HTC’s been a fan of Windows Mobile for their phones for a while now. Even though they’re going with Android on their newer phones (such as the Hero, which we ignored for the sake of this video), their current Windows Mobile offerings still make for awesome fun. In this run-through, I take a rather quick look at HTC’s current US-bound Windows Mobile phones:

• Snap, coming out on two different carriers (and two different bands) with different looks for each carrier
• S743, for those who don’t like touch screens but love their candy bars
• Touch Cruise, basically a standard Windows Mobile touchscreen phone
• Touch Pro 2, a touchscreen phone with a full horizontal keyboard and other ridiculous features
• Touch Diamond 2, essentially the same as the Pro 2 but with the keyboard swapped for a higher resolution camera.

All of them are solidly built. The only downside to these phones (except for the Snap, which is subsidized by both T-Mobile and Sprint) is the price, but when you consider that HTC makes some of the best Windows Mobile smartphones around, that price might not be a bad business expense. Sadly, if you’re aiming for the Touch Diamond 2 or Pro 2 with hopes of using that front-mounted camera, consider moving to Europe; two-way video calling isn’t offered in the USA.

You can catch the vanilla YouTube and YouTube HD videos after the break.

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HP joined the netbook craze after it saw the market potential for the tiny devices (something Acer has used to propel itself toward the number 2 spot amongst computer OEMs). This one carries less of a netbook-y feel and more of a business-y feel than other typical netbooks, which might help HP reach an audience slightly more concerned about aesthetics than the typical netbook buyer. Things to note:

• It runs Vista, which is great. Thing is, I’m unsure as to whether it runs Windows Vista smoothly enough under load thanks to the chipset being used. This is one of those netbooks which might be a better grab once it’s loaded with Windows 7 thanks to 7’s performance and power usage optimizations.
• The keyboard is spill-resistant (there’s a difference between this and spill-proof), which means that it can likely withstand an accidental coffee or coke spill without problems. Your best bet would be to dry it off quickly.
• Build quality is excellent, and the tool-less design (with switching ram, anyway) is definitely a plus. The only catch is that I can’t think of too many instances where a user would want to upgrade ram on a netbook.

There are two separate add-ons which I also take a look at in this video; one of which is a USB expander that adds extra USB ports, dedicated headphone/mic jacks, as well as a NIC. It’s not a complete docking solution, but it should serve perfectly fine for people who just want to plug one USB cable into their netbook at work as opposed to setting it on a dock. The other is just an external optical drive, which might (again) only really be a necessity in the office.

As with the last video, you can catch this hands-on video after the jump in both vanilla YouTube and YouTube HD.

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NVIDIA’s first ION-based netbook went on sale a few days ago (the Lenovo S12, seen above and in the video), and I managed to get a good run-down of the thing as well as with OCZ’s as-yet-unreleased ION netbook. Things to note:

• ION is essentially a GeForce 9400m repackaged for netbook use, so the same graphical abilities seen in lower end MacBook Pros are also available with netbooks running ION.
• Because there’s a CUDA-enabled 9400m GPU, other CUDA-accelerated tasks can also be run on these netbooks, such as video encoding. The video demonstrates this.
• As can be seen in the video and in the above screencap, Windows 7 runs on these netbooks just fine, which makes sense given that there’s a pretty decent GPU sitting inside these things.

You can catch the video demonstrating 1080p video from the netbooks (as well as other tasks) after the jump in both vanilla YouTube and YouTube HD.

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Update: Please, if you’re going to copy my images, don’t delete the watermark. I went through effort to get these pictures, and having them torn off (as is the case with ArsTechnica’s recent linkback)just means that I’ll have to present unsightly watermarks over the entire picture next time as opposed to keeping the images presentable by leaving the watermark in the corner. Update 2: ArsTechnica corrected their image accordingly. Thanks!

Just about everyone has seen the shots of the new Windows 7 retail packaging, but pictures of the new Anytime Upgrade packaging are much harder to come by. Impossible to find are any current examples of the packaging besides press shots and renders, so having said that, here are a few good hands-on shots I managed to take. For those wondering, yes, this means the boxes themselves are real, and that yes, Microsoft will indeed be pushing Anytime Upgrade through retail channels.

If you want some context as to how Microsoft arrived to this new box design, go ahead and check out Brandon LeBlanc’s post over at the Windows Team Blog. As for a physical size comparison: the full version boxes carry the same dimensions as the current Vista boxes.

(There’s nothing relevant inside the boxes themselves; just a fake key and a CD of Visio inside the retail box of which I was also taking some pictures.)

