Acer Launches Aspire V5 Starting At Rs 34,550

Notebooks with touch, a feature that adds much value to the new Windows 8 operating system, are finally becoming cheaper. Acer's new Aspire V5, with prices starting from Rs 34,550, which is the cheapest windows 8 touch laptop available in the market. 

Till now Asus had the cheapest touch laptop in the Vivobook F202E, which costs Rs 39,990. However, this is a 11.6-inch device in comparison to the Aspire V5 which is available in 14- and 15.6-inch sizes. At the entry level, the V5 series will have Pentium Dual Core processors. There will also be models with the newer Intel Core i3 and i5 processors. At less than 20mm thin and weighing slightly over 2 kg, the elegant V5 series is 30 percent slimmer and 10 percent lighter than a traditional notebook, said a release. 

Chief Marketing Officer S Rajendran said touch technology will allow users to integrate with both the virtual and physical environment. "With consumers on the lookout for products that offer ease of use and enhanced user experience, we are confident that consumers will seamlessly adapt to touch technology in their day to day use as touch is a natural instinct to mankind. To address this emerging demand we have launched a series of notebooks on the latest Windows OS."

The devices will come with a 16:9 aspect ratio ideal for movies and games on a power-saving LED backlit screen. They will also feature Dolby Advanced Audio technology.

The Acer Aspire V5 series touch enabled devices are priced between Rs 34,550 and Rs 47,500 according to their specifications. 

You Will Be Able To Run Windows Apps On Android Soon!

Wine, a popular software that lets users run Windows apps on Linux and other Unix-like operating systems, will release a version for Android that will let users accomplish the same.

Alexandre Julliard, the original developer of Wine for Linux, confirmed that Wine for Google's Android platform was being worked upon and briefly demoed a very early version of the same. According to reports, the performance was "horrendously slow", but that was expected given that the Android environment itself was emulated on a Mac, instead of using a live Android device.

A progress report was also provided on Wine for ARM devices, a project that will help ARM devices run applications designed to run on x86 platforms. Given the rise of ARM devices, there is a lot of interest in the project, and the work is said to be in significantly more advanced stage than Wine for Android.

Wine originally released way back in 1993 and is one of the most popular programs on the platform. According to Wikipedia, in a 2007 survey by desktoplinux.com of 38,500 Linux desktop users, 31.5% of respondents reported using Wine to run Windows applications. This number was larger than all other x86 virtualization programs combined, as well as larger than the 27.9% who reported not running Windows applications.

Wine, though an open source project, has benefited from sponsorship from CodeWeavers, the company that has hired Julliard and other wine developers to work on CrossOver, CodeWeavers' supported version of Wine. CrossOver offers some additional features not found in Wine.

Wine has also benefited from sponsorship from Google, which has paid CodeWeavers in the past to have some bugs fixed so Picasa runs fine on Linux. Wine has also been multiple-time beneficiary of Google's Summer of Code program, that rewards students with stipends to work on open-source projects.

Google Pledges To Restore In-Browser Maps Access To Deprived Windows Phone Users

Rejoice, Windows Phone users: your daylong Google Maps crisis will soon be over.

After causing quite a kerfuffle the other day by effectively blocking some Windows Phone users from accessing Google Maps in-browser, Google has released a statement (obtained by The Next Web) clarifying its rationale and promising that it would soon fix the issue.

“IE mobile still did not offer a good maps experience with no ability to pan or zoom and perform basic map functionality,” the statement reads. “As a result, we chose to continue to redirect IE mobile users to Google.com where they could at least make local searches. The Firefox mobile browser did offer a somewhat better user experience and that’s why there is no redirect for those users.”

Here’s a quick primer on the situation in case you’re not familiar with it: late yesterday, Windows Phone users discovered that they could no longer access Google Maps from within the preloaded Internet Explorer browser – they’d be redirected to the Google homepage instead. When the expletive hit the fan shortly afterward, Google issued an official statement that, no, it never officially supported in-browser Google Maps on the Windows Phone platform, blaming the “fact” that IE doesn’t lean on the WebKit layout engine. It wasn’t long at all before people figured out that wasn’t exactly the whole story. Google was only redirecting users whose browser user-agent strings betrayed them as Windows Phone owners.

