Synaptics Shows Off Touchpad Features in Windows 8

One of the things that I wish Windows had more support for was multi-finger gesture controls. I’m sure most of you have seen them all at some stage or another in Mac’s. The likes of 2 finger scrolling and pinch to zoom is so incredibly handy. While there actually has been some multitouch and gesture control support in some laptops which have multi-touch trackpads in Windows 7, it really isn’t too mainstream at the moment.

Microsoft have promised it’s coming, so hopefully we will see it rolling out properly in Windows 8 since Microsoft are moving towards touch more so than ever with the new Metro UI.

Major touchpad manufacturer Synaptics has demonstrated some examples of what we can expect from them once Windows 8 is released. As you will see from the video,  a lot of these multi touch features and gestures look completely natural and fluid. They’ve basically transformed the touchpad into a mini tablet screen.

You’ll see towards the end of the video that Synaptics have even started experimenting with precision touch gestures which try and work out where abouts your fingers are on the touchpad in relation to objects on the screen, interacting just as a tablet screen would. Of course the difficulty here is that the touchpad is a lot smaller than your screen so it will be tricky to get the positioning right, but in fairness to Synaptics they seem to have it working pretty well.

You can have a look at these gesture controls in the video from Synaptics below

What do you think of them? Could you see yourself using them?

Let us know in the comments below

Source:

Synaptics via Techcrunch

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Intel Can Not Wait For Windows 8!

I know there has been mixed reactions for the tech community over Windows 8, but for the most part it has been pretty good. Since it’s still so early in it’s development stage there’s no point in making a decision on it just yet, but Intel’s CEO Paul Otellini seems to be over the moon with the developments Microsoft has made with Windows 8. He called it “one of the best things that’s ever happened to our company”, now that’s a pretty bold claim.

There’s been a couple of myths and rumours floating around that Windows 8 won’t be great for Intel since apparently they can’t make mobile chips very well. But Paul threw these rumours aside and had this to say about Windows 8.

We are very excited about Windows 8. I think it’s one of the best things that’s ever happened to our Company. And it’s a very good operating system, not just for PCs, but we think also will allow tablets to really get a legitimacy into mainstream computing, particularly in enterprises that they don’t have today. A lot of the enterprise managers are worried about security, they’re worried about the difficulty affording their legacy applications over to an Android tablet or to an iPad.

He emphasized how the new development environment that Microsoft had developed Windows 8 on, makes it much easier to develop apps for the new Metro UI and since you can flip back to the current Windows UI seamlessly, it’s very easy to keep applications and drivers backward compatible.

What Microsoft is doing is making that seamless for them. And they have a new experience, which they call Metro, that’s the interface up there. But for Intel-based machines, there is also one button that basically takes you back to your classic Windows experience and that’s a software button essentially.

So you’re just running one manifestation of the operating system with two different GUIs, if you will, it’s not running on virtual machines, it’s one manifestation. So this gives us, x86, in particular, I think a unique advantage as Windows 8 comes to market, because we can take advantage of all the legacy that was ever written, and all of the fact that all the drivers for the mice and for printers and every other USB device in the world. For example, getting photos off your camera and onto a tablet.

Because all these tablets running Windows 8 that pretty much every manufacturer under the sun has promised us will be running the core Windows operating system alongside the slick Metro user interface, it means that everything will work just as it does on a normal Windows PC, ensuring backwards compatibility with pretty much everything.

Intel say that the PC has become stale, but that the industry is working to fix that problem. The range of Ultrabooks which are thinner,sleeker,faster and more responsive than PC’s with brilliant battery life and decent pricing are part of that movement.

Source:

Zdnet

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Windows 8 Is Even More Energy Efficient

Over on Microsoft’s latest post at Building Windows 8, Pat Stemen has addressed the topic of power management in Windows 8. Windows 7 was a real leap forward for Microsoft in terms of power management. It was widely claimed that just by upgrading to Windows 7, users saw in increase in the battery life of their devices and it was widely advertised that simply upgrading systems to Windows 7 would greatly decrease energy bills for large corporations.

Microsoft of course are looking to continue this trend and reduce power consumption even further with Windows 8. One of the biggest problems with running a full blown OS on small portable devices like tablets is that they use up a lot of resources and need much larger batteries, which not only makes them more expensive, but also thicker and heavier.

But now that Microsoft are looking to finally make an impact in the tablet market, it’s crucial that they make their new OS as energy efficient as possible. While the type of hardware you’re running has a lot to do with how efficient it is, the software is largely responsible for ensuring that it makes the best use of the hardware, but at the same time using as little power as possible.

