers come in.

There’s a whole culture out there devoted to preserving their favourite games. After all, good game design is art, mixing interactive story telling with the finest examples of digital images and animation. It’s also where new techniques are pioneered, in artificial intelligence, in speech synthesis, and in human computer interaction. Keeping those classic games alive is an important part of keeping digital culture alive - and in a fortuitous fallout, it’s also our best hope for preserving and using those old business applications that just won’t die.

We’ve been clearing out the spare room at the palatial SandM Towers,  and a couple of old pieces of software came to light. One was a copy of an old favourite, Dungeon Keeper. It had been a good few years since I heard the games dulcet tones, along with the immortal “Your creatures are falling in battle”.But how was I to run a DOS game on Windows 7? The change to NT-based operating systems with Windows XP had left games like Dungeon Keeper orphaned.

A quick trip to Google revealed the answer to my problem: DOSBox

Not so much a virtual PC, more an emulator, DOSBox gives you a place to run your old DOS software, with emulation for most popular graphics cards of the time, and most popular soundcards. There’s even networking support and the ability to access serial ports to work with old hardware. While DOSBox doesn’t run DOS (so you don’t need a DOS licence!), it’s able to give you most of the familiar old commands with its own shell - and can map drives from the host PC to the virtual DOS machine. While it’s command line driven there are plenty of frontend GUIs to help you configure your environment, including mounting disks and drives.

There’s a lot that can be said for taking a tool designed for working with games and using it in your business. Even more when it’ll run on a wide range of different processors and operating systems. Tools like DOSBox will help you plan your Windows 7 migration, giving you more options for handling old software and for slowly transitioning unsupported applications to new, supported tools.

Hey, and you also get to play Dungeon Keeper. That, my friends, is most definitely a win.

–Simon

When you install Windows 7 with IE 8, you’re usually going to get Bing as the default search engine - at least until you change it to Google. If you install Windows 7 on enough machines, you’re probably not going to get around to changing the search engine on all of them straight away. Sure it’s on the list with installing Office, and your favourite blogging tools, and ‘can’t live without them’ utilities like ClipMate and SpeedFiler (and in one case, downloading a 114MB NVidia graphics card driver file to get Aero Glass and flashing the BIOS on this Dell XPS M1330 to stop the display driver spinning the fan up to the speed of a jumbo jet); but between importing my extensive AutoCorrect definitions from my last PC and remembering the IRC addresses to put into Trillian, I’ve not got around to changing the search engine on a couple of my PCs. And when I have, I’ve actually considered changing back.

I’ll be honest, I’ve got most of my exposure to Bing through a game that used to be called Club Live Search (so yes, I do spend time at Club Bing, groaning at the pun). They’re fun little word and puzzle games that earn tickets you can spend on air miles (or donate to charity). And when you ask for a hint or fill in an answer, you see a Bing search in the bottom of the browser window. And over time, you start to get used to seeing related searches and your search history down the side of the page, and being able to hover over an orange dot next to a link to see the first few lines of the page previewed and being able to choose image results not just by size but by whether they’re in colour or black and white, a photo or an illustration, a picture with people in or not… You notice that, hey, Bing has a couple of useful features.

The kind of searches you do when you’re playing a word game don’t relate to the kind of searches you do for work (unless your job is writing word games), so it isn’t until you forget to switch your default search away from Bing that you also notice that, hey, Bing doesn’t suck nearly as much as it used to. I’m researching Windows 7 deployment tools and I accidentally ran the search on a newly 7-ized PC that still defaulted to Bing. I found what I was looking for on Bing, but I checked Google for comparison. Many of the results were the same, but Bing had more results about Windows 7 on earlier pages of results; Google had more results about a range of Windows versions on the earlier pages, it had more results from older pages (years older in some cases) and it had more irrelevant results overall. Google did find one useful link I didn’t spot on Bing: did you know you can use GFI LANguard (which I think of as a security tool) to deploy client software as well as patches? Handy to know now that there’s a freeware version that will scan up to five IPs…

Bing didn’t find it, because the page doesn’t mention Windows or Windows 7 anywhere and until I confirm that GFI LANguard can actually deploy an OS as well as an application I don’t know if Google was exceptionally clever or benefiting from synchronicity. I do know that if Google’s ‘all your data are belong to us’ attitude gets too irritating, I could probably stand to use Bing for searching the Web without complaining about it all day. And that really is a major improvement.
Mary

No, there isn’t.

Is there a bug at all? Maybe, maybe not. Several bloggers have noticed that if you run CHKDSK on a system with a lot of memory with the Repair flag turned on, it uses nearly all that memory. For an OS as undemanding about memory as Windows 7 this might seem like a bug; memory leak, shriek many of the reports. As it turns out, it’s by design. Microsoft assumes that if you’re asking a disk utility to repair your hard drive by marking out the bad sectors that you want this done as quickly as possible so that you don’t lose data and so it uses as much memory as is available to get it done faster; the other assumption is that you understand how demanding an operation checking every single sector on your hard drive it (and probably that you’re smart enough not to carry on working on a system with a hard drive that you’re worried enough about to be repairing in the first place). That’s not a bug, but it might be worth warning users this will happen.

What seems more worrying is that some of the testers had their systems crash when they tried the CHKDSK repair. Is that a bug? Again, maybe and maybe not; the problem seems to be with the drivers for the PC chipset and when those are updated, the crashes stop happening. That’s not a showstopper bug; that’s something that needs an update to warn you that you need to update the drivers before you run CHKDSK.
And even if the crash was down to Windows 7 RTM code rather than the drivers, that wouldn’t make it a ’showstopper’ that would ‘derail RTM’. In his usual hands-on manner (he once spent half an hour at a conference looking at bugs I was seeing in the beta build of 7 and trying out fixes on my PC), Windows VP Steven Sinofsky dropped by the original blog to calm things down and give a definition of showstopper; “Bugs that are so severe as to require immediate patches and attention would have to have no workarounds and would generally be such that a large set of people would run across them in the normal course of using their PC.”