So long story short, the experience for Windows Phone users really sucked, and they didn’t want people using it. Fair enough, I suppose. I get not wanting people to draw inaccurate conclusions about Google Maps because it doesn’t yet play nice with a particular platform. But to say that Google handled this whole situation poorly is a bit of an understatement. Walling off a service like Maps to an entire class of device owners was bad form, even if it wasn’t the vindictive, anti-competitive move some people first thought it was.

Really Google, could you not have just told Windows Phone users that when they tried to access Google Maps? Was a blind redirect really the best you guys could come up with? Granted, Microsoft’s mobile OS hasn’t exactly picked up the sort of traction that makes every developer swoon yet, but surely there must have been another way.

It really seems like Google just took the path of least resistance here. After all, there’s a decent enough Maps app baked into every Windows Phone, and Google clearly didn’t expect the likely small subset of users who leaned on Google Maps to get too ticked when access to a sub-standard experience was revoked. I can’t help but think that it was foolish of Google to underestimate the ire of spurned geeks, but with any luck, Google will think long and hard before it does something as short-sighted as this again.

Google Maps Never Supported Internet Explorer On Windows Phone 8

Microsoft’s complaint that Google is hoarding its YouTube metadata has fueled a new conspiracy theory: The search giant has pulled levers to prevent Windows Phones from accessing Google Maps. In reality, this phenomenon likely has little if anything to do with chicanery on Google’s part and everything to do with Microsoft’s reluctance to support the WebKit browser framework.

While Google Maps was never officially built for or supported by the Windows Phone platform, prior to this complaint, the service was accessible to a certain degree. Users of Windows Phone 7 and 8 both seem to be facing this issue.

Google released an explanation for the issue, saying that Google Maps rely on WebKit on mobile devices and Internet Explorer for Windows Phone does not utilise the rendering engine.

Microsoft, over the past few months, has publicly sparred with Google over its shutting down of Exchange Activesync support at the end of January. Microsoft expressed “disappointment” in the action and implored any affected users to transition to Outlook.com, its new (and excellent) mail offering. By turning off Activesync access (which applies to all platforms, not just Microsoft’s), Windows Phone users will not be able to sync Google contacts or calendars. Because Microsoft has yet to implement CalDAV and CardDAV support in its mobile OS, users will be out of luck by the end of the month.

Apple, on the other hand, will be unaffected by the change as it implemented the new calendar and contact sync standards in its latest version and has push support for mail via a native app. Android users, of course, will suffer no such issues with sync as their phones tie directly into Google’s activation servers.

While it’s currently assumed that the redirect is a bug and not the status quo going forward, we’ve yet to hear from Google on the issue.

U.S. Department Of Defense Signs New Deal With Microsoft To Bring Windows 8 To 75% of Employees

For the most part, the news about Windows 8 hasn’t been very positive for Microsoft, but the company today announced a major win. The U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) just signeda new three-year 

licensing agreement with Microsoft reseller Insight Public Sector to bring Windows 8, Office 2013, and SharePoint 2013 Enterprise to 75 percent of all DoD personnel. The DoD, Microsoft says, will “use Windows 8 to empower productivity from any location, and any supported device, while taking advantage of enhanced security.” It’s worth noting, of course, that the DoD was already a Microsoft customer.

Today’s announcement, says Microsoft, means the U.S. Army, U.S. Air Force, and Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) will now have access to “the latest Microsoft technologies in support of top IT priorities around datacenter consolidation, collaboration, cybersecurity, mobility, cloud computing and big data.” Microsoft also says that this is “the most comprehensive” agreement it has ever established with the DoD. The total worth of the deal is about $617 million, and the Army expects to save more than $70 million per year because of it.

“There’s a move afoot throughout the department to bring about efficiencies in the [information technology] world,” David L. DeVries, DOD deputy chief information officer, told American Forces Press Service. “We took a long, hard look at it … realizing that the Department of Defense relies upon the network and upon information technology to do its business.”

Microsoft will work closely with the U.S. Army’s Network Enterprise Technology Command and the Air Force Program Executive Office for Business and Enterprise Systems to achieve “Army Golden Master and Air Force Standard Desktop Configuration compliance for Windows 8.”