Very small changes done well in Windows can result in very large positive environmental impact because of our scale. In many markets around the world, increasing electricity consumption is putting more demand on every aspect of the workplace to reduce power consumption. PCs are a significant source of potential savings

According to Microsoft, Windows 8 has been designed with 3 main energy goals:

1. Aim for power efficiency on all platforms, laptops, netbooks, desktops and of course tablets. If you’re doing some heavy gaming or just causally browsing the web, the same power management features will be present.

2. Improve battery life. Because Windows 7 offered such a significant saving on the battery side of things, the aim here is to try and keep it at that, but at the same time add in all the new features of Windows 8. Microsoft has to be careful with the automatic updating apps and tiles which are  running a lot of the time, pulling in updates.

3. Apply the smartphone power model to PCs and laptops. Currently smartphones and tablets are all able to instantly switch between low and high power modes in a split second. Microsoft wants to do this with Windows 8 as well, and this has already been demonstrated to us.

Another key item to saving power is the new revamped task manager. It manages apps much more effectively now and lets you see what is running and what’s draining power from your device. It ensures that the metro apps retreat into the background when they are not needed so as to reserve power.

Of course we only expect it from Microsoft to improve power usage with every new OS that they release. But I think it’s more important than ever with Windows 8, especially if Microsoft want to get it out on tablets.

Source:

Building Windows 8

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Windows 8 Bootkit Demoed

Last week I wrote up a post regarding a new bootkit virus for Windows 8 that security researcher Peter Kleissner discovered. It was initially thought that this new bootkit virus was able to fool the new UEFI security feature that Microsoft has put in Windows 8, but it turned out that it doesn’t actually. However this bootkit has the ability to bypass the Windows UAC and gain administrator privileges and access to all user accounts.

Peter has now posted a video which demonstrates the bootkit called Stone Lite  in action so you can see for yourselves just how simple it is. It’s only a mere 14kb file but it has the potential to pretty much unlock your whole computer.

As I mentioned in my previous post on this, Peter has already developed bootkits which have a similar effect for Windows 7, Windows Vista and XP. The code is also up and available on his site for anyone to have a look at. He’s also said that this exploit will only work on systems running legacy BIOS’s and doesn’t work on systems with the new UEFI technology.

Of course, Peter has informed Microsoft about this exploit several weeks ago and also passed on his recommendations to prevent it from being an issue in the final build of Windows 8.

View the original article here

Windows 8 To Have Less Automatic Restarts

I’m sure all Windows users are familiar with those irritating automatic system restart messages that constantly pop up at the wrong moment. Generally when you’re in the middle of something important, Windows will announce that it’s essential that you restart your system now so as to install an update for something or another. While these updates generally are necessary, it’s still a pain none the less.

The reason that you have to reboot to install these updates is because they modify essential Windows files which are already running and can’t be modified unless the system is rebooted.

With Windows 8, Microsoft are promising that there will be less of that. Instead Windows 8 will quietly leave a notification on your Windows log on screen. Microsoft are also going to consolidate all the updates into one day –  Patch Tuesday – the second Tuesday of every month. So this will reduce the number of times you need to restart your computer to just once a month. Once Windows Update has pulled down the updates and they are ready to be installed, the notification on the log on screen will alert you to this and give you 3 days to restart your system.

However if you still haven’t done it after 3 days, Windows 8 will take things into its own hands and restart the next time that the system is idle. It will be careful not to interrupt you during a movie, presentation or working on any documents so as to ensure that you won’t lose anything.

Of course, sometimes there is a more urgent case for Windows to restart and install security updates. If this happens, then Windows will apply the update as soon as possible instead of waiting for the next Patch Tuesday

I personally think that this is a much better method for applying Windows updates. It’s still slightly annoying that you have to restart your computer or tablet to do it, but with the rapid boot times promised with Windows 8, this shouldn’t be too much of a problem. It’s also much better that you will only have to do it once a month, unless an urgent security patch is released.

Source:

Building Windows 8 

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Windows 8 Developer Preview Reaches 3 Million Downloads

Microsoft have announced that the Windows 8 Developer preview has now had over 3 million downloads since it was released back in September. I suppose the news isn’t really that surprising, especially when you consider that Windows is easily the most popular operating system in the world.

