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With Apple deciding not to include support for T-Mobile’s bands in the US, T-Mobile has turned into an Android wasteland with over 90% of the smartphones sold on the network running on Google’s OS. Looking for some diversification (besides the over million legacy iPhones), T-Mobile looks to be one of the first in the US to roll out one of the new Nokia Windows Phone 7 devices which they plan to announce on Dec 14th, a little late for the holidays.
VMware, the maker of a popular virtualization software Fusion, seems to be backpedalling on the last week’s release of VMware Fusion 4.1 for the Mac. As originally noted by Macworld, Fusion 4.1 was released with support for virtualization of Lion, Snow Leopard and Leopard clients. A dialog box pops up when installing an operating system client in Fusion 4.1, asking user to “verify” that they are in compliance with their software’s licensing terms.
In essence, this removes VMware from the position of having to evaluate and enforce Apple’s operating-system license, and instead leaves the decision in the hands of users.
In a new blog post today, VMware hinted an upcoming update will “fix” their “mistake”.
When the license verification step was added in VMware Fusion 4.1 the server edition check was omitted. We are preparing an update. [...] Users should always ensure they remain in compliance with any applicable software license agreements.
Of course, per Apple’s EULA only server software is supposed to be virtualized and the above wording pretty much spells doom for Snow Leopard or Leopard client virtualization in the next Fusion release. At the end of the day, VMware is fixing Fusion the same way people fix their dogs. What is Apple’s official stance on this issue?
Mac OS 10.8 testers both inside Apple’s HQ and in the surrounding area of Silicon Valley have been spotted in Web Logs by MacRumors. Indeed, looking at our own logs (above), 10.8 users have been hitting our servers since mid-August, though only in numbers that probably could have been faked.
More recently, however, 10.8 testing has grown more abundant, with testers hitting our site every day including on weekends from non-Apple IP addresses throughout October.
Similar patterns emerged in testing OS 10.7 which leads us to conclude that this is still very early testing and it is likely more than a year before we’ll see even public betas of the OS.
Still, very nice to see Apple’s already working on the next big cat.
VMware Fusion was upgraded to version 4 today with “over 90 new features” and low introductory $49.99 price. That follows the release two weeks ago of main competitor Parallels with many of the same Lion and speed improvements but heftier $79.99 price tag.
VMware touts three major areas of improvement:
Release below:
If, for some reason, you don’t want to run Lion on your new Mac Mini, it appears that using a clone of a recent MacBook Pro running Snow Leopard will boot and operate the Mac Mini. MacBidoulle cautions the Ethernet hasn’t been properly tested and the new Radeon Video cards in the high end model may need some hacking to get 3D working. Read more
Today was Microsoft’s Windows Tablet 8 unveiling. The product on the surface looks cool, people are hyped, but alas it will be a year before real products are given to real people. The iPad 3 with its Retina Display will have been on the market for months and Google will have iterated 10,000 Beta releases of Android before then on 200 different pieces of tablet hardware.
On top of that, this new OS is really just smashing together Windows Phone 7 Metro UI Windowing (some admittedly nice UI features) with Windows 7 applications. Real world use of Windows 7 apps in tablet form isn’t going to be fun. I’ve tried using Windows on the Parallels iPad app – and it is OK in a pinch, but apps need to be redesigned 100% to work in tablet mode effectively. Try entering data into Excel on a tablet for instance. Then try Numbers on an iPad – it is slightly better.
Luckily, just about every iOS app was designed or redesigned first for touch over the past four years. Microsoft is, today, telling its developers to do the same for their Windows apps.
How long can Microsoft keep up its “next year” strategy? Windows 8 tablet isn’t the only thing coming “Next Year”.
Two years ago, Microsoft made the decision to scrap Windows Mobile and said: “Next year we’ll have Windows Phone 7″. When Windows Phone didn’t grab much attention at the end of last year, Microsoft ‘bought Nokia’ and said, by the end of this year we’ll have some top quality phones from Nokia. We’re waiting to see how that pans out, but by the time Nokia can produce anything with a Windows logo on it, it will have fallen from #1 in the world in smartphones to #4 or #5 behind Apple, Samsung and probably HTC and RIM. But Windows Mango devices are coming to AT&T, have you heard?
How did this “wait until next year” thing become business as usual for Microsoft? Read more
