AT&T’s two newest 4G LTE devices, the Pantech Burst Android smartphone and the Element Android tablet are now available for purchase. BGR exclusively revealed the Pantech Element ahead of this year’s Consumer Electronics Show and it features an 8-inch display with a 1024 x 768-pixel resolution, 16GB of storage, a 1,5GHz dual-core processor and Android 3,2 (Honeycomb). It’s now available for $299 with a new two-year AT&T contract. The Pantech Burst smartphone is equipped with a 4-inch Super AMOLED screen with an 800 x 480-pixel resolution, a 1,2GHz dual-core processor, a 5-megapixel camera capable of recording 720p HD video, a 2-megapixel front-facing camera for video chats and 16GB of storage. The phone is now available for just $49,99 with a new two-year AT&T contract.
01/2/2012
— Filed under: Markets,Mobile
Tags: AT&T, Tablet
Microsoft Corp., Intel Corp. and International Business Machines Corp. issued results yesterday that topped analysts’ estimates, showing that buoyant business demand is girding the largest technology companies against Europe’s debt crisis and a consumer-spending slump.
12/31/2011
— Filed under: Internet,Markets
Tags: Microsoft
According to published reports, Microsoft is working on delivering a capability to run Linux on its Windows Azure cloud platform.
12/13/2011
— Filed under: Markets,Software
Tags: Linux, Microsoft
With Xbox being one of the most selling gaming consoles around the world, the rumours of its successor has been around the web for quite a while. The latest one suggests that there will be two versions of the next generation Xbox for the 2013 launch during the autumn. One of them could be a low cost set top box type console capable of streaming games and other media directly from the web and the other being a regular full size console with all the latest hardwares like the storage drives, optical drives and will be capable of playing the Xbox 360 line up of games.
11/16/2011
— Filed under: Gadgets,Markets
Tags: Microsoft, Xbox
Skype co-founder Niklas Zennström has joined the board of Swedish social gifting service Wrapp after it raised $5,5 million in a funding round led by Zennström’s venture capital firm.
11/7/2011
— Filed under: Internet,Markets
Tags: Skype, Wrapp
Microsoft is expected to launch the next version of the Windows OS — Windows 8 — in the second half of 2012. It recently showcased the developer preview of Windows 8 at its Build conference. Windows 8 will be targeted at both the computer and tablet markets. While it is the dominant platform in computers, it will compete primarily with Apple‘s iOS and Google‘s Android in the tablet segment. Dell and HP, the largest computer manufacturers have already started planning and working on Windows 8 tablets. [1] They will be launching their tablets soon after the official launch of Windows 8.
09/23/2011
— Filed under: Internet,Markets
Tags: Dell, HP
Summary: Microsoft and Oracle are on opposite sides when it comes to the importance of multitenancy support to their respective public-cloud platforms.
After years of ridiculing the idea of cloud computing, Oracle is officially «all in» as of last week’s Oracle Open World show. At the confab, CEO Larry Ellison took the wraps off Oracle’s public cloud platform and strategy.
Oracle’s public cloud is going to be a combination of platform as a service (PaaS) and applications/software as a service (SaaS), with the «glue» being Java Enterprise Edition. The five components comprising Oracle’s public cloud are Sun servers; Fusion Middleware, Oracle database; Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c; and Oracle’s Fusion Applications.A few pieces of the Oracle cloud (like CRM) are there now; most pieces seem to be coming «in the near future» (as is pricing, apparently).
Summary: Microsoft and Oracle are on opposite sides when it comes to the importance of multitenancy support to their respective public-cloud platforms.
After years of ridiculing the idea of cloud computing, Oracle is officially «all in» as of last week’s Oracle Open World show. At the confab, CEO Larry Ellison took the wraps off Oracle’s public cloud platform and strategy.
Oracle’s public cloud is going to be a combination of platform as a service (PaaS) and applications/software as a service (SaaS), with the «glue» being Java Enterprise Edition. The five components comprising Oracle’s public cloud are Sun servers; Fusion Middleware, Oracle database; Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c; and Oracle’s Fusion Applications.A few pieces of the Oracle cloud (like CRM) are there now; most pieces seem to be coming «in the near future» (as is pricing, apparently).
While Ellison aimed almost all of his barbs and rhetoric at Salesforce last week, Oracle has another big PaaS competitor out there: Microsoft. Windows Azure is Microsoft’s PaaS play, with its .Net «glue» and System Center management components. Office 365, SQL Azure, Windows Intune and other Microsoft-cloud enabled apps (like Dynamics CRM Online) are its SaaS play. So far, none of Microsoft’s cloud-enabled apps is running on Windows Azure; they’re running in Microsoft datacenters but not hosted on Microsoft’s own public-cloud platform.
The Java-.Net differentiator isn’t the only key one worth noting between Oracle’s and Microsoft’s public cloud platforms. Oracle officials claimed last week that a multitenant model isn’t the right one for Oracle’s cloud customers because of potential security issues — a rather vague claim that not just Oracle’s competitors have called into question.
Microsoft it taking the opposite stance. The Redmondians increasingly are channeling Office 365 users toward using the «Standard» (multitenant) SKUs and away from the «Dedicated» (single tenant) approach. Earlier this year, Office 365 officials told me that they believe in just a couple of years the vast majority of Office 365 users will be relying on the Standard/multitenant offerings, resulting in a phase-out of the Dedicated Microsoft cloud-apps.
I asked Microsoft for comment on how its public-cloud solutions compare to those announced by Oracle and was told no. (I guess the Softies are saving all their cloud-compete arrows for VMWare and Google Apps/Docs….)
Oracle wasn’t the only company launching more direct attacks on the Microsoft cloud platform last week. Google also unveiled a developer preview of Google Cloud SQL, a cloud database for the Google App Engine platform. The new offering is a MySQL database environment with JDBC support (for Java-based App Engine applications) and DB-API support (for Python-based App Engine applications). Google isn’t offering any guidance as to when it will make a final version of Google Cloud SQL available.
Microsoft officials also declined to comment on how Google Cloud SQL stacks up against SQL Azure.
09/21/2011
— Filed under: Internet,Markets
Tags: cloud, Microsoft, Oracle
It isn’t a pretty picture at Yahoo right now, but that’s not stopping the beleaguered Internet company from touching up its popular photo-sharing service, Flickr.
09/11/2011
— Filed under: Internet,Markets
Tags: Flickr, yahoo
Apple has selected Microsoft’s Azure and Amazon’s AWS to jointly host its iCloud service, The Reg has learned.
08/25/2011
— Filed under: Internet,Markets
Tags: Amazon, Apple, Microsoft
Microsoft reportedly showed off an upcoming quad-core Windows tablet Thursday during the company’s TechEd New Zealand conference in Auckland.
08/14/2011
— Filed under: Markets
Tags: Microsoft, Windows tablet
