Windows 8: a touch of madness

Monday, February 18th, 2013

For the last week or so I’ve been using Windows 8 and, for the most part it hasn’t been the least bit horrid.

Yes, it forced me to restart this morning just as I sat down to get some work done and, yes, the procedure to actually turn off the computer is like a putative storyline scribbled on a napkin by Franz Kafka but later rejected for being too complicated. And yes, the way PDFs, JPEGs and a few other file types insist on opening full-screen (how many PDFs are that important?) is jarring, but still, most of my work is done in a browser these days, making the operating system in the background irrelevant most of the time.

It is, as operating systems go, perfectly fine.

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Can Dell do without PCs?

Wednesday, February 6th, 2013

Michael Dell is set to reclaim his eponymous company from the stock market, allowing him to make the sweeping changes the company needs without the scrutiny and fear of triggering a collapse in the share price that comes from being a PLC.

Even this morning, The Times and others are speculating that one of those sweeping changes will be the end of PC manufacturing, allowing Dell to make an IBM-like transition into an enterprise hardware and services company.

It’s a plausible strategy, but an unlikely one, and one made all the more improbable by the involvement of one of the companies helping Michael Dell buy his own firm back: Microsoft. Steve Ballmer has agreed to lend Dell $2 billion to complete his buy-back, and it seems highly unlikely that Microsoft would have taken such a step without cast-iron assurances that Dell wasn’t about to completely undermine confidence in the PC market by pulling out.

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Microsoft buys Dell: PC Pro’s April Fool comes true

Wednesday, January 23rd, 2013

The Times is reporting this morning that Microsoft is poised to buy a $3 billion stake in Dell, as the PC maker attempts to go private. For us here at PC Pro towers, the news prompted a sudden wave of deja vu.

In 2009, our own Jon Honeyball penned an April Fools’ joke column, depicting the wildly fantastical scenario that Microsoft had bought Dell (the full column is reprinted below). While it would take more than $3 billion to buy Dell outright, today’s news isn’t a million miles away from our four-year-old jape.

“Dell hasn’t been doing that well recently,” Jon wrote, “and the global economic downturn is certainly contributing to its woes. Few companies are prepared to splash out on new hardware when money is tight, especially without a clear indication that it really will run the latest version of Windows in a satisfactory way.” Sound familiar?

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Inside Steve Ballmer’s inbox

Thursday, January 3rd, 2013

Few people will ever know what it’s like to run one of the world’s biggest companies, but for the past few months I’ve had the briefest of glimpses of what it’s like to read the top man’s emails.

No, this isn’t another case of journalists hacking email accounts. As regular PC Pro readers may remember, when Microsoft launched its Outlook.com webmail service a few months ago, I jumped in and quickly grabbed the SteveBallmer@Outlook.com address that Microsoft had somewhat carelessly left vacant.

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Sinofsky and the power vacuum inside Microsoft

Tuesday, November 13th, 2012

Ray Ozzie, Jeff Raikes, Robbie Bach, J Allard and now – most surprisingly of all – Steven Sinofsky: the list of internal candidates to succeed Steve Ballmer has been crossed off, one by one.

This morning, despite years of rumblings of discontent from investors about Ballmer’s leadership, the Microsoft CEO has probably never been more secure. With Ballmer having seen off all the likely internal contenders to his throne, the Microsoft board must either continue to stand by their man or appoint externally.

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Microsoft Windows Phone 8 Data Sense: hands-on video

Monday, October 29th, 2012

Microsoft managed to hold some key features back for the launch of Windows Phone 8, among the most intriguing of which is Data Sense.

It offers users an overview of mobile data use, showing which apps have been using most data, and allowing users to set a data limit so the app can sound the alarm when you’re about to breach the cap. And the app has a Live Tile you can pin to the phone’s homescreen, displaying a running total of data consumed over the past month.

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Windows Phone 8 Kid’s Corner: hands-on video

Monday, October 29th, 2012

Microsoft might not have announced anything groundbreaking at its grand unveiling of Windows Phone 8, but that’s not to say we were completely underwhelmed. Indeed, for anyone who has children, the official confirmation of the new Kid’s Corner feature will come as a breath of fresh air.

And while the demo involving Windows Phone manager Joe Belfiore’s own children appearing on stage was undeniably cheesy, it will have struck a chord with smartphone-owning parents across the world. It certainly did with me, for whom the wheedling question “can I play a game on your phone, daddy?” has become a tiresomely regular refrain of late.

You can see a short demo of the feature in the short video at the top of this blog post, but the idea is really good. Set up involves ticking a few boxes in the Kid’s Corner settings, applying a lock so your kids don’t unlock the main phone and send your boss a text by accident, or purchase a small fortune’s worth of apps and music.

Then all your little devils need to do to get to their protected area is swipe a finger from right to left on the lock screen, and up pops a bright, kiddy-friendly interface, complete with live-tile-equipped home screen, but with only access to the apps you specified earlier.

There’s just one potential pitfall: it’s all lovely and safe and cuddly, but giving the kids their own “phone within a phone”, as Belfiore put it, seems likely to give even them an over-inflated sense of ownership over your pride and joy, making it more difficult than ever to prise their sticky fingers from it when you need it most.

Microsoft Surface review: first look

Thursday, October 25th, 2012

After the disappointment of the Windows 8 keynote, where very little was said that was either key or of note, Microsoft has struck back with a vengeance by delivering the Surface. And it is a staggeringly good device.

To explain this without making me sound like a Microsoft fanboi, I’ll dive into the kind of minutiae that PC Pro readers should appreciate.

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Dell XPS 12 review: first look

Thursday, October 25th, 2012

I’ve spent a lot of time in the past couple of days examining Windows 8 devices in all shapes and forms, but to me the XPS 12 (which first broke cover at this year’s IFA) looks like the real deal: a powerful laptop when you want it, a tablet when you just want to consume or fiddle with information.

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Lenovo IdeaPad Yoga 11 review: first look

Wednesday, October 24th, 2012

If Windows 8 tablets are going to take off, it’s designs like the IdeaPad Yoga 11 that are going to make the difference. It’s slim, has stunning battery life, and it’s stupidly easy to move between tablet and laptop positions.

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