The latest version of the Bing for iPhone (and iPod Touch) app features visual scanning of barcodes and cover art. What would you do with that you say? Well, how about compare prices or read reviews? Andy Chu from the Bing for Mobile explains how to do this:
1. From the homepage of Bing, click the camera icon to launch the feature.
2. Point your camera over a barcode; and for books, music, movies, and video games, position the camera over cover art and tap to take a photo.
3. When Bing gets a match, you’ll see “1 result” in the lower corner.
4. Click on that thumbnail to see product information like descriptions, reviews, prices, and links to merchant websites. You can even click through to participating merchants to buy the item.
Handy!
We’ve been noticing a significant increase in the number of #NewHotmailHere tags on Twitter since Monday morning, as well as receiving many tips and comments from our readers about sightings of the new Hotmail. (Thanks to everyone who tipped us! Keep them coming!) It seems like users from all over the world are starting to see their Hotmail inbox being transformed into Wave 4. In fact, checking my own Windows Live accounts I’ve noticed that 1 out of my 4 Hotmail accounts (including Windows Live Admin Center ones) had been upgraded to Wave 4 just today:
Together with upgrades to your Hotmail inbox, you would’ve noticed that as part of the upgrade, Windows Live Contacts and Windows Live Home are upgraded as well. For Contacts, you should notice that the old Windows Live People is now Windows Live Contacts, and you’re now able to filter your contact list by the service it is from (Messenger, Facebook, MySpace…etc.). For Windows Live Home, you should see the “Hotmail highlights” heading on the top instead, as well as the ability to update your status message, and the integration of Web Messenger (Messenger friends) on the right-column. Disappointingly, news feeds have been removed, and this includes the LiveSide.net one. Here’s what you should see if your account has been upgraded:
Unfortunately, several big features for Hotmail Wave 4 such as Full-session SSL and Exchange ActiveSync are not part of this update. This is what Ben Vincent from the Hotmail team has to say on the Inside Windows Live blog:
Is full-session SSL part of the Hotmail updates happening right now?
SSL is not part of this release, we'll share more details on it's availability on this blog in due course.
Why not? When will it take place?
Hotmail isn't one big monolithic platform built by a single engineering team. As a result we ship different parts at different times based on the schedule we built when we started the Wave. We're going to continue to update everyone through this blog when we have news to share. Thanks for your interest in Hotmail, we appreciate it.
While the number of users being upgraded to Wave 4 had been significantly expanded today, there are still quite a large proportion of accounts that haven’t been upgraded. Are you seeing the new updates to your Hotmail? Let us know by either tweeting #NewHotmailHere or #NoHotmailYet to @liveside, or simply leave us a comment below!
Update: Mike Schackwitz has posted an update on the Inside Windows Live blog, saying that over 100 million customers has been upgraded to the new Hotmail, and the pace is picking up faster as we speak. All customers should be upgraded within the next week. In fact, just 24 hours from when I wrote this post, all 4 of my four Hotmail accounts have been upgraded. Schackwitz also mentioned that when this stage of rollout is complete, the rollout for Exchange ActiveSync should begin soon later this summer.
We reported last Friday that there would be 5 hardware partners with Windows Phone 7 handsets ready at launch. Turns out later that day Microsoft “turned back” on what was said.
"Microsoft has not made an official announcement on device partners for Windows Phone 7 at general availability," a Microsoft spokeswoman said after Computerworld, amongst others, had reported that Microsoft had chosen Asus, LG, Samsung, Dell and HTC to manufacture WP7 phones. Maybe Microsoft just didn’t want to give a specific, official list. After all, HP announced that there would definitely be no HP Windows Phone 7 mobile phones and they were on the initial list too. So yea HP dropped out, and so could any of the other mobile phone manufacturers…..or can be given the boot by Microsoft? Pretty sure HTC applying Sense to its first Windows Phone 7 devices isn’t what they had in mind when they took firmer control of the core experience…
Only time will tell!
This week it’s TechReady at Microsoft in Seattle, a semi-annual event (this is TechReady 11) where Microsoft product teams show off their new stuff internally, a kind of a top secret product fair. Microsoft employee and blogger M3 Sweatt, (Chief
For those of you lucky enough to have Hotmail Wave 4, apparently one of the new features – Conversation View , has been at least temporarily disabled. MVP Vasudev tweeted about it : 'Conversation View' in the Windows Live Hotmail Wave 4 Beta has
Microsoft acquired TellMe back in March 2007 , and the speech recognition features that came with it have been finding their way into a number of Microsoft products, from Windows 7 to the Bing for Mobile app, and soon, of course, to Windows Phone 7. Speech
Greg Sullivan, senior product manager for Microsoft, told Pocket-lint that Dell, Asus, LG, HTC, and Samsung will have Windows Phone 7 handsets available at the launch later this year. That's (at least) five launch handsets, some of which, Microsoft has
On the Bing homepage you can take a look at the previous 7 days worth of homepage images by clicking the arrows. But what if you want to view images from further back? Starting today, there is something for that too: the Bing homepage Visual Search gallery