Microsoft Windows 7 News |
- WP7 Ringtone Manager Available (but not for all)
- Bing: A Great Way to Search for Windows Phone Apps
- Rumored Windows Phone Update Coming Soon
- Harry Potter Windows 7 Theme Released
- Windows 7 Phone Struggling in Market, Says UK Retailer
- How To Create A Password Protected Folder In Windows 7
| WP7 Ringtone Manager Available (but not for all) Posted: 01 Dec 2010 04:21 AM PST Following on from the release of the Windows Phone 7 Jailbreak software last week, the same team has released something that is a genuinely useful piece of software for the platform, a custom ringtone manager. The first release version of the Windows Phone operating system doesn’t allow you to choose custom ringtones, something that many people consider a fundamental on a modern mobile phone. This software, which can only be run on jailbroken handsets, comes in two parts. There’s a desktop app (which requires you have the .NET 4.0 Framework installed) and an application you install on the phone. As always we cannot recommend jailbreaking your phone for several reasons. The most important is that we’ve seen on handsets from Apple that jailbreaking can open your phone up to malware and viruses. There’s also no way to know how Microsoft will respond to jailbroken phones when the time comes to install updates to change the terms of use for the app and music stores. Finally at this stage you will certainly invalidate your customer warranty. If, after all this you’re determined to install this software, you can find it and the jailbreak software here. Related posts:
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| Bing: A Great Way to Search for Windows Phone Apps Posted: 30 Nov 2010 07:11 PM PST If you have recently purchased a Windows Phone 7 device, then you’ve probably spent a lot of time in the Zune software looking for apps to make the mobile experience even better. And while the Zune software is great, searching for apps is a little cumbersome at times. This is where being the creator of the mobile phone OS has its advantages. Not only can Microsoft integrate many of their services into a phone, but they can use their search engine, Bing, to aid users in the search for apps as well. To run a Windows Phone app search, simply type something like "Windows Phone 7 apps" into the Bing search engine and you will receive results. Click on Visual Search and Bing will pull in all of the Windows phone apps and also provide different ways to search and display them. Bing provides different ways to filter Windows Phone apps and also lists the total apps in the top left-hand corner as well as: top rated, newest free apps, newest paid apps and most downloaded categories. By comparison, it looks like Bing app search is a little behind the actual Marketplace catalog, because there are some new apps missing from the results.
Bing is a great way to search for different apps because it contains an easy view of much more information without having to move through different screens. Maybe this feature will help us find apps easier and quicker. I thought this was a nice little feature that Bing offers and I’m sure app developers will enjoy the exposure through Bing as well. Related posts:
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| Rumored Windows Phone Update Coming Soon Posted: 30 Nov 2010 09:46 AM PST There are a few things that you must do correctly in order to make a successful smartphone platform and one of them is update early and often. If rumors are true, Microsoft plans to do just that. According to Chris Walshie, creator of WP7′s first jailbreaking tool, Microsoft is ramping up a major update in early January 2011. Apparently, Microsoft has been working on this first update long before the actual Windows Phone 7 release, which is very believable considering Joe Belifore announced a copy and paste feature to come in early 2011, at the release launch. Other features rumored to be added are: copy and paste, 3rd party multitasking, custom ringtones and some enhancements to Bing for turn-by-turn directions. Walshie also noted in a tweet, “MS took 3 months to do what Apple did in 3 years.” Which is true if the rumor is accurate, however, Apple was out in front of the smartphone market by far, so they could be slow to update some of their missing core features, Microsoft needs to update quickly and often if they wish to get WP7 off the ground and in the race. Personally, I love my Windows Phone device and I think it’s extremely close to being much better than anything else out there, but updates need to happen as soon as they are rumored to for this to be the case. Since Microsoft has confirmed nothing, this update for Windows Phone is a rumor, so take it with a grain of salt. Related posts:
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| Harry Potter Windows 7 Theme Released Posted: 30 Nov 2010 08:46 AM PST Microsoft is constantly pushing out new themes for the Windows 7 operating system, to provide users with more personalization options. The latest addition to the ever growing number of official themes is the Harry Potter theme for Windows 7, dedicated to the first part of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, which is currently shown in cinemas around the world. The theme should appeal to both young and old Harry Potter fans featuring six wallpapers of Harry, Hermione, Ron, Snape, Bellatrix and Voldemort. The wallpapers are well done even though we would have wished for a bit more of variety as they appear to be part of the same “theme”. The theme is available for download at Microsoft’s official personalization gallery for Windows 7. Windows 7 users can install the theme with a double-click after downloading it. Everyone else may still download the theme and use an unpacker like 7-zip to extract the wallpapers to their system to use them without the theme file. Fans may even go the extra step and install a wallpaper changer to automatically switch between all, or only some, of the wallpapers of the theme. You can alternatively download the wallpapers below or from our Windows 7 themes section       Related posts:
