Nicholas Kolakowski

Dell’s 5-inch Streak, released to the U.S. market in August 2010, suffered from something of an identity crisis. Was it a tablet competitor to Apple’s iPad, despite the smaller touch-screen? Or did its calling ability make it more of an Android smartphone, on par with the Samsung Galaxy S? Dell obviously hoped its new baby […]

Microsoft’s relationship with Google, never the most copacetic, went a bit nuclear this week. The tussle began Feb. 1, when the blog Search Engine Land published details of what it called Google’s “sting operation” against Bing. Google executives claim they grew suspicious of how closely Bing’s search results mirrored their own, and, after finding terms […]

Any doubts about Microsoft’s seriousness in its online efforts should have been dispelled this week, after the company lashed back at Google’s accusations that Bing, Microsoft’s search engine, copies its Web-search results. “I didn’t expect that Microsoft would deny the claims so strongly,” Google Principal Engineer Matt Cutts wrote in a Feb. 3 posting on […]

Are Nokia and Microsoft getting ready to announce a Windows Phone 7 alliance? That’s certainly been the buzz-even before a German bank analyst, in a Jan. 31 letter, encouraged the companies to port Microsoft’s mobile software onto Nokia smartphones. Berenberg Bank analyst Adnaan Ahmad’s letter, addressed rather familiarly to “Stephen (Nokia CEO) and Steve (Microsoft […]

Microsoft has unveiled release candidates for Windows Home Server 2011, its bid to give consumers an office-like backup system, and Windows Small Business Server 2011 Essentials, aimed at small- to midsize organizations. Windows Home Server previously went under the codename “Vail,” while Windows Small Business Server was termed “Aurora.” In a series of releases over […]

Apple’s newest iOS 4.3 updates will load a variety of new features onto the iPad, iPhone and other mobile devices-just as Google Android 3.0, code-named “Honeycomb,” makes a hard charge at the tablet market. The constant software updating by Google and Apple suggests, yet again, that 2011 will be a year of seismic changes and […]

Google accusing Bing of copying its Web-search results, blogged a Microsoft executive Feb. 2, is possibly motivated by the search-engine giant’s fears of losing ground to its upstart rival. “We do not copy results from any of our competitors. Period. Full stop,” Yusuf Mehdi, senior vice president of Microsoft’s online services division, wrote on the […]

Social-networking Website LinkedIn, which focuses primarily on business connections, has leveraged data from its 90 million users to reveal some things of interest to pretty much every employee: promotions. More specifically, LinkedIn’s data reveals that the most popular month for a promotion continues to be January-although that’s changing. During the 1990s, some 22 percent of […]

Microsoft has blamed Yahoo Mail for a “data-drain” bug affecting a small subset of Windows Phone 7 devices. However, Yahoo seems intent on shoveling that blame right back on its rival-backslash-partner. The fun originally began when an unknown subset of Windows Phone 7 users began complaining their devices devoured data even when not running applications […]

Apple’s iPad 2 may lack a high-definition Retina Display, at least based on alleged photos of the device posted on the blog 9to5Mac. The blog claims that, along with “the iFix Youri iPhone 4 repair shop,” it managed to acquire an “iPad 2 LCD” from China. “At this point, we cannot tell if the resolution […]

Google Android 3.0, codenamed Honeycomb, could complicate Microsoft’s nascent tablet efforts. Scheduled for a media unveiling Feb. 2 at Google’s Mountain View, Calif., headquarters, Honeycomb has been designed with larger screens in mind, including a retooled, tablet-friendly virtual keyboard and a brand-new system bar along the bottom of the screen. Additional tweaks include the Web […]

Apple and News Corp launched The Daily, an iPad-only newspaper, Feb. 2 in New York City. Priced at 99 cents per week (and $39.99 per year), the publication enters a complicated and dynamic media environment that seems to take special pleasure in crushing upstarts. The question is whether the iPad’s popularity and News Corp’s production […]