Have at it:

On an unrelated note, we (the staff of AeroXperience) would like to wish our condolences to the Jackson family with regards to the recent, sudden, and highly tragic passing of Michael Jackson

It has come to my attention (Thanks, William and Pastor Johnnie Sloan!) that a number of spambots took advantage of our lenient forum registration mechanisms to spam other blogs and forums. To this end, I’d like to personally apologize for the inconvenience caused. We are also trying to curb spam on our own blog and board, but this new form caught us off guard mainly due to its implementation.

Spambots were registering zero-post user accounts and filling the About-Me profile information with ads for the usual cocktails of worthless medications. We’ve done a mass deletion of all zero-post accounts made after the 20th of May and temporarily disabled the ability for a member with less than 100 posts to edit his/her profile. As a result, the spam links associated were typically in this format:

http://www.aeroxp.org/board/index.php?showuser=insert_number_here

We expect to return back to normal operating conditions soon.

Again, my sincerest thanks to William and Pastor Johnnie Sloan for tipping me off, and to the Akismet crew for guidance on the matter.

For those looking for IPs and emails to block, I can’t give block-worthy IPs as the automated nature of the spam meant that new IPs were used for each account. However, one domain suffixed to the bulk of our spam was “@top-medz.com”. If you operate your own forums and have recently fallen victim to spammers using your board to spam others, please check for this domain and any others and pass it to the guys at Akismet.

Update: added a link to the original exploit

I really, really hate having to interrupt a good series bashing Apple, but this has to be said.

Long has resumed his crusade on fixing UAC, and normally, I would tell him to give it up for the sake of saving his own time. However, even though Mark Russinovich might not see UAC as a security boundary, the original UAC team sure as hell did, which makes me want Long to see this all the way through. (check the sidebar on the left)

“User Account Control (UAC) is a core security feature in the next release of Windows Vista and Windows Server code name Longhorn.” –UAC Blog

Guys, just fix it. I don’t see why things have to be made so hard; the UAC team clearly calls it a security feature, so do them a favor, don’t make them feel like they’ve wasted their time, and fix the problem. Thanks, Long, for telling me that this can’t actually be fixed as it’s a design issue, so here’s a better solution: give the user the ability to chose which UAC setting he/she wants upon first run. Here are three good options:

1. Always On
2. Notify when programs try to change settings (give a warning with this option about the potential risk of compromise)
3. Always Off (give a bigger warning with this option)

You’ll notice that I didn’t actually suggest the option which gets rid of the secure desktop: I personally believe that that particular option offers absolutely no benefit over having UAC off altogether.

I figured it had to be said.

(If you want to take this for a test run yourself, check Leo Davidson’s site for the original source code and binaries for the proof of concept exploit)

Mark & friends, I love you guys dearly, but I’ll be taking the original team’s word on this one. If you guys try editing it out, keep in mind the Internet Archive has a copy of the original statement.

This is part two in a series of three.

Yesterday, I focused on the un-selling points of the new MacBook Pro line as announced during the WWDC keynote. Today, my focus is going to be on Snow Leopard, Apple’s rather depressing tendency to bash Microsoft, and the rather nasty turn-off this all happens to be. Granted, most of Apple’s recent ad campaigns have comprised of “let’s make things up about Windows!” in order to try and gain market share. Microsoft is only avoiding suing Apple because of the potential for the world’s worst Streisand effect, which is depressing given the libelous nature of the ads themselves.

Having said this, it’s no surprise to see this mentality persist throughout this year’s WWDC keynote, so I’ll pick up from yesterday and explain just why Snow Leopard in and of itself is nothing more than hypocrisy.

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This is part one in a series of three.

Apple’s WWDC keynote on the 8th of June (yesterday, if it seems like forever passed between then and now) showed the world just how bad Apple’s core products and services are without the Reality Distortion Field™ Steve Jobs generates through the waste matter exuded from his pores. Apple’s core offerings boiled down, really, to just three things as discussed in the keynote:

• Updated MacBook Pros
• Snow Leopard
• A new iPhone

The wonder in all of this is how badly Apple happened to damage each of their offerings in this keynote. Today, I’ll be focusing on the new MacBook Pro line.

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Note: I’m not saying that Bing is a bad service! My entire argument is based around the fact that the marketing seems gimmicky and that the name itself might serve as a significant impediment towards adoption. I honestly hope it turns out to be good.

Microsoft announced today a new search initiative (and yet another brand identity) for their struggling game against Google, and unfortunately, it’s not exactly the best name. Microsoft has used too many different brandings for its search initiatives within the past decade (unlike Google and Yahoo who, well, used the same name all throughout), and besides creating confusion for people, all it does is make it harder to create those mental associations Microsoft is looking for.

Once all is said and done, Bing is a search engine which aims to present more relevant information. Since this is the perpetual, never-ending goal of search engines, I can’t actually say that Bing is something new, nor can I agree with the “decision engine” marketing term because, in the end, all search engines exist to help us make decisions. Hopefully, Bing can provide better results than Google, but that completely depends on how much time and effort Microsoft invests into Bing. Given that search was the future, Microsoft might’ve been better off finding a new disruptive technology as opposed to fighting an established goliath.

