NIKON D3X ?

Nikon D3x Specs Leaked: A Mighty Flagship Cometh

By Wilson Rothman, 1:30 PM on Fri Nov 28 2008, 7,965 views

The long rumored, medium-format-friendly D3x is profiled in detail in an upcoming issue of Nikon Pro, and Nikon Rumors published the pages themselves and a rundown of details, including 5fps 24.5-megapixel shooting, 51-point autofocus and a 922,000-dot LCD screen for Live View. Here's the basic spec rundown:

• World’s highes-res SLR with Live View
• 51-point MultiCAM3500FX autofocus system
• Scene Recognition System
• Expeed 16-bit processing to handle detail on the 75MB image files
• 3-inch, 922,000-dot LCD
• 35.9mm x 24mm FX format sensor (If you can't think in metric, that's 1.4" x 0.94")
• Weather-resistant magnesium body
• Designed for medium-format shooting
• ISO range of 100-1600 with a Lo1 (equivalent to ISO 50) with boosts up to ISO 6400
• 24.5-megapixel shooting at up to 5fps; cropped 10-megapixel shooting at up to 7fps
• 12ms start-up time; 41ms shutter-release lag time
• Writes files to dual CF slots at 35MB/s
• USB 2.0, HDMI and AV-out jacks, with 10-pin terminal for GPS and other accessories
• Same lithium-ion battery as D3

Believe it or not, there's even more data over on Nikon Rumors, plus some very interesting pictures, so go have a look. [Nikon Rumors]

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Which Phones Deliver The Real Web

Mobile Browser Battlemodo: Which Phones Deliver The Real Web

By matt buchanan, 11:00 AM on Wed Nov 19 2008, 22,658 views

Before 2007, using the internet on your phone would make you want to kill yourself, if you were dumb enough to believe the crap splattered across that tiny screen even was the "internet." But the combination of increased bandwidth and better mobile software means that more phones really are promising to deliver the real internet, in living color. We tested eight different browsers, and while some put smiles on our faces, others proved that rendering HTML correctly is a far cry from actually giving you an awesome web experience. And what about 3G vs. Wi-Fi? Everything the carriers have told you is a lie. This is the true state of mobile web.

Before we give you the rundown of each of the most prevalent mobile browsers, here's how they all stacked up in a timed test of how fast (and how well) they could render websites, chosen for their diversity and particular challenges:

CHART KEY: Number value is time for complete page load in seconds; page rendering is rated from "Fail" to "Excellent" for each; and the color (red, yellow, green) indicates overall performance taking into account both speed and rendering accuracy: Green = good overall, Red = fail overall.

This second chart runs through the same procedure with all of the phones that had Wi-Fi options:

It's a pretty daunting pile of numbers, so let's break it down into standard prose, rating each browser as we go:
Android
A fast, smart mobile browser based on WebKit. It tackles most sites with (almost) unrivaled grace and speed. Panning and zooming could be smoother and more responsive, but with a ton of options for getting around a page—various touch methods and the trackball—few sites will be challenging to zip around. The only thing we really miss is multitouch for zoom. Buttons just aren't a very elegant or precise solution, and while the whole-page magnifying glass technique is nice, we'd love something a bit more refined. Overall though, we're happy campers on Android's browser. Grade: B+

BlackBerry Bold
Leaps and bounds ahead of the browser BlackBerry users have put up with for years, it renders most pages correctly, even if scripts give it a conniption fit (hence its long load times for Wikipedia and the WSJ). It uses the standard "click to zoom" metaphor, which works well enough, though getting around a page with the trackball can be kind of a work out for you thumb. The Column View, which squeezes a whole page into a single column, is fairly convenient and makes it easier to get around wider pages, even if it doesn't work equally as well on every site (nice on Wikipedia, ugly on Giz). Hopefully they fix the script performance in the Storm, which is using an updated version of the Bold's browser. We humbly suggest they ditch their home-baked browser for one based on WebKit, which would help out there. Grade: B-/C+

iPhone
What can we say? It's still got the best mobile browser around. It crushes basically everything but Android's browser—which is also based on WebKit—in speed and outclasses its still classy brother-from-another-mother (and everyone else) with the ease and elegance of its multitouch zooming. Some pages still give it fits, and it's missing Flash support, but it really does deliver an unrivaled mobile web experience. We love it, but make no mistake we're eagerly waiting for something better. (Mobile Firefox? Is it you?) Grade: A-