I’d imagine that nearly all the developers and Windows enthusiasts have all grabbed a copy of the developer preview by now and downloads have probably dropped off significantly. Of course the main reason people are downloading the new operating system is to get a look at the new Windows 8 interface which is made up predominantly of the new Metro UI. Developers of course will also be looking at what apps they can create which will utilise the new features in Windows 8.

Of course I believe that if you want to get the best experience out of Windows 8, you will probably have to use a device with a touchscreen like a tablet or those all in one desktops with touchscreens.

Microsoft have said that they’ll be releasing the first Beta of Windows 8 in February which is expected to have a good few changes from this developer preview. Microsoft stressed that the Windows 8 developer preview is far from finished and has a lot of work still to be done on it as well as more features to be added.

Let’s see if the Beta lives up to those expectations.

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Get style of full power with HTC phones

HTC is one of the best touchscreen mobile phone makers in the mobile phone market today. Most of the HTC mobile phones come with touch screen and features latest based. HTC is one of the largest manufacturers of Windows Mobile powered phones in the world.

Produce the latest phones from HTC include the HTC P4350, HTC S710, HTC Advantage X 7501, HTC Touch 3 g, HTC diamond, HTC Touch HD, HTC Dopod C720W and HTC shift, which has some of the smartest phones with a high demand in today's mobile market. Let's you talk about HTC Touch 3 G mobile phone to know why HTC WINS and other fights, to even competition.

HTC Touch 3 g is an ultramodern and elegant mobile phone in the range of HTC Touch. It has many high quality features. This enabled 3 g handset comes in four that are eye-catching and stylish colored housing noble gold, sophisticated black, blue and sparkle a modern brown coloured housing. The HTC Touch 3 g works on the Microsoft Windows Mobile 6.1 professional operating system. The phone comes with a 2.8 inch QVGA LCD touch has a high resolution of 240 x 320 pixel touch-sensitive screen and shows up to 65 K colors. It has large user-friendly features like touch TouchFLO finger swipe navigation handwriting recognition and 5-way navigation key that the user can feel real life with this handset. It has a 3.2 megapixel camera that is sharp and crystal clear images with a resolution of 2048 x 1536 pixels. Secondary camera allows the users to make video phone calls all over the world. It has some other great features such as built-in GPS receiver, Pocket Office (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, PDF Viewer) files, voice memo, MP3/AAC player, and built-in handsfree. The standard battery, there 1100 mAh lithium ion 6 hours and 30 minutes an approximate talk time and standby time of 450 hours or. Next model in queue which is HTC Touch Diamond. It is also a large mobile phone from HTC family.

HTC Touch Diamond is an incredible find 3 g Smartphone with high-quality communication and business functions. The handset comes in an Evergreen Black colored casing and has a cut-out style diamond on the back of the handset. The HTC Touch Diamond comes with a 2.8 inch LCD screen, a sensitive touch screen offers a high resolution of 480 x 640 pixels. The large touch screen display provides easy play to see users video clips and mobile games. There the users thousands of songs, with 4 GB of internal memory allows save video clips and pictures in a single, elegant device. The mobile phone support Microsoft Windows Mobile 6.1 Professional operating system. This device works on 528 MHz Qualcomm MSM7201A processor and 192 MB DDR SDRAM or 256 MB ROM. It has a 3.2 mega pixel camera with auto focus with a resolution of 2048 x 1536 pixels. It is also relieved the video recording in CIF mode at 30 fps, which allows the users to capture high-quality video of every time. The Pocket Office functionality supports various file formats like Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote and PDF Viewer. The user can easily view and edit Office documents at any time anywhere. An other great phones made by HTC, the HTC Advantage X 7510 belongs.

This is an ultra-modern and stylish handset with several great features. It is a 2 G and 3 G enabled mobile phone. It has a large pulsating 5.0 inch TFT touch screen with shades of internal 256 K colors, with which the users to see video clips and play a high resolution. The device comes with a full QWERTY keyboard and handwriting recognition, with which the user in the type of long e-mails and massages without search key word. HTC Advantage X 7510 has 16 GB of internal memory which allows users, numerous multimedia in its massive memory stores. It has a 3.2 megapixel camera with advanced features such as auto-focus and powerful flash every time giving perfect pictures and videos. It has built-in Windows Media Player 10 version that can play many types of video and audio files without any problems. Its powerful standard battery provides approximate long 300 hours standby time and 6 hours of talk time, respectively. So, HTC phones have about well equipped, fabulous features and great fashion designs.

Read more about Christmas phones.