One, this isn’t that severe a bug, and two, if it hasn’t shown up in the telemetry that Microsoft gets back from system crashes then it’s not affecting that large a set of people. The Microsoft testers haven’t managed to reproduce either the crash or the drive upgrade solution; if they can’t do that with their extensive internal test network then it’s not likely to happen on the majority of machines - and it’s definitely not a showstopper by definition.

But ‘just another driver issue’ isn’t as good a headline as ’showstopper bug’, so that’s what you see.
-Mary

We’ve been helping a friend get to grips with mobile browsing on his aging BlackBerry. It’s one that’s old enough that it doesn’t get the new browser that arrived with the Bold, so he’d been using Opera Mini to at least get something that approached a decent browsing experience. Even so he was hitting what I think of as the mobile browsing wall: the mobile web is not the web we get on our desktops.

Our friend uses a lot of online forums, and Opera Mini was starting to show its limitations. Most of the social aspects of the sites were lost as he was redirected to mobile versions of the sites - with drastically cut down user interfaces. The in-cloud reformatting the Opera Mini was doing wasn’t helping, either…

Opera recently sent us a whole pile of statistics about how people are using their Mini browser. The numbers make interesting reading, with impressive numbers of people using the service to view huge numbers of web pages. But if I was running Opera I would be getting very worried about my mobile business indeed…

“Nokia phones continue to be the handsets of preference for Opera Mini users, with Sony Ericsson claiming second place. BlackBerry and Samsung phones are the preference in the United States.”

Nokia is in the process of rolling out a WebKit-based browser, which should bring iPhone class browsing to much of its Symbian platform. Sony Ericsson is enroute to Android, and while its Java-based feature phone platform works well for Opera, new Java-based platforms like Bolt are rolling out that give users access to a much more powerful in-cloud browser, with support for Flash and for Silverlight. BlackBerry will get a significant browser upgrade in the autumn with the release of BlackBerry OS 5.0, and our Windows Mobile in-cloud browser of choice SkyFire is currently testing its own BlackBerry version. Samsung’s own browser is also in the middle of upgrading.

The foundations of the Opera Mini business model are crumbling. What was a story of broken browsers and unsatisfying online experiences is changing into one where high end devices like the iPhone are changing the way users think about mobile browsing - and mobile device manufacturers are having to follow. Opera needs to make a jump that takes its desktop rendering engine into the cloud, rather than the current service.

It’ll be interesting to see if Opera Mini can evolve to deal with the demands of its users.

Oh, and our friend?

He’s now using the beta of Bolt and finding the mobile web a much more desktop-like place.

And do you even want them to? Yes, Microsoft is planning to offer Windows 7 with IE built in in Europe so users don’t have to jump through hoops to get a browser (and avoiding millions of CDs that go straight into landfill after one installation is a good thing).  It keeps the EU happy by popping up a ‘ballot screen’ that lets you pick from a list of browsers - here’s the sample screen Microsoft is showing off.

Incidentally, Opera - who started this whole debacle by complaining to the EU - still isn’t happy. Microsoft says the ballot screen will “in a horizontal line and in an unbiased way display icons of and basic identifying information on the Web browsers.” Opera says that’s still biased, because the IE logo is just so recognisable. Newsflash: the reason Opera isn’t the most popular browser isn’t the logo (and making it harder for people who want IE because they’re comfortable with it to find it isn’t the best way to grow your market share).

And “Yes,” confirms a Microsoft spokesperson, “the proposals will also cover boxed copies of Windows sold in Europe”. Does that mean that we don’t have to have an ‘upgrade’ version of Windows that only does a clean install? After all, the reason for the E version is to offer a browser choice to people who have previously had a built-in IE; surely the upgrade install process could offer the same ballot screen and not force you to vape your system in the name of choice? (At least if you’ve got Vista; XP users are stuck with a clean install because it’s too different). Ah, says the spokesperson. “Everything’s just at proposal stage, so specifics of how the upgrade process would work would just be speculation right now.”

And actually, with the relatively low numbers of people who have Vista compared to Windows XP, the current plan of E versions Windows 7 that mean you can buy the full version of Windows for the cost of an upgrade may be a better bargain.  Yes, you lose the convenience of an in-place upgrade but a clean install will often give you better performance - and with a full version there are no restrictions on installing on another machine and you don’t have to faff around providing proof that you have a previous version of Windows first. That’s probably worth the time it takes to back up your settings and re-install your apps.

-Mary

Microsoft announced RTM today (Wednesday 22nd), but that doesn’t mean you can get the code right now. Depending on how you get Windows, you’ll see it anytime from August to October. Courtesy of the Windows Team blog, here are the dates. All dates are for the initial English version; other languages will follow by the end of October at the latest.

When                           Who

Right now                               Gullible downloaders risking malware to get a leaked version on Russian sites that appears to have significant problems.
now to 2 days after RTM      PC manufacturers
’shortly’ after RTM                IT pros who want the evaluation version from Springboard
August 6th                              software and hardware developers who use Microsoft Connect and MSDN
                                                 TechNet and MSDN subscribers
August 7th                              Volume Licence customers with SA
August 16th                            Microsoft Partner Program Gold/Certified Members who use the Microsoft Partner Network (MPN) Portal
August 23rd                           Microsoft Action Pack Subscribers
September 1st                       Volume licence customers without SA
October 22nd                         Consumers buying a boxed copy or a new PC