Many corporate customers, who buy mostly Windows-based PCs are eyeing the new Windows phones as possible adjuncts to their overall strategy, particularly since Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8 share many characteristics and may be easier to manage as a set.
On a personal note I found people around me talking positively about Windows 8 and particularly the Metro interface.
In another blow to Microsoft particularly, sales of tablets powered Windows 8 also haven't been strong.
And I really do think there could be an opening for Windows Phone 8, particularly if Microsoft can sow seeds of doubt with the Android OEMs about the conflicts Google has in both supplying software to handset makers and competing with them at the same time.
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Samsung is working with Microsoft to define optimum packet sizes and best practices for reading and writing files to SSD as a potential update for Windows Vista, which is particularly optimized to work best with traditional hard drives.
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Palm 's Treo smartphone has become increasingly popular over the last year, particularly since Palm launched a version that runs the Windows mobile operating system.
Microsoft and its OEM partners haven't been particularly forthcoming on how much the first round of Windows 8 tablets are going to cost, but one Lenovo executive just gave us a hint.
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Palm 's (nasdaq: PALM - news - people ) Treo smartphone has become increasingly popular over the last year, particularly since Palm launched a version that runs the Windows mobile operating system.
The program is particularly focused on apps that run on PCs from Windows to Linux, but the apps could also run on a variety of devices, including mobile devices, TVs and cars, says Peter Biddle of Intel.
And so, when a new release of Windows came on the market customers (and particularly business owners) were generally excited not just as much by the new features that would make their computing lives more fun, but more importantly with the fixes to the problems that plagued their daily lives too.
The only Hirst pieces that are showing signs of recovery are butterfly paintings, particularly the wing-only works that evoke kaleidoscopes and stained-glass windows.
More importantly, the Windows Phone OS and its vertically-scrolling live tiles are particularly well suited to a greater screen acreage: almost every bit of it is put to good use, but Microsoft's minimalist design stops it from feeling overcrowded.
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Particularly in the enterprise, Google is pushing its Chromebooks as an alternative to Windows laptops.
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But many companies, particularly those with Unix folk already on the payroll, have found that switching from Windows to Linux saves money.
The low roofline and squat windows feel claustrophobic at first, but the interior is so spacious and pleasing, particularly in the extended XJL Portfolio edition, that you quickly forget about it.
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Beyond desktop PCs, HP and others could look to AMD chips, particularly those forthcoming in the third quarter, for use in low-priced server computers running Linux or Windows.
While it's easy to see how TouchPad and smartphone sales would symbiotically attract developers, it's less clear how much apps for those products would have in common with, say, those on a printer front panel or on a layer living on top of Windows on a PC -- two possibilities that HP has raised for device markets where it is particularly strong.
He is particularly focused on Navio, a consumer-software consortium recently launched by Netscape and others designed to make sure that Windows and Windows CE (its consumer-electronics cousin) do not become the standard for interactive television and game machines.
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