Nokia E71 Symbian S60
Hey look, another web browser with WebKit guts! It doesn't perform quite as well as Android's or iPhone's iteration where speed or render accuracy are concerned (can any Symbian nuts explain why?), but it does a serviceable job. The big thing it has going for it is Flash Lite 3 support, though performance there is kinda assy and memory intensive. Navigation is tougher with the E71's d-pad than with a trackball, but the whole page magnifying approach makes it easy enough to get around (too bad you have to dig through a menu or two to get to it). Not bad, but short of excellent. Grade: B-

Internet Explorer on Windows Mobile
Jesus Christ. This is a joke, right Microsoft? Hahaha. No really, this is the worst smartphone browser on the planet. It couldn't render its way out of an ASCII-art paper bag. It totally screwed up every single test page, except for Wikipedia, which it only mostly screwed up. Good luck navigating a page if you're granted the miraculous occurrence of it being rendered in a state that's usable. Grade: F-

Opera Mobile on Windows Mobile
Microsoft's own intentions notwithstanding, you can use the internet on a Windows Mobile phone. You just need Opera Mobile. It's kind of hobbled by Windows Mobile's assy performance, but it usually gets the job done. Not as quickly or always as accurately as its WebKit rivals, but it's definitely usable. Interestingly, it benefits more from the extra bandwidth offered by Wi-Fi than the WebKit browsers do. Menu-based zoom is annoying and imprecise. Touch-based panning worked okay, though a little laggy. We mostly navigated with the Samsung Epix's optical cursor, which worked pretty well, somewhere in between a d-pad and a trackball. Grade: C

Sprint Instinct
Holy CRAP. This is not the painfully lousy browser the Instinct shipped with not by a long shot. The original was slow and fairly feeble, even if it was the head of its (dumbphone) class. The new 1.1 browser really is a life-changing upgrade. It suffers in the chart because it's much slower than most other browsers, and zooming is still clumsy, but once the page loads, it's much smoother to pan and actually move around. I got a bit annoyed that it lied about pageload time, hanging at the last 2 percent of the status bar for half the load, but it usually gets things right. This is the best non-smartphone browser you can get. Grade: C+

LG Dare
Like the Instinct, the Dare proves you can actually get a usable browsing experience on a feature phone. It's a little nimbler at loading pages than its Korean blood rival, but the reason it ultimately posts lower marks than the Instinct is that it buckles way more easily under a moderate to heavy pageload, turning it into an unresponsive picture of the website you were trying to look at. Still, it renders most pages fairly accurately, and we like the sliding zoom scroll bar, at least in theory, since it seems like an intuitive way to deal with the zoom issue. Unfortunately, it works more like a glorified pair of buttons. (Note: I don't think the speed was actually a piddly 300 Kbps—I think it just had a problem dealing with DSL Reports' mobile speedtest, even though it's text-based for the dumbest of phones.) Grade: C

Methodology
We tested every browser only using the full—not mobile—versions of selected sites, over 3G and, whenever possible, Wi-Fi. All scripts were turned on, and the cache was cleared before each round of testing. We took the average of a series of five sequential speedtests to give us an idea of the bandwidth we're dealing with, and timed how long it took to completely load a site according to each browser's progress bar. We assessed whether or not it rendered the page correctly, on a scale ranging from "excellent" to "good" (a couple things out of place) to "utter fail" (I've seen prettier train wrecks).

A few additional issues to note: Internet Explorer would not work on Wi-Fi. Opera yes, our Skyfire install, yes, Internet Exploder, no. (Samsung suggested it might be because of Opera.) We didn't pursue the matter because of how IE did in the 3G tests: A page that looks like a pile of blended dog poo is going to look like that no matter how much faster it loads. Sprint's updated Instinct and Verizon's Dare, which we included as best-of-class examples of feature phones, don't have Wi-Fi capabilities. We left out Opera Mini and Skyfire, since they both leave most of the hard work to servers which essentially spit out a kind of image file—besides, we don't think this kind of internet-by-proxy browser will be around for much longer.

