Microsoft - page 19

Apple has a proud tradition of cannibalizing its products before someone else does, but in the case of the iPad mini, Cupertino might start eating its rotting corpse as soon as the 5.5-inch iPhablet is announced.

The latest projections from IDC claim that tablet sales are starting to level off even faster than expected with only 245.5 million units forecasted to sell in 2014 – a palty 12.1% year-over-year growth rate after tech companies just feasted on 51.8% YOY in 2013.

During Apple’s last earnings call Tim Cook boasted that iPad is the fastest selling product in Apple history, but IDC gives two major reasons why that could soon change:

Universal translators are a common trope in science fiction. In The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy, they come in the form of the babelfish, a tiny crustacean you jam in your ear. In Farscape, they are bacteria injected into your body. In Star Trek, they take a less squishy form as a wand or tiny computer pinned to your lapel.

In all incarnations, though, a universal communicator is seen as alien and futuristic. But Microsoft wants to change all that. The Washington-based company has just revealed a new real-time speech translation tool that is set to be built right into Skype, and which can translate any foreign language into English in the blink of an eye.

Instead of taking on the iPad Air’s 9.7-inch display, Microsoft is thinking even bigger with a 12-inch Surface Pro 3 that could make it the perfect competitor for Apple’s long-rumored 13-inch iPad Pro.

Like Microsoft’s other’s tablets, the Surface Pro 3, which the company revealed Tuesday morning, comes with a kickstand and a collapsible keyboard that Microsoft Surface chief Panos Panay says will remove all the conflicts you’ve had about buying a laptop or tablet, plus they’ve added a Surface Pen for seamless digital writing.

Xbox One owners just got a shot in the arm as the team behind the acclaimed Halo franchise has just revealed a new iteration in the series: Halo 5: Guardians.

Halo has always been associated with the Xbox system, reaching back to Microsoft’s original console, released in 2001. With the latest title now in sights, Halo fans will start the salivation required of the lead up to the game industry’s most popular series.

There are few companies you can trust with your private data ever since the revelations leaked by Edward Snowden shook the tech world last year, but according to the latest report from the Electronic Frontier Foundation, our iPhone-making friends in Cupertino have gone from being a privacy chump to the people’s champ in just a year.

Critics slammed Steve Jobs when he opened the first Apple Store nearly 13 years ago, but now that Apple’s retail space makes more money per square foot than Tiffany’s, everyone from Samsung to Microsoft has been trying to duplicate Apple’s success.

To see just how quickly Apple Stores have invaded the U.S., Retale created an interactive map that plots each new store opening since 2001. Each blue dot in the GIF above represents a new store opening, starting with the original Apple Store in Tysons Corner, Virginia.

254 Apple Stores now dot the country with an additional 170 outlets open internationally, but six sad states in U.S. are still waiting for their first Apple shrines to open. Check out Retale’s site for a full breakdown on when each store opened and the flagship products that brought customers into Steve’s aluminum and glass utopias.

When it comes to getting sued over U.S. patent infringements, no one gets targeted more than Apple.

A new study from legal analytics firm Lex Machina found that in 2013 Apple was the most frequent target of patent lawsuits, followed by Amazon at No. 2, as both companies came under heavy fire from a group of 10 “patent monetization entities” that were responsible for a staggering 13 percent of the 6,092 patent-infringement suits filed last year.

Here’s a breakdown of the top 10 most-sued companies:

Microsoft Office for iPad only landed six weeks ago, but Microsoft claims it’s already been downloaded a whopping 27 million times.

The figure was thrown out by Julia White, the general manager of Microsoft’s Office division, who mentioned it during a keynote speech on Monday at Microsoft’s TechEd customer conference in Houston.

Nokia’s incredible PureView camera technology is one of the reasons why so many Android users were desperate to see the Finnish firm ditch Windows Phone and bring Google’s platform to its flagship smartphones instead — and you could soon see the same technology in future iPhones.

Apple has used Microsoft’s recent acquisition of Nokia’s handset business as an opportunity to poach executives who are seeking new challenges, and the Cupertino company has just hired Lumia engineer and PureView camera expert Ari Partinen.

The smartphone wars are two company race and it’s not even close.

Apple and Samsung are dominating the competition so badly that a new report from Canaccord Genuity claims the two tech giants account for 106% of global smartphone profits.

Take a look at this chart:

Are you sitting down? Because this news may shock you.

With the iWatch reportedly set to arrive later this year, noted original thinkers Microsoft recently published a patent related to its own dive into the Wonderful World of Wearables™.

Amazingly enough, Microsoft’s plans suggest the company is planning to take on the previously uncharted waters of fitness tracking — with a somewhat familiar-sounding device capable of keeping tabs on the wearer’s pulse, displaying the number of calories burns during a workout, and measuring distance traveled.

