After the launch of the Surface Pro 3, a teardown revealed that the device is hard to repair — but don’t let this put you off. Microsoft has an impressive cashback offer for MacBook Air owners that could lure Apple fans to Microsoft’s latest tablet. One of the most impressive feature of the Surface Pro 3 is it pen — and it’s incredibly versatile. But it looks as though things could get even more mind-blowing if a new patent could to anything. It shows a stylus being used to interact with other peripherals, boasting tactile feedback, and even featuring a camera. If you’re having trouble with your current stylus, just check that your batteries are inserted correctly – it could save some embarrassment!
It’s fair to say that Microsoft’s console has the best selection of games, but if you’re looking for one more reason to opt for Xbox One, don’t forget all of the benefits an Xbox Live Gold subscription could bring you. There are improvements coming to Kinect that will make it easier to interact with the GUI, and there’s not long to wait until achievements, profiles, and game clips come to Xbox.com. Although Sony is able to claim victory over Microsoft in terms of console sales at the moment, the Xbox One is actually more popular on Facebook — well, the company needs putting back in its place after its silly dancing antics last year.
Moving to the mobile world, Windows Phone users have native printing to look forward to, but there’s already an update to the Nokia Camera app to get excited about. After something of a wait, Adobe pushed Photoshop Express to Windows Phone. There were rumors circulating that Windows Phone 8.1 was going to be released last week, but it’s now looking more like it will be coming in the first half of July – so not long to wait now.
Nokia X2 is Microsoft’s latest foray into Android, but it turns out that the software cannot be used on older Nokia X handsets. There are more handsets to look forward to as well; a new batch of Nokia codenames emerged, hinting at the arrival of new devices in the near future. If you’re using Internet Explorer on your main computer as well as under Windows Phone, you can now take advantage of password syncing, and Microsoft was keen to spread the word.
There was a big storage increase for OneDrive and Office 365 was announce with Microsoft cloud storage service jumping to 15GB of free space. Subscribers to Office 365 now have 1TB of space to play with, and it didn’t take long for Google to respond, offering not only a storage boost for Google Drive for Work users, but also announcing that Google Docs will soon support editing of Office documents. It’s probably all for naught, as a study found that users still prefer Office 365 over Google’s offering. OneDrive was also updated on iOS and Android, and there was a slight wobble in the week as Exchange Online suffered a nine-hour outage.
There’s also Windows 8.1 Update 2 to look forward to with the possibility of RTM in July. But what everyone is most interested in is Windows 9. We take a look at what we already know about the next version of Windows. Interest in wearables refuses to die… could Microsoft be on the verge of launching a smartwatch?
Looking further to the future, we learned that Microsoft is investigating ultra-efficient fuel cells that can be used to power data centers, but for home computers it looks as though the future could be quantum. Having swallowed up Nokia, Microsoft could be considering making changes to branding. Nokia Lumia could become Nokia by Microsoft, and there’s a chance that the Surface name could also be consigned to the history books.
Thanks for your company over the last week — we’re here with more of the same for the next seven days, and it would be lovely if you stuck around.