The Big Gulp
Remember our mantra it's code that counts? It's true for mobile internet too. An awesome browser can make up for a mediocre network, but a terrible browser delivers a crappy experience no matter how great the network is. It's all about the browser. As it stands, WebKit is clearly the best thing going, but even then, software implementation matters, or Nokia would deliver as good a performance as Android and iPhone. Proving the point, it's striking how little Wi-Fi actually boosted speed beyond 3G—hell, WebKit browsers on 3G slid past some of the others that were running on Wi-Fi.

Another thing to note is that the zoom metaphor is a tricky thing to nail. Buttons are too brutish, the magnifying glass is imprecise. Multitouch seems to be the best way to handle zooming in and out in a way that's intuitive and precise. Hopefully we'll see other developers start to use multitouch interfaces in touchscreen phones (*cough*ANDROID!*cough*).

As much as this blow-by-blow battlemodo shows you all the problems we encountered, the big picture is that really, mobile web is pretty dandy right now, and getting dandier. It could be more reliable, faster, maybe a little more versatile, but for the most part, yes, you can access the internet on your phone. Compared to just two years ago, that's really saying something. We can't wait to see what it'll look like in two years. Maybe Internet Exploder will actually work. Nah, that's a little too sci-fi.

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Microsoft Lowered Vista Hardware Requirements to Appease Intel

By Dan Nosowitz, 10:30 AM on Sat Nov 15 2008, 2,771 views

The class-action lawsuit against Microsoft for its misleading "Vista Capable" marketing let loose another scandal when emails between Microsoft and Intel execs surfaced (PDF link), suggesting Microsoft cut Vista's hardware requirements to help out Intel. Originally, Intel's 915 series chipsets didn't qualify for the important "Vista Capable" sticker, but after a scheduling mix-up, Microsoft decided to throw Intel a bone by pretending the chipsets are up to Vista standards.

Apparently, Microsoft decided to begin their "Vista Capable" marketing program three months earlier than expected, which left Intel a bit in the dust, without time to ramp up production on their newer, more powerful chipsets. Intel execs complained to Microsoft execs through email that the losses would be severe, and Microsoft decided to appease their partner by relaxing their standards for Vista capability, even though the 915 series is incapable of running Aero.

This is a pretty damning piece of evidence, especially given emails like this one from Jim Allchin, then-co-president of platform products and services: "I believe we are going to be misleading customers with the Capable program. OEMs will say a machine is Capable and customers will believe that it will run all the core Vista features." He concluded, "We must avoid confusion. It is wrong for customers." Well said, Jim. [The Inquirer]

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Movie review - Latest James Bond movie

Quantum of Solace Is the Perfect Bond Movie

By Jesus Diaz, 1:00 PM on Thu Nov 13 2008, 8,465 views

The latest Bond is the perfect Bond Movie. Yes. It is. In fact, Quantum of Solace is not only the perfect Bond movie, it's the best Bond movie ever, period. Even surpassing Casino Royale—and I mean both the Craig's one and the original Peter Sellers, David Niven, and Woody Allen's delirium—which to me surpassed Connery's best (I know, sacrilege). It has everything a Bond film must have and more: Cars, cocktails, airplanes, boats, cocktails, smart hot girls, evil baddies, slimy baddie sidekicks, cocktails, and gadgets. Yes, the new Bond has some really cool gadgets in it. I don't mean cheesy stupid mini-rockets firing from the exhaust pipe of an Aston Martin or laser watches that can cut through steel and french lingerie. I mean cool, believable technology that integrates in the movie transparently.

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To start with, real multitouch makes a stellar appearance with a giant Microsoft-Surface-style table which Judi Dench—the head of MI6—and other agents use with ease, simultaneously. In fact, the user interface on the table—albeit adorned for the required Hollywood eye candy—actually makes sense and is extremely attractive, gesture includes. Everything on it is doable with current technology, even the part in which they place a dollar bill and it gets automatically scanned and identified.

There's also the huge video wall at M's office. Unlike the multitouch surface, this is a CGI effect. However, with enough money and the use of transparent OLED technology and gesture recognition, the video wall is also perfectly doable. In fact, I saw something similar in my visit to Philips Labs last August, although that transparent video wall—a simulation of a glass storefront—used projection rather than OLEDs.

Only a couple of technologies were exaggerated. One was Bond's cellphone camera capabilities—with 007 taking pictures of faces with 3D depth of field information from a very long distance. The other was the speed of data transmission between the cellphone and MI6's headquarters. However, you can perfectly imagine that all that may be real in the military world and just not available to consumers, specially looking at some of the latest camera and communications research.

But what really makes this movie is not the technology. Yes, it plays an important role: Bond gets geolocation information on the baddies, and he uses his camera to get some of their pics, which then are analyzed and cross-referenced by MI6 databases. But none of it is a gimmick. There is no magic zippo lighter capable of launching kinetic rocket fire balls and save the day at the end of the movie. The technology in Quantum of Solace is realistic and it integrates naturally into the film, it flows with the plot.

What makes it the best Bond movie ever is what makes an action movie good. The script to start with. Serious, but also witty, and with the right amount of reality stretching. It even has an underlying social theme, which is interesting and relates to the current world's political climate. Marc Forster's direction makes you wish he directed Indiana Jones IV. His movie runs like clockwork, with the action scenes being masterfully choreographed and filmed, and painting a deeper, much more complex portrait of not only Bond, but also M, who gets a lot more presence in this one (and is Judy bloody Dench. I rest my case).

And then there is Bond himself. Daniel Craig really makes the movie work with his presence alone. He's a badass, but feels absolutely human. He has flair and a taste for luxury—wait until he arrives to Bolivia to see what I mean—but he gets gritty and dirty all the time. He could be a psychopath, but you can see that he has heart. He can seduce a women into bed like the best Connery would do, but you can actually see that he cares about her. You can feel that he is a hopeless romantic below the cold surface. A guy consumed by the need of vengeance and the contradiction of being betrayed by the love of his life. Yet, at the same time, he still loves her to the point of risking everything, even while she is dead.

And he likes cocktails.

Yes. Go. See it. Now.

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GOLF new tech

Air Force One Golf Clubs Use Compressed Nitrogen to Help You Hit Farther

By Sean Fallon, 1:50 PM on Thu Nov 13 2008, 1,313 views

Have you ever heard the adage that you can buy a better golf game? I really is true. Over the years my game has improved dramatically because of improvements in club design—but I never expected to be swinging anything like the Air Force One. On paper, PowerBilt's idea makes a lot of sense—by filling a clubhead with nitrogen at pressures of up to 150 psi, you can dramatically reduce the thickness of the face and increase the sweetspot because there would be no need for mechanical bracing. The result is increased flex in the clubface on impact which translates into greater distance.

PowerBilt is releasing their line of Air Force One drivers, fairway woods and hybrid clubs with variable face thickness—allowing players to tailor their club to their game. In other words, users with a low swing speed can opt for the thinnest face (for easier compression) while faster swing speeds would require a thicker face. Either way, PowerBilt claims that these clubs can add 10-15 yards of extra distance to your drive. That's remarkable if it is true, but what may be even more remarkable is that the clubs actually conform to USGA regulations—so you can avoid crippling cheater's guilt when you step up to the tee. The driver, fairway woods, and hybrids will run you $500, $350 and $250 respectively. [PowerBilt via DVICE and World Golf]

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Waterfall

Here are some photos i took at Kiansom waterfall . Some 20 min drive from town, and about 10-20 min walk depend on which waterfall you want to go .

The 1st photo is a HDR version.

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What is 64 bit ?

Giz Explains, ram, memory, vista, leopard, windows 7, windows 8...

, apple, microsoft, 64-bit, bits, windows, os x, snow leopard, windows vista, 64 bit, bit, bits, feature, top

Giz Explains: What's So Awesome About 64-Bit?

The phrase "64-bit" has been tossed around lately, the most it's been since the Nintendo 64. If you haven't heard it, pay attention. One of the most important steps forward in computer power is happening right under your nose, but most people don't know thanks to the sneaky efforts of Microsoft and Apple. Though fully 64-bit operating systems are the OSes of tomorrow, you can taste some of that power today with 64-bit versions of Windows and OS X. Here's why 64-bit computing is so awesome:

In a word, memory. We're not going to get super nerdy on you here (Wikipedia will gladly go there). To keep it simple, the whole bit thing (16-bit, 32-bit, 64-bit) refers to how much data the computer can keep track of, or talk to, at once, and that's what determines how much memory it can handle. A processor with 32-bit memory addresses can roll with 4GB of RAM. A 64-bit system can rock, on the other hand, 16 exabytes of RAM. That's 16.8 billion terabytes. Of RAM. You're not going to get that kind of memory, not anytime soon; for now, from a user standpoint, this means there's simply no ceiling to memory expansion.

So while 32-bit hardware and software—the current norm in PC-land—limited you to 4GB of RAM (Physical Address Extension will let you have more, but 32-bit software will still only use 4GB), with 64-bit hardware and software, you can use vast amounts of RAM, which enables a whole new world of possibilities for applications, since they'll have a massive amounts of memory to work with.

The road to 64-bit rather conveniently dovetails with the multi-core processor arms race, using graphics cards for processing and growth of parallel processing in mainstream computing. In other words, in just a short generation, applications will be able to harness an exponential increase in power over what they can use today—a crapload of processors working together with a smorgasbord of memory at their disposable. With 64-bit, computers can also crunch bigass numbers way faster, so it's excellent for science-y things. So get ready for some cool stuff.

You're probably asking: Why not now? I've heard of this 64-bit stuff before. Well, the hardware has been around for a while—64-bit super computers go back decades, and AMD brought 64-bit processors to the mainstream a few years ago with the Athlon 64, for instance. The PowerPC G5 for Macs was also 64-bit. And if you buy a Core 2 Duo today, it's 64-bit. But the operating systems regular people use have essentially been slow to adopt 64-bit until recently, and won't plunge excluslively into 64-bit for another generation, Windows guru Ed Bott explained to us. Windows Vista ships with separate 32-bit and 64-bit editions, with Vista 64-bit being the first consumer-usable 64-bit version of Windows. Apple has been moving more and more of OS X over to a 64-bit architecture with every new version. Bott told us that while Windows 7 will have 32-bit and 64-bit versions, its eventual successor, Windows 8 (or whatever it's called) will likely be the first Windows that's exclusively 64-bit. Reportedly, next year's Mac OS X Snow Leopard will be 64-bit down to the kernel.

The reason 64-bit is the future and not the present is that 64-bit is a whole different architecture from the 32-bit status quo—different kernel means different drivers, application compatibility issues, that kind of stuff. A swift, clean break means lots of headaches, especially for the corporate world, which, as Bott told us, is as big of a concern for Microsoft as the consumer space. That's why Apple has been transitioning OS X to total 64-bit over time, and why Microsoft will still ship a 32-bit version of Windows 7. And likely, Bott says, an exclusively 64-bit Windows 8 would have a virtualization setup to run 32-bit apps. "Fortuitously," he told us, "an x64 system with lots of memory should scream at virtualization."

Another hitch on the path to true 64-bit glory that Bott raised is the question of "When will people outside of the specialized work software" like Adobe (Photoshop CS4 will be a native 64-bit application in Windows, though not in OS X) write 64-bit apps? With the coming wave of many-core parallel processing and ridiculous amounts of memory take advantage of, programmers have a lot to play (and deal) with. Applications have to be re-written to take advantage of the multiple cores and huge amounts of memory at their disposable, and that transition is going to take some time. The other slight downside 64-bit Bott mentioned—and it is slight—is that hibernation will be slower, since all that memory means more to write to the hibernation file, and more to read when it wakes up.

While that awesomeness sounds like it's too be good to be the norm anytime soon, it's not. Leopard already does quite a bit of 64-bit voodoo, like having a 64-bit GUI and Vista 64-bit is supplanting 32-bit on computer maker's systems, now that the driver situation isn't so abysmal. And while four totally usable gigs of RAM in a Vista machine is a thing of beauty, 6GB and 12GB will quickly become the norm for performance machines with the launch of Intel's Core i7, since it uses triple-channel memory—three delicious sticks of RAM—so 64-bit couldn't come soon enough.

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WIndows 7 news

Windows 7 Walkthrough, Boot Video and Impressions

Like Elvis in '68, Microsoft is itching for a "comeback," and Windows 7 is the perfect excuse. In fact, this week in LA at the Professional Developers Conference, Windows 7 officially shoved Vista aside. Having suffered through the often deserved criticisms of that ill-fated OS installment, Microsoft's people are thrilled to tears to be able to talk about something (anything!) else. On Sunday, they took journalists through a lively 7-hour orientation on Win 7, then handed off a Dell XPS M1330 loaded with pre-beta Build 6801. Thankfully for the overworked, underappreciated developers at Redmond, it's surprisingly stable, and its look and feel already puts Vista to shame.

Here's a walkthrough of the system I'm looking at, some videos showing its basic performance, and then shots of more interface and system details demoed at PDC that will show up in the first beta build.

It's really hard to piece together everything I experienced at the seminar, so I'm going to start with the real, actual improvements I see in the system I've been fiddling with, and then expand into the more rhetorical stuff.

WHAT I'VE ACTUALLY SEEN
For starters, even the early build of Windows 7 feels like a fast, stable environment. There's a lot going on behind the scenes to make the OS more usable, one monumental improvement being how video memory is allocated for unseen windows. (Hint: It's not.) The result is a highly responsive machine that gets decent battery life. Though specs aren't out yet, Windows boss Steve Sinofsky confirmed that it could run on systems with just 1GB of RAM.

As you might expect, I'm already seeing smarter user-interface decisions. Here are three great examples:

Choosing a Wi-Fi network now takes just one click, straight from the system tray. How much of a no-brainer was that? Instead of the clicking on the insulting "networks are available" pop-up, you actually get the available networks. Speaking of the system tray, it now gives you more complete control over what you see—instead of just hide or show, you can get it to display particular notifications, as you see here:

The dreaded User Account Control lives up to its name with more control. Yes, this slider is how you will be able to reduce the number of pesky pop-up warnings, eliminating all the ones that come from Windows, for instance. There are four tiers of security in total, so basically two settings between Vista's tell-me-everything and don't-tell-me-squat modes.

The sidebar is dead—the gadgets roam free! Why should keeping one or two gadget/widgets alive mean sacrificing a fifth of your clickable screen? Now when you add gadgets, they stack up on the right, but you are at liberty to put them wherever you want, and they're always there, hiding under your windows. This is an idea I wish Apple would incorporate too. Speaking of Apple and things hiding under windows, there's an upcoming "peek" feature that I will show below in the up-coming section.

There are some other new interface elements that might be quite useful. Microsoft is sort of the opposite of Apple when it comes to organizing your media files: Apple helps you put them all in one place, while Microsoft says it's okay to leave them scattered around. Up until now, though, it was hard for Microsoft's software to keep track of everything. But there are two new tools, one local and one networked, that will help you track all kinds of media files.

Libraries let you clump together same-type content no matter where it is on the system. If you have pictures in one set of folders, and other pictures in another, and you damn well aren't going to merge the folder, you can still track them together by adding them both to the Photo Library. Libraries even show the contents of local external storage drives you add to them, though when you unmount the external drive, Library offers to ditch its folder.

HomeGroup is a re-do of classic workgroup networking, only with the home in mind. The feature will only work on Windows 7, so to test it I'd need a second loaner unit. Still, having set up a basic HomeGroup, at least the initial interface and Microsoft's literature suggest that this will simplify viewing content across multiple machines, and sharing printers and other products. Let's hope so, because it could also be one of those classic "Why won't this work for me????" networking wizards. (Or is it just me who gets those?)

Here are some other shots from the pre-beta unit I'm looking at, including:
• Ribbon interface now appearing on WordPad and Paint (and nothing else so far)
• Solutions Center that will soon be re-branded as Action Center
• New fast-launching "lightweight" Windows Media Player
• Subtler, but still cool, improvements to the main Windows Media Player
• Windows information page, so you can see the attributes of the system

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VIDEO
I shot the following videos to get you some immediate sense of what it's like to use the Windows 7 laptop, but though in some instances it is compared to a reasonably similar system that is also fairly clean, this isn't any kind of test. It is interesting to note, though, that while the Win 7 boots way faster here (even with the other computer's BIOS startup out of the way), it actually takes longer than the other system to shut down. But yes, these are totally unscientific, just a nice thing to observe:

Totally Unscientific Video of Boot-Up Time

Totally Unscientific Video of Shut-Down Time

Super Scientific Video of New Window Resizing Feature

WHAT MICROSOFT IS PROMISING
The sad thing about the build that Microsoft handed out is that it's missing a lot of the neat stuff that they showed off at the conference, and have been hinting at elsewhere. Though we did see a lot of this stuff running on systems, we couldn't take photos or video—not even of the slides.

User Interface Improvements In the last video above, I say more UI to come, and I mean "in the beta." Here are the new promised UI effects—all of which make Vista's Flip3D look like the OS equivalent of the infamous "Mission Accomplished" banner.

While I'm a fan of the mouse hot-corner "Peek" function in the above photo, that lets you see gadgets or icons that windows could be obscuring, the biggest improvement to the Windows UI is probably in the Taskbar. It's gone through quite a few evolutions already, but this latest one is pretty great. Click on an app, and contextual menus pop up, giving you options like opening recent documents. The Taskbar can pull information that's already part of the program, so new apps don't need special programming to work here. Another aspect of the new Taskbar will be the preview feature, which will show you floating glimpses of hidden windows. (I'm still hazy on this one, so we'll have to revisit it once the beta comes out.)

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Other improvements come in the natural-interface category: You can now write in math equations. (I think this is cool, even though it's been a very long time since I've actually written out any math more complex than a bar tab.)

Windows 7 will have great native touch and multitouch benefits too—none shown here unfortunately: Menus subtly enlarge when tapped with a finger instead of a mouse cursor; the mouse cursor disappears when the finger touches the screen; and iPhone/Surface-style pinching and stretching are now part of the OS.

Cool Device Tricks
As a gadget lover like most of you, one of my favorite parts of the conference was the device discussion. I am happy to report that, for starters, Windows 7 is itself a more aggressive media playback system, natively handling both AAC and H.264 as well as DivX and Xvid without third-party download.

It's also a DLNA 1.5 system with some neat tricks up its sleeve. Windows Media Player has a "play to" feature (at left) that you can reach via the Taskbar—one click and you can pull up a song, start playing, and even jump to the next.

But here's the coolness: You can use that same feature to pull songs from other places on the network. And you can send the song to play through a Sonos or other compatible player on the network, rather than through your dinky laptop speakers. You can even, theoretically, if everything's visible on the net, pull DRM-free AAC files from a Mac, and tell it to play on the Sonos, re-encoding it on the fly if the Sonos doesn't support AAC. In this case, the compatibility is only as good as the interface, and the interface is only as good as the compatibility, so I am eager to see how this is executed.

A nice servicey program for interfacing with gadgets and peripherals is called Device Stage. Yesterday in comments, it got maligned a bit as the new PlaysForSure, but that's a branding it doesn't deserve. Not yet, at least. The system allows camera, phone, MP3 player and printer makers to create mini interfaces for their devices. The products appear in the Taskbar when connected, with their own pop-up menus of activities, like offloading pics or uploading music. In addition to the pop-up Taskbar menu, each device will have its own pop-up page with links to ordering supplies or downloading the manual in PDF format, plus a photorealistic icon that will appear wherever the device is referred to.

For Device Stage to work, the third-party brands will have to provide their own content, but it will get served throughout the world by Microsoft. If there is no Device Stage present, you get the basic AutoPlay pop-up that we've seen for ages. When I asked Microsoft how aggressive they would be in getting companies on board with Device Stage, they said that the companies themselves were excited about the chance to do it. As someone who was bitterly let down by PlaysForSure, I can tell you, this ain't the same.

I realize I covered far more of the external bits and far less of the internal guts than some of you folks wish—nor I even touched on the new Windows Live and IE8 features, both of which are somewhat visible already—but it's early yet, and while I will always focus on usability, there will be a lot more to look at in the coming months as the builds get richer and the testing is more reflective of the final product. As far as exact dates go, Microsoft is reluctant to carve anything too deep into granite, but can you blame them?

For now, we should just be happy that Windows 7 appears to be on the right track. You can almost look at consumer-level Windows—that is, 95, 98, Me, XP, Vista and Win 7—like the first six Star Trek movies: They pretty reliably alternate between crap and quality. All I can say is, screw the Final Frontier, and hellloooo, Undiscovered Country. That, and thanks to Microsoft for talking about Windows 7 early and often. It helps. Just don't screw it up! [Windows 7 News on Giz]

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