Nicholas Kolakowski

Microsoft faces something of a battle royale in the tablet market. Apple’s iPad currently sells millions of units, and its rivals are making aggressive inroads with increasingly powerful Android offerings. Both Research In Motion and Hewlett-Packard are prepping tablets for launch in the next few quarters that will introduce new operating systems into the market, […]

Microsoft is prepping to release the final version of Internet Explorer 9 on March 14, starting at 9 p.m. PST. According to a March 9 posting on The Windows Blog, that final launch date would be exactly 12 months from the first Platform Preview of IE9, the company’s newest browser and its latest hope in […]

What does a billion dollars buy you? If you’re Microsoft, it apparently buys you a new manufacturing partner. According to a March 7 Bloomberg report, itself quoting two unnamed sources “with knowledge of the terms,” the company plans on paying Nokia more than $1 billion over five years to manufacture handsets running Windows Phone 7. […]

Apple could push through its iOS 4.3 update as early as March 9, according to rumors. That would mean it arrives on iPhones and iPads a full two days ahead of the official March 11 release date. On March 8, the blog Boy Genius Report suggested that Apple would push out the update at 10 […]

Apple put iPad 2 rumors to rest by unveiling the next-generation tablet March 2, clearing the way for media and bloggers to obsess about another company product reportedly in the pipeline: the iPhone 5. If Apple follows its pattern from past years, this summer will see the release of its next iPhone. And according to […]

Microsoft claims its Windows Phone 7 ecosystem has grown to 9,000 apps, with a base of 32,000 developers. While that doesn’t put the company’s nascent smartphone platform in the same realm as Apple’s iOS or Google Android, which respectively boast hundreds of thousands of apps, it nonetheless suggests some growth on the developer side of […]

Microsoft’s Patch Tuesday is a relatively minor one, with a single bulletin rated “critical” and two “important.” Affected software includes applications within Windows and Office. The MS11-015 update, rated “Critical,” patches vulnerabilities in DirectShow, Windows Media Player and Windows Media Center. In order for an outside entity to exploit said vulnerabilities, the user would need […]

Windows Phone 7 failed to halt Microsoft’s decline in smartphone market-share during its first few months of release, according to new data from research firm comScore. In a new report, comScore suggests Microsoft’s share of the U.S. smartphone platform market dipped 1.7 percent between October 2010 and January 2011, from 9.7 percent to 8.0 percent. […]

Microsoft wants Internet Explorer 6 to die in the worst possible way, even launching a new Website that encourages users to migrate from the increasingly antiquated browser. That Website, “The Internet Explorer 6 Countdown,” uses data from analytics firm Net Applications to break down IE6 usage around the world. Despite its tiny market share in […]

Microsoft is planning to integrate instant search results into the next version of its Bing search engine, according to the latest rumors. That innovation would mirror a similar one launched by Google in 2010 and represent yet another escalation in the search battle between the two companies. According to a March 6 posting on the […]

Within minutes of Apple unveiling the iPad 2, media outlets immediately began debating the next-generation tablet’s ability to hold off the rising tide of Android-based competitors. The general agreement seems to be that the iPad 2, equipped with a dual-core processor and hardware upgrades such as cameras, matches the capabilities of its highest-end rival, the […]

Microsoft continued to chase the cloud this week, prepping for the launch of its Windows Intune IT management platform and trying to get the most recent software update for its Windows Phone 7 back on track. The cloud-based Windows InTune gives IT administrators for midsize businesses an enterprise-style level of control over a network, via […]