MS Plots iPhone Rival, Vista PR, as MobileMe Draws Flak

July 25 06:05:03 AM, Yahoo News

NewsFactor - Apple has been boosting sales of Macs with its Mac OS X operating system -- seemingly at Microsoft's expense, as more PC users turn up their noses at Microsoft's Windows Vista. Apple also has had great success with its iPhone, but now that Apple is taking flak because of problems with its MobileMe service, an admiring Microsoft appears ready to go after some of Apple's revenue.

In a memo distributed to Microsoft employees Wednesday, CEO Steve Balmer said Apple is good at "providing an experience that is narrow but complete, while our commitment to choice often comes with some compromises to the end-to-end experience." As a result, he wrote, Microsoft will work with hardware vendors to make sure there are "absolutely no compromises."

Amid reports that Microsoft is planning a rival to the iPhone, Ballmer wrote that he wants Microsoft to emulate Apple by controlling all aspects of a product's design. Reportedly, Microsoft's iPhone challenger would be built around its struggling Zune media player using Windows Mobile 7.

In the memo, Ballmer acknowledged that changing the public's perception of Vista is a priority. He said the company will soon mount a campaign to "tell our story."

Meantime, Walt Mossberg, a well-known technology columnist for The Wall Street Journal, criticized Apple's MobileMe subscription service in a rare swipe at Apple products. Many longtime users of the renamed .Mac service are upset because they haven't been able to access their e-mail. The $99-a-year service is meant to seamlessly synchronize (or push) data between iPhones, PCs and Macs.

MobileMe, Mossberg wrote, is both sluggish and buggy with Web pages loading slowly. In his tests, syncs between the PCs and Macs he used took 15 minutes. Apple says it's working on a fix.

He also found problems synchronizing with Microsoft's Outlook e-mail application. And he said that for changes to appear in calendars, a manual refresh was necessary. Apple had promoted MobileMe for enterprises as Microsoft "Exchange for the rest of us," a slogan that it seems to have dropped.

Other reviewers have had similar complaints about MobileMe.

In response, Apple has given subscribers an extra month of service free. In the United Kingdom, users got two months after complaining that creating a trial of MobileMe resulted in credit-card "holds" of 121 pounds (US$240.43) instead of a half-pound.

Apple has declined to comment, although it acknowledges there are problems on its Web site.

Source

Microsoft set to release Silverlight 2
InfoWorld - Microsoft's Silverlight 2 browser plug-in technology for rich Internet applications will be generally available on Tuesday along with supportive development tools, the company said during a…
Vaunted Michelin guide adds mobile Internet to its review menu
AFP - Michelin guides, lauded as roadmaps to the world's finest cuisine, will be delivered to iPhones and other "smart" mobile devices as the century-old publication embraces the Internet age.
New service to stop loose lips from crashing cars
AP - When David Teater's 12-year-old son, Joe, was killed in 2004 by a driver who was talking on a cell phone, he tried to cut back on his own habit of driving and talking. It turned out to be very difficult.
Bush signs RIAA-backed intellectual-property law
CNET - Updated at 12:45 p.m. PDT with quotes.
Sony Says PS3 Price Will Remain Firm for Holidays
NewsFactor - The Tokyo Game Show is, to put it mildly, a noisy event as game manufacturers crank up the volume on their latest racing or military combat products. But the loudest sound may have come from…
Huge Credit Fraud Ring Sends Europeans' Data To Pakistan
marshotel excerpts from a story at the Wall Street Journal: "European law-enforcement officials uncovered a highly sophisticated credit-card fraud ring that funnels account data to Pakistan from hundreds…
10 Forces Guiding the Future of Scripting
snydeq writes "InfoWorld examines the platforms and passions underlying today's popular dynamic languages, and though JavaScript, Perl, PHP, Python, Ruby, Groovy, and other scripting tools are fast achieving…
Joost relaunching TV site as online shows abound
AP - Forget about the boob tube. Places to watch TV on the Internet are proliferating, from NBC Universal and News Corp.'s Hulu to Joost � a site that plans to relaunch Tuesday to make it a more interactive…
Free US wireless network a step closer
AFP - A free nationwide wireless Internet network has moved one step closer to becoming a reality in the United States following a key finding by the US Federal Communications Commission (FCC).
Microsoft Woos Developers Under the Silverlight
CWmike writes to tell us that with the impending release of their Silverlight 2.0 product, Microsoft is poised to enact the next phase of their plan, wooing developers and designers directly. Microsoft…
UK university holds artificial intelligence test
AP - Computers argued, cracked jokes and parried trick questions, all part of an annual test of artificial intelligence carried out at the University of Reading.
Yahoo Hacker 'Mafiaboy' Eight Years On
An anonymous reader writes "Eight years ago Mafiaboy (Michael Calce) knocked Yahoo offline. Today he he works as a legitimate security consultant and has just published a book documenting his criminal…
FCC Green-Lights Wireless Free Internet
NewsFactor - The Federal Communications Commission has released an engineering report that opens the door for the FCC to apportion a chunk of wireless spectrum for free Internet services across the nation.
Windows 7 To Dial Down UAC
Barence writes "Engineers working on Windows 7 have admitted Vista's User Account Control was too intrusive, and are promising to tone it down in the forthcoming Windows 7. 'We've heard loud and clear…
EU warns youth: turn your MP3 players down!
Reuters - Millions of youngsters across Europe could suffer permanent hearing loss after five years if they listen to MP3 players at too high a volume for more than five hours a week, EU scientists warned…
MySpace gives little guys online ad muscle
AFP - MySpace on Monday unleashed a tool to let small operators with tight budgets easily target online advertising to preferred demographics on the world's leading social networking website.
New York Times Says Thin Clients Are Making a Comeback
One of the seemingly eternal questions in managing personal computers within organizations is whether to centralize computing power (making it easy to upgrade or secure The One True Computer, and its data),…
Is the era of easy credit over for the long haul?
AP - An inflatable gorilla beckoned from the roof of Don Brown Chevrolet in St. Louis, servers doled out free bowls of pasta and a salesman urged potential customers to "come on up under the canopy and…
Elcomsoft Claims WPA/WPA2 Cracking Breakthrough
secmartin writes "Russian security firm Elcomsoft has released software that uses Nvidia GPUs to speed up the cracking of WPA and WPA2 keys by a factor of 100. Since the software allows them to network…
Microsoft Quietly Previews PC Advisor Repair Tool
notthatwillsmith writes "On Friday, Microsoft invited members of the Windows Feedback Program to try out a preview of a new application, the Microsoft PC Advisor. The new tool promises to 'continuously…
New 'Xbox Experience' Too Much For Some 360s
PC Magazine - There's a lot to look forward to in the upcoming New Xbox Experience -- set to launch on November 19 -- but for those who own Xbox 360s without a hard drive or a 256MB memory card, you may…
US video game guru heads for space as tourist
AFP - American millionaire video game guru Richard Garriott followed in his astronaut father's footsteps Sunday, blasting off aboard a Russian rocket to become the world's sixth space tourist.
Kenya's elephants send text messages to rangers
AP - The text message from the elephant flashed across Richard Lesowapir's screen: Kimani was heading for neighboring farms.
Loebner Talks AI
Mighty Squirrel writes "This is a fascinating interivew with Hugh Loebner, the academic who has arguably done more to promote the development of artifical intelligence than anyone else. He founded the…