Freaking hilarious. Snarks aside, he has absolutely nailed the double standards Molly showed during the 2-week trial. She would rather have a broken Android than a Windows Phone. She did not like that there was no turn-by-turn navigation in Windows Phone, but has no reason not to let her friends choose the iPhone over Windows Phone, while iPhone does not have turn-by-turn navigation either. Nor does it have her other wanted feature, compose email by voice.

Can someone please let me know what she is trying to conclude? I didn't get it. Oh no, I did. She concludes, "I like Android". Sigh.

[youtube [www.youtube.com/watch](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iAq-zes9ri0?wmode=transparent])

[youtube www.youtube.com/watch

I have been using Office365 for about a month now. I migrated from Google Apps and here are my thoughts about it so far.

What I like:

1. Outlook Web Access: Such a refreshing change from the dull gmail interface. It is not only better-looking but it performs way better than the sluggish gmail. Navigating around the interface is better (although for keyboard-navigation fanatics, gmail may seem better, I am not one of those) and Outlook Web Access seems way more like a desktop client that gmail does.
2. Real exchange access via Outlook: No IMAP, no nonsense. Pure Exchange connectivity from Outlook. Makes backing up emails to local disk easy. No folders to set up, no headers vs entire emails to choose.
3. SharePoint: Getting full SharePoint access included in the plan is simