Xbox 360 in India

[source]

You read it right, Microsoft promised additional markets including India for Xbox and here is the official news. Launching in India for Diwali and gamers can pre-order by June this year.

Microsoft announced today its plans to launch the Xbox 360 video game and entertainment system in India later this year.

"Xbox 360 will be available for consumers before the Diwali season. However, the pre-order of the product will start in June," Mitch Koch, Corporate Vice President of Microsoft Entertainment and Devices Division said. "We will be in India before our competition has launched in any other market".

later…

Windows CE & Windows Mobile – What’s the difference?

I know this is a confused world and one of the many confusions is the difference between the Windows CE and the Windows Mobile Edition. What is the difference between these two? Fernando Zandona explains it all in his blog here.

An excerpt…

Windows Mobile is not Windows CE (and vice-versa), Windows Mobile has Windows CE as its core – WM 2003 was based on WinCE 4.x, WM 5.0 is based on WinCE version 5 – plus a standard shell, applications and APIs.

later…

Background downloading in Xbox 360

[source]

Boris Schneider, Xbox Germany's senior product manager, has allegedly confirmed (via Xbox Archiv) that an impending Xbox Live dashboard update will install a background downloading feature. In addition, users will be able to queue up to six content items, which will download sequentially (not simultaneously). Downloads will pause during online play sessions and while the console is powered off.

Awesome, now I don’t have to wait and watch the download progress bar! Wondering what other features/upgrades are there in the new dashboard update. it’s still a rumor, but I know this will be coming and will turn true.

later…

Windows Media Player 11

It’s a trend for the new products to come with a cooler UI. When I first installed Windows Media Player 10, I thought Wow, that’s much better. I had the same expression after installing the Windows Media Player 11 beta. Navigation and Music search is much better in this version and I like the UI, so appropriate for the current age! Search is awesome and I really like the word wheel search. I haven’t figured out the features of the URGE music directory, but I’m happy with my collection of songs.

later…

Blogging from Word 2007

This is a new feature in Word 2007, you can blog direct from your Word document. Now, there is less to worry about the HTML formatting. More information, here

Word is a great tool for writing stuff, right? Blogging is all about communicating with words (and pictures, too). So, why not use Word to write your blog posts?

Stop, don't jump to the end of this post to push the comment button yet. I'm not an idiot. I'm not endorsing you commit HTML suicide. If you've ever written a post in Word 2003 or before and then copied and pasted the text into your web browser you know what I'm talking about. Sure you can do it, but you have to run one of those HTML clean up tools so that your posts don't look mangled. Even then the HTML is not tight and clean, right?

Well no more. We've been working late into the nights and very late into our development schedule for Word 2007 and we have a special goody for all you bloggers in Beta 2 of Office 2007. That's right blog post authoring from Word. This is a very late breaking feature and is definitely beta software. That said, I hope that everyone is pleasantly surprised with where we are going with this feature.

I am posting this from Word 2007, hope it works.

Later…

MSN India in தமிழ்

Ha...it's good to see MSN India is venturing into new languages...here it is in my தமிழ்



...and here in Hindi

later...

Can't wait...

My Xbox started talking...

I'm not kidding, yes it started talking as of yesterday, well ok not talking, but blogging ;-) If you don't belive me, check it out here


About the technical details behind this, it is made possible from the fact that the 360 is connected to Xbox live and the guys at 360 Voice retrieve the info from Xbox live and made it available in RSS 2.0. Freakig cool...another cool part is the blog will be updated every day even though you are not playing every day and the contents are humorously cool.


I also added my Xbox Gamer score chart to the blog template which you can see on the right panel below my Gamer Card. It keeps track of my gamer score in a chart. If you want one for yourself, visit Gamer Score Chart

Oh...last weekend, I had my friends over at my place for gaming and we had a very good time jabbing and knocking out each other on Fight Night Round 3 and yeah sore thumbs the next day!

Spent...too...much...time...blogging...have to...get...back...to my...360 :-)

later...