Productive Organizer

Today we got 2 contrasting reports. The first is a report showing how Microsoft want to help their distributors or sales tackle iPAD in the enterprise market:

It’s one thing for the iPad — which launched less than a year ago — to capture "casual consumers" who previously spent $800 or for a full-featured Windows PC, only to find they were using it mainly for e-mail, Web surfing, and games. The iPad does all of those things well — in many cases better than Windows — and it’s easier to use and maintain. Microsoft seems to be OK with losing a couple points of consumer market share now and hoping to capture those consumers back with the next version of Windows in a couple years.

But the enterprise is supposed to be Microsoft’s core. Windows has dominated the enterprise desktop for more than 20 years. Most enterprises have a few Macs around — usually in the design department — and there are always programmers who prefer to work with Linux. But the vast majority of what Microsoft calls "information workers" still use Windows and Office.

Apple is making a push into the enterprise with the iPad — it’s hiring salespeople to work with carriers like Verizon to sell iPads into large companies, and Wall Street banks like JP Morgan are starting to allow them in.

As ZDNet‘s Mary Jo Foley has found, this has apparently scared Microsoft into action. The company has prepared a set of marketing slides for the partners who sell into enterprises, briefing them on how to counter interest in the iPad. They’re supposed to familiarize themselves with the Windows 7 slates that PC makers are making today, then talk to enterprises about things like security and management, where Windows has a long-standing edge.

What is so lame about Microsoft is that they have yet to put out a credible fight against a well created device.

They are essentially selling vaporware now!

In another report, those enterprises that have tested iOS in enterprises seem comfortable with it such that they wouldn’t want to go back to Blackberry:

The result “was a fantastic experience as it was easier/faster to access data (touch UI) than on the Blackberry. It was also great to only have to carry one device for personal and corporate email access.”

They’re using Good [iTunes link] for messaging so users complain about the lack of background email receipt, and they do miss the BlackBerry notification light but the positives “far outweigh these issues”.

Apple reported over 80% of Fortune 100 were piloting or deploying iPad, an unheard of adoption rate for new technology.

I think Microsoft and Blackberry stock is looking more dangerous now then ever. Was it a value buy? I think I wouldn’t touch them now unless I see some real offense here.

The first public beta of Microsoft Office 2010 is now available as a free download on microsoft.com/office. And other then Office, you can also download Visio 2010 beta and Project 2010 beta for your Windows computer.

This is the Microsoft Office Professional Plus 2010 edition so you get to experience Publisher and Infopath 2010 as well in addition to the regular Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote and Outlook applications.

The Office installer weighs around 700 MB in size but you need around 3 GB of free space on your hard drive for the installation.

I am gonna try this on a pc of mine that does not have office installed.

WMExpert’s Malatesta have come up with a speed boosting article for your Windows Mobile Phone. Do note that you need to probably sacrifice available space for performance improvement. There is no free lunch there.

So you like your current setup on your Windows phone but are looking to add that extra oomph to give it just a little extra speed and fluidity? Well, look no further as I’ll share some of my favorite tweaks to help get your phone running as zippy as the processor can handle.

Most of these tweaks will not even require us to alter directly the registry. Instead, we will rely on various third party programs to do that for us. This will allow a method to record our changes as well as a quick way to “undo” anything you find unsatisfactory.

Oh and none of this involves over-clocking the processor—I’m just not a fan of that technique.

Regardless of your ROM build (custom or official), OS type, or device make, so long as you are running a Windows professional OS, you will be able to apply these changes. For the sake of audience reach, we will be using a Sprint Touch Pro 2 running a custom WM6.5.1 ROM.

Read on for the only guide you’ll need as I reveal all I know on this topic.

First and foremost I should point out that I don’t consider any of these changes absolutely necessary to enjoy your Windows phone — in fact with my roughly six WM6.5 devices, I only have done this to the one I use the most: the Touch Pro 2. Still, if your device set up perfectly or you just flashed a new ROM, taking the 15 minutes to do these changes will give a noticeable boost in speed.

Second, nothing is free. The big trade off in doing these changes is a reduction in available program memory, i.e. RAM. Personally, I don’t care about available RAM. Windows Mobile 6.1 and 6.5 do a great job of managing memory and as long as you have more than 50MB of free RAM after a boot, I would not worry about it.

Still, to keep this in perspective, these changes also don’t consume a huge amount of memory either. Just be aware that’s how some of these tweaks work: we’re allocating RAM for larger amounts of available cache.

Third, a lot of what is below is redundant as many of these program overlap, so don’t feel you have to all that is listed below. Fact is, whether you do one or all of these tweaks, you will see a difference in performance.

[Read The full article @ WMExperts >>]

I never have been a big follower of the development for the Zune HD, but since discovering this video, i realise that Microsoft might have a serious product to compete with the PSP and the iPod Touch in the gaming arena here.

Its got better graphics and touted to have better sound quality (not hard to beat, Apple have some really bad sound chips) But the screen size is so small! I wonder how you are gonna enjoy it without speakers as well.

I think this might be an infant step but get more developers on board Microsoft. Then we can start talking