Pre-beta Microsoft Windows 7 Unveiled!

Pre-beta Microsoft Windows 7


Pre-beta Microsoft Windows 7

Windows 7 Windows Media Player Compact View

Windows 7 WordPad

Opera 9.6

After spending some time in the beta tank, the Opera browser team has released Opera 9.6. The latest version of the Opera web browser adds a few new features, not all of which are related to the web. For instance, Opera has a built in email client. Opera 9.6 has a new low bandwidth mode that prevents attachments from being automatically downloaded if you have an IMAP account. For POP users, just the first 100 lines of a message are available unless you click on the message.

Opera 9.6 also has a new RSS feed preview feature that lets you see the contents of an RSS freed before you subscribe. In fact, the newspaper-style layout of the feed preview is so nifty that you might find yourself bookmarking RSS feeds to read in your web browser instead of the original web pages.

There are also a bunch of bug fixes and stability and performance improvements. Users can also synchronize their custom searches and typed history with Opera Link.

Nokia 5800

The crimson-coloured baroque interior of the Koko Club, a night club in London’s Camden Town and a popular variety theatre even 100 years ago, proved a somewhat bizarre locale for the launch of an Internet Age initiative. Analysts in the cramped and dark seating area were jabbing reports into their laptop keys to predict that the Nokia move might well change, for ever, the business model of paid popular music.
Touch-sensitive phone

The new handset launched — then 5800 XPress Music — is Nokia’s first touch-sensitive phone. It comes after rivals such as LG, Samsung and Apple with its new iPhone entered the field.

But the more sedate pace of this Scandinavian player has also ensured that it sized up the competition and added its own features: like full Web browsing including Flash content; a touch technology that is truly ‘haptic’ - that means the keys seem to kick back at your fingers — a GPS receiver and a 3.2 megapixel camera with Carl Zeiss optics. The 8 GB internal memory can be beefed up with another 16 GB on a micro SD type memory card - which means one can store over 18,000 songs if one were a hard core music freak.
New service

For such buyers, the biggest plus point for forking out Euro 279 ($390) for the 5800 (this is the price before any service provider subsidies) lies in Nokia’s new “Comes With Music” service: Buying this handset or new units of the 5310 XPress Music phone or the N95 smart phone, means one can access a music repertoire running into millions from publishers such as Universal, Sony BMG, Warners or EMI — as well as local music companies in every geography, for one year after purchase.

You can keep all you download for free, during this period, thereafter. The Senior Vice-President (Entertainment and Communities Business), Mr Tero Ojanpera, added that there was no restriction as regards to the format: users could use the ‘Nokia Music For PC’ software to re-format tracks to any standard and also ‘rip’ CDs directly into their phones.

Music publishers plagued by piracy might decide that rather than spend time and money trying to stop the unstoppable, they were better off being paid in bulk by large handset makers such as Nokia — leaving music essentially free for the end-user (provided he/she bought a particular handset).

The 5800 would be launched in India towards the end of 2008 at a price around Rs 20,000