The data-hungry tentacles of the NSA have managed to choke America’s top tech firms into silent submission on data requests, but after months of demanding more transparency, Apple is ready to defy authorities and let you know when the NSA wants your data.

Prosecutors warn that such a move will undermine investigations by tipping off criminals and allowing them to destroy sensitive data, but according to the Washington Post, Apple and others have already changed their policies.

Today Microsoft released an update to its Office for iPad suite that brings the ability to print from within Word, PowerPoint, and Excel. The apps use Apple’s AirPrint to automatically find a nearby printer on the same network.

Apple is one of several tech giants to enter a voluntary agreement to add a global anti-theft “kill-switch” to their handsets from July 2015.

Other companies on board include  Google, HTC, Huawei, Motorola, Microsoft, Nokia, and Samsung — while carriers have reportedly agreed to help “facilitate these measures.”

Apple’s support of the need for a kill-switch doesn’t exactly come as a surprise. The company added an Activation Lock with iOS 7, designed to make it tougher for thieves to use stolen iOS devices. The feature allows users to remotely locate, lock and wipe their iPhones if they are stolen.

Ever since Office for iPad launched a few weeks ago, folks have been claiming that it costs $100 just to use it. This isn’t true at all. And as of now, with Microsoft’s new Office 365 Personal plan for $7 per month (or $70 per year), it’s even less true.

Office for iPad hasn’t been in the App Store for very long, and it has already done surprisingly well. Microsoft recently bragged that Word, PowerPoint, Excel, and OneNote have been downloaded 12 million times combined in a week.

Microsoft won’t say how many Office 365 subscriptions have been bought through its new apps. Anyone can download them for free to view documents, but the editing features have to be unlocked with an in-app purchase.

The team behind Office for iPad took to Reddit today to answer questions about how the suite of apps was made, what took so long, and what’s planned for the future. Here are the five most interesting revelations:

For those who thought Office for iPad was too late to the party, the numbers tell a different story. Today Microsoft announced that Word, PowerPoint, Excel, and OneNote combined have been downloaded a staggering 12 million times in one week.

If you doubt that number, then just take a look at the App Store charts.

Apple’s thermonuclear war on Android has thrown the company into the courtroom more times in the last five years than ever before, so in an effort to make U.S. patent laws bend to its will, Apple has joined forces with some some of its old enemies, IBM and Microsoft to form a U.S. lobbying supergroup to fight patent trolls and push new legislation through congress. 

Along with the new Office Suite that launched on the iPad yesterday, Microsoft has updated its OneNote app to look like a proper iOS 7 app. OneNote is Microsoft’s Evernote competitor, and now it looks better than ever,

The day has finally come. During a keynote today in San Francisco, Microsoft unveiled the Office suite for iPad. Rumors have said that Word would be unveiled for Apple’s tablet this month, but that’s not all; Microsoft has also released versions of PowerPoint and Excel.

Last week, Alex Kibkalo, a former Microsoft employee living in Lebanon, was arrested on charges that he had sold the Windows 8 source code in retaliation for a bad performance review. What was most shocking about the arrest was the means by which Microsoft gathered evidence pinning the crime on Kibkalo: they went into his personal Hotmail account and read his email to figure out it was him, without a court order to do so.

Apple would never do something like that by reading iCloud email without a court order, right? It’s not that simple, actually. Like Hotmail, Yahoo, and other webmail providers, iCloud’s terms of service specify that Apple reserves the right to read your email at any time.

There’s a lot to Microsoft Office, and many of us are expected to dive right in and be competent with the software suite with little to no training. That’s where this Cult of Mac Deals promotion can help.

With this actionable course, you’ll learn be able to mater MS Office and take your skills to the next level (while impressing your co-workers and superiors in the process) with The Microsoft Office 2011 Course Bundle. And Cult of Mac Deals has this package available for only $39 for a limited time.

Microsoft today launched a new OneNote application for Mac after more than 10 years of desktop exclusivity on Windows. You can download it now from the Mac App Store, and just like its iOS counterpart, it’s completely free.

SAN FRANCISCO —  The Game Developers Conference is an odd beast, less a trade show and more a topical conference that caters to the folks actually making the games you while away the hours with on your iPhone, iPad, and Mac, plus that console under your TV.

Cult of Mac will be on the scene when a gaming tribe of 23,000 comes to town — that’s about the population of Poughkeepsie, N.Y. — and here’s what you can expect.

Microsoft has full versions of Office for iPhone and iPad ready for release, and now all it has to do is allegedly pull the trigger. It’s up to newly-appointed CEO Satya Nadell to make the call, according to Reuters.

Office for iOS has been rumored for years, but recent reports point towards the company finally releasing the software this year. The questions now are why has Microsoft waited so long, and has the ship already sailed?