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Here’s how you can try out Windows Phone on your Android device

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Curious to see how Windows Phone feels, but don’t have a device around to do so? Us neither. But Microsoft has just released a new HTML 5 website that allows iPhone and Android users to get a taste of the Windows Phone 7 (Mango 7.5) operating system. The trial requires no downloads or registration, and you can try it out by just going to the webpage http://aka.ms/wpdemo on your Android device.

While it doesn’t use any of the data on your phone like your contacts, the demo does give you a pretty comprehensive look at all of Windows Phone’s features. Microsoft uses a blue dot to guide you around the operating system, and obviously some features like voice recognition just don’t work in the browser. Drat, that’s something we really wanted to try.

Will this draw users over to the Windows Phone platform? Probably not, but it’s always cool to see what the competition is up to.


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What if Nokia had gone Android?

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What if Microsoft didn’t decide to dump a boatload of cash on top of Nokia to take their OS and Nokia went Android?  It appears that there might have been a skunkworks project in place to get the Android OS on Nokia’s devices if the images from Engadget and Weibo are any indication.

Either that, or some cheeky Nokia employee decided to put Android on their N9.  Whichever reality you believe, it wold have been nice to have an N9 Android device, even if it looks like an oversized iPod nano.

A closeup below:
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Acer CEO decries Microsoft’s tablet meddling

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More trouble in Microsoft land as Bloomberg reports that Microsoft device manufacturers are complaining about the software giant’s meddling in their affairs:

Microsoft Corp.  is putting “troublesome” restrictions on makers of processors used to run the coming Windows tablet-computer operating system, Acer Inc.  Chairman and Chief Executive Officer J.T. Wang said.

“They’re really controlling the whole thing, the whole process,” Wang said at the Computex trade show in Taipei without identifying the restrictions. Chip suppliers and PC makers “all feel it’s very troublesome,” he said.

Can you even imagine a PC manufacturer standing up to Microsoft publicly in a pre-iPad world?  While Acer is moving to Google for many of their tablet products, and even ChromeOS for one of their notebooks, Acer is still one of the three biggest Windows PC manufacturers on the planet and of course is expected to make Windows 8 slates
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The most important 256 pixels on the planet?

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Google announced its second favicon change this year after having the same favicon for the past 8 years. Why is this so important?

Google Favicon, its most important 256 pixels

Google.com gets over 150 million hits a day. Every time someone visits Google in their search bar, they’ll see these pixels. This image also accompanies Google in your bookmarks and page history. Browsers that support a tabbed document interface typically show a page’s favicon next to the page’s title. The Microsoft Windows Shell also uses favicons to represent “Internet shortcuts” to web pages. If you save a Webpage to your iPhone, it will be represented by the favicon.

Google’s favicon is looked at millions of times every hour by Google’s customers all over the globe. You’d better believe those 256 pixels are important to Google and they’ve obviously spent some time thinking about it. Have you considered your most important 256 pixels?
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