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| Windows 7 Phone Struggling in Market, Says UK Retailer Posted: 29 Nov 2010 07:33 PM PST A blog post from UK phone retailer MobilesPlease paints a bleak picture for the recently introduced Windows Phone 7 mobile OS: at this particular chain, the new Windows handsets are apparently being outsold by Symbian handsets at a rate of about three to one, and are being overwhelmingly turned down in favor of similar Android phones. Unlike rivals Apple and Google, Microsoft sometimes has problems building enthusiasm for new products outside of its traditional Windows and Office markets – the Zune music player and the recent KIN phone failure are two examples of poor entries by Microsoft in unfamiliar markets. Even successful products like the Xbox 360 are up against stiff competition – despite the console’s year-long lead on its competitors, the Nintendo Wii has blown past it in worldwide sales and the PS3 has almost caught up. While Windows Phone 7 is a brand-new operating system in an extremely competitive market, it’s hard not to be disheartened by these numbers. It should be said, however, that this blog post is based on the mostly anecdotal experience of one retailer, and that it may not be representative of the entire smartphone market. Windows 7 Phone may not have set the world on fire, but it’s not quite time to declare the platform completely dead. No official Windows Phone 7 sales figures have yet been released, which makes assessing the health of the platform difficult at this point – surely, the MobilesPlease post and the early reports that only 40,000 Windows Phone 7 handsets sold on the first day of availability paint an overly bleak picture of the situation, but if the OS were doing significantly better one gets the feeling that Microsoft would be talking it up a bit more. The company’s silence thus far leaves a lot of room for interpretation. The situation with third-party applications reinforces this ambiguity – some developers complain that Microsoft won’t release sales numbers for their respective apps and that the company is withholding payment for app sales until February of 2011, but other sources point to the fact that there are currently 15,000 registered app developers for Windows Phone 7 (up from 13,000 at the beginning of the month) and that the number of apps available for the handsets has tripled from 1,000 to 3,000 in the last month. Microsoft has made moves to boost the phone’s sales, most notably with an AT&T Black Friday buy-one-get-one-free promotion on the handsets and a staggering $500 million advertising campaign to accompany the phone’s launch. Absent a full-on iPhone-style consumer frenzy, it’s obvious that the company will settle for steadily increasing sales that get them back into the phone market in the long run. Do you have a Windows Phone handset? Do you simply have a strong opinion about Windows Phone handsets? Let us know in the comments! Sources: MobilesPlease Blog, CNet, AppleInsider, CIO Today Related posts:
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| How To Create A Password Protected Folder In Windows 7 Posted: 29 Nov 2010 03:19 PM PST Some people like to go all out with security and encrypt files and folders with such complicated codes that no computer hacker could figure them out. But then there’s also people who just want to hide files from casual PC browsers. That’s where this little guide could come in handy for you. This tutorial will guide you through the steps to create a locked folder in Windows 7, and the best thing is you don’t need to use any additional software. Now anyone who really is serious about accessing your files will probably be able to crack this, but it should deter more than the average passer by. A heads up to Simplehelp.net for putting this together: 1. First off, create a new folder and name it what you like 2. Go into the folder and create a new text document (Right click on blank area -> New -> Text Document) 3. Now you want to open up the text file you just created and paste in the following text:
4. Be sure to enter your password in the “Enter Your Password Here” bit 5. Next you want to save your this document in the .bat form and name it locker so it’s called locker.bat To do this make sure you change the Save as type: All Files (*.*) 6. Now you want to go back to the folder you created at the very beginning and double click on the locker.bat file and this should create a new folder named Private, this is where you can put anything you want. 7. Once you add your files to this folder, double click on locker.bat again and it will ask you if you want to lock the folder or not. Press Y and the folder will disappear! You’ve now successfully locked it and hidden it. 8. Now to get back your folder, all you have to do is double click on the locker.bat file again and enter the password that you made and the folder will reappear for you. Again thanks to Simplehelp.net Related posts:
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