Microsoft’s Windows Phone OS is often criticized for lagging far behind iOS and Android. But on Thursday, a leaked description of Microsoft’s next big mobile OS, Windows Phone 8, came to light, revealing how the operating system will improve. But can it really compete? We handicap Apollo against iOS 5 and Android 4.
Surveys conducted and sponsored by research firm BTIG suggest that movie viewers might actually spend more money on films, if they were available online or on cable video-on-demand services at the same time as they are available in theaters. The post from BTIG’s Richard Greenfield (free registration required to view) details three different surveys conducted over the last few weeks, which asked respondents to forecast their theatrical and home entertainment spending if windows were to collapse.
All of the surveys leveraged Survey Monkey to poll respondents, but the most complete of the three polled the Survey Monkey Audience (SMA) network, racking up 1,124 responses. About 70 percent of respondents from the SMA survey said their spending on entertainment wouldn’t change if priced in the – range. But while the majority of users predict no change, the number who say they would spend more outnumber those who predict they would spend less by three to one.
According to Greenfield, that group appeared to be price-sensitive and more likely representative of today’s average consumer that respondents from the other surveys. Those who expected to spend more would be doing so because they saw cost savings from concessions and parking outweighing the difference in price and convenience of watching at home. In addition, some respondents suggested that they were unhappy with the current moviegoing experience.
In aggregate, the survey shows that Hollywood studios would likely make more revenue with the collapse of movie windows. More importantly, those sales would come with better margins since they wouldn’t be sharing with exhibitors. The fear seems to be that putting pressure on the theatrical window could cause some exhibitors to go out of business, which would in turn destroy that distribution channel.
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How will ARM-based Windows 8 tablets mitigate the heavy payloads of traditional desktop apps? A new report suggests desktop application support will be limited but still present, contradicting an earlier statement by Windows lead Steven Sinofsky.
After augmenting Windows 8 with some mobile-friendly features, it looks like file management is next to go under the knife. Not the sexiest part of an OS, granted, but one you’ll use almost every day — a fact not lost on Redmond. Based on newsgroup feedback, Windows 8 will sport a stack of tweaks hoping to make some of the more mundane tasks, well, less mundane. For example, if you copy duplicate files to a directory, it’ll make decisions based on size, name and modified date to determine if it’s the same file or not. For long copy jobs, error messages will be mercifully left until the end, allowing the rest to complete. Other simple touches include EXIF orientation data, which will be reflected in Explorer’s preview, updates to the slightly contentious Ribbon, plus a bunch more user-driven goodies. We’re reserving judgement until we get hands-on of course, but if you want to know more, there’s a full rundown in the source after the break.
Windows 8 file management: You ask, Microsoft listens originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 31 Jan 2012 12:02:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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When the Absinthe A5 untethered jailbreak solution hit yesterday it opened Apple’s iPhone 4S and iPad 2 for more creative uses by their owners — as long as they were on OS X. Now the team has returned with a version of the tool built for Windows users who enjoy iLife mixing and matching. All the usual restrictions, warnings and directives apply, but you know what you’re here for — hit the source link below to download a ZIP file straight from greenpois0n’s servers and get going, or check the other links for more information on the exact steps to follow.
[Thanks to everyone who sent this in]
Absinthe A5 Jailbreaker for iPhone 4S / iPad 2 now available for Windows originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 21 Jan 2012 17:24:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Amazon will let customers run free micro-instances of Microsoft Windows 2008 R2 on its EC2 service starting now, according to a new post to the Amazon Web Services (AWS) blog.
Such try-before-you-buy tactics have helped Amazon win converts to its cloud platform by letting them test new or existing applications in its cloud for free. While Amazon offers a choice of operating systems, Microsoft licensing constraints have made running Windows workloads on AWS more expensive than running them on Linux.
In his post, Amazon’s web services evangelist Jeff Barr wrote:
The micro instances provide a small amount of consistent processing power and the ability to burst to a higher level of usage from time to time. You can use this instance to learn about Amazon EC2, support a development and test environment, build an AWS application, or host a web site (or all of the above). We’ve fine-tuned the micro instances to make them even better at running Microsoft Windows Server.
The AWS Free Usage Tier has until now let customers run small instances of Linux or other Amazon services for free for 750 hours per month as a way to let customers kick the tires of its cloud-based services. The “micro instances” for 32- or 64-bit Linux and now Windows can utilize 613 MB of memory. Customers can use the free usage tier for a year, according to Amazon.
Users of this free usage tier have access to Amazon S3, Elastic Block Store, Elastic Load Balancing and AWS data transfer services. The new Windows Server free usage instances are available across AWS regions except for the GovCloud.
This news comes at an interesting time. Amazon’s popular infrastructure-as-a-service and Microsoft’s Azure platform-as-a-service are increasingly competing with Amazon adding more PaaS-like capabilities and Microsoft working on IaaS capabilities. Both companies plan web briefings this week on their cloud strategies — Microsoft has a webcast slated for Tuesday, Amazon hosts one on Wednesday.
As more companies weigh putting workloads onto public or private clouds, hold on for more competitive moves by these cloud giants.
Photo courtesy of Flickr user liber
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