I decided to wait a little while before I posted my thoughts on Microsoft’s announcement of Windows Phone 7 Series.  I wanted to give myself a little time to digest all the coverage.  I also wanted to gather my thoughts on what we know and what is still up in the air.

For those that haven’t seen the new interface yet (where have you been?), here’s a quick video intro:

I’m not going to go very in depth in this post because many other sites have covered what we know with extreme depth and clarity.  If you’re looking for an in depth article with very good analysis, see this Engadget article.  For my part, I’m simply going to cover things from my personal perspective, picking out the things that I really like or things that I think will really apply to my life.

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Microsoft will reportedly be announcing Windows Mobile 7 at Mobile World Congress during a Steve Ballmer press conference on February 15, 2010. There have been rumors swirling for weeks now about what we’re going to learn about Windows Mobile 7 at MWC.

I haven’t talked about Windows Mobile much on the site, mainly because there hasn’t been much news regarding the platform for a while. Sure, Windows Mobile 6.5 and subsequent versions were released, and they were an improvement (somewhat) over previous versions. But they weren’t the big, revolutionary leap forward that we’ve been expecting. Whether Windows Mobile 7 will fulfill that promise from Microsoft, we’ll have to wait and see.

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On 16 October 2009, the Mozilla Firefox team made a decision to issue a “block” for the Windows Presentation Foundation plugin and Microsoft .NET Framework Assistant extension for Firefox due to reports of a vulnerability in the Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) hosting process.  This is not a vulnerability in the two add-ons in question, but rather in an underlying library from .NET that the add-ons rely upon, thus opening Firefox to the vulnerability.

Where the story gets interesting is that the patch for this vulnerability (MS09-054) was issued via Windows Update by Microsoft on 14 October 2009.  So, two days after the patch for this issue was delivered via automatic updates, Mozilla decided that it would be a good idea to disable these add-ons.  Unfortunately, the block list technology Mozilla has put into place in Firefox does not give the user any option to override a block other than turning off blocking completely.

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While this isn’t really a gadget, per se, I’m really loving Windows 7.  I now have it installed on 5 different machines, all serving different purposes, and it’s really shining in every role I can throw at it.

Main Desktop

My main desktop machine, where I do most of my gaming and just general personal computing, was the first machine that I migrated to the Windows 7 Beta.  I had some issues with video card drivers at first, but that was quickly resolved.  Other than occasional video weirdness, which I think may actually be hardware related, it performs wonderfully.  I haven’t had any problems with games that would’t play or performance or anything.

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I picked up an HP Mini 1030NR Netbook from Best Buy yesterday.  I had some Reward Zone certificates that were about to expire, so I ended up getting a great deal on it (about $65 out of pocket).

I’ll write up a more in depth review after I’ve had some time to play with it, but I’ll give a few quick observations here. First, I immediately put the Windows 7 beta on it, and it performs really well.  It’s not as fast as a full blown laptop or desktop machine, but the performance is completely acceptable for casual, every day web use.  While the keyboard is smaller than I’m used to (my “real” laptop is a Lenovo Thinkpad R61), it has a very nice feel to it.  The screen is bright and beautiful, and about as small as I can see myself using at 10.2″.

It has built in 802.11g wireless, which so far shows really solid performance.  The two USB ports allow for some nice expansion options and make it easy for me to use my Sprint EVDO card for on-the-go wireless whereever I am.  Even though there’s no optical drive, I can easily plug in an external DVD drive via USB when I absolutely need it.

The HP Mini is a tad bit heavier than other netbooks I’ve seen, but it’s not uncomfortable to carry.  It has a similar case design to other HP notebooks, which is very attractive.

All in all, a great package from what I can tell so far.  I ran into a problem getting the Sierra Wireless drivers installed for my Sprint EVDO card on Windows 7, but it was an easy fix (I’ll post a full writeup on this in a separate post).  I also had to manually install the touchpad drivers, as Windows 7 saw it only as a PS/2 mouse.  The default drivers allowed the touchpad to work as a mouse with no problems, but I missed my “scroll area” on the touchpad, so I grabbed the drivers from the Synaptics website.

I’m looking forward to playing with this new netbook!