Back to the name:

Long ago, Yahoo tried to get their name woven into the fabric of public literacy. Yahoo wasn’t successful for the same reason Bing won’t be successful either: they’re both ever so slightly too hard to pronounce as a verb. Here’s a good rundown of worked and what didn’t:

• Yahoo has two syllables with weak starting consonants, of which one is the confused letter Y.  It also ends in an audible vowel which, when paired with the next word in the sentence, makes pronunciation harder. Since the next word after the term would likely have been “it,” saying “yahoo it” doesn’t properly roll off the tongue.
• Kumo (the old name for Bing) doesn’t work because it ends on a vowel and has one soft consonant in the middle, deflating the word itself. The word “Kumo” makes the person saying it feel like he’s losing enthusiasm as a result of not holding some degree of assertion through the name.
• Cuil sure as hell didn’t work because no one knew how the hell to pronounce it. (It’s pronounced “cool,” unlike the name)
• Google works because both syllables start with a solid consonant, and the word itself ends in a silent (and therefore irrelevant) vowel. Larry and Sergey got lucky with the name; they were just making a play on Googol, but the end result is the same. The name itself implies an assertive action through the use of hard consonants but succeeds in avoiding aggression because it ends in a soft consonant. The consonant ending also allows the word to easily be appended to other words during pronunciation, especially the word “it.”

Bing is a different case altogether. It’s a monosyllabic word (like Cuil, but it doesn’t look as intimidating), which means the rules change a bit. One-syllable words have the advantage of being quick to pronounce and easy to remember, which also means that the word is best starting and ending with a rather solid consonant (Digg is a good example), but there are too few permutations of letters for any cool monosyllabic words starting with a good, solid consonant to be unused in this world of Web 2.LetsNameOurWebsiteAnything. The problem is that Bing actually sounds cool and usable. Unfortunately, Bing has two drawbacks which set what would otherwise be a rather successful name up for failure:

• It sounds too much like “ping.” While this won’t be a problem for lay-users who don’t know what an ICMP Echo is, it will be a problem for the more advanced users who will inevitably struggle to differentiate the pronunciation of “bing” from “ping.” The problem is that when the advanced users have to put too much effort into saying something, they will subconsciously lose motivation to spread the word, which limits the spread of the brand. This would be the biggest drawback of all since Bing is yet another tech service looking for appeal.
• It just feels analogous to ‘hit,’ ‘bang,’ ‘tap,’ and any other term which falls into that category of slang.

There aren’t really any words left with four letters ending in “ing” that haven’t been taken already, and Bing actually sounds better than what’s left. The best goal for any name is to be easy to pronounce in context while serving as a subconscious motivator to do the act to which the name is tied, which is why Google worked, and which is the only way any other name can work.

Honestly, I wish Bing the best of luck. The world knows how badly Google now needs a competitor in the search space. It’s just that Microsoft’s resources might’ve been better spent on disruption rather than throwing blunted stones at a shielded Goliath. If you want to read a full rundown of the service itself, drop by the WinSuperSite and have at it.

Stan Schroeder over at Mashable decided to argue in favor of Mozilla and Opera’s complaints reegarding Internet Explorer 8 becoming the default browser when the user upgrades to Windows 7 RC via Express settings. It took me a few reads to realize he was serious, so I’ll spare you the hassle of reading through his post and summarize it for you:

wwwaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhh!

Let’s look at a logic chain here:

1. User installs third party browser and makes it the default on Windows Vista.
2. User upgrades to Windows 7 down the road, chooses express upgrade options.
3. IE8 replaces the Vista default as the new default browser.

So, Mozilla and Opera are arguing that a new Microsoft browser which was installed onto Microsoft’s OS shouldn’t become default when the user just wants to install Windows and be done with it? Think about it this way: A user chooses to go with express configuration settings because the user doesn’t want to deal with setting anything up on his/her own. The user, therefore, consents to using Microsoft’s default settings, and Microsoft’s defaults include setting up Internet Explorer 8 as the default browser. If the user really wanted to customize any settings, the user would go ahead and do so without any problems. Keep in mind that installing Windows 7 also means, by extension, installing Internet Explorer 8.

There is no problem here; all I see is whining, and it’s getting ridiculous. Mozilla and Opera should work on creating a compelling product, and while I agree that Opera is better than Internet Explorer 8 in many ways including memory management (Mozilla’s RAM issues prevent me from considering it for anything), the point is that Windows belongs to Microsoft, and thus, Microsoft can do whatever they want with it. These “dominant market position” arguments don’t fly because Mozilla and Opera are both using the argument selectively; you don’t see them making nearly as much noise about Apple and the iPhone/iPod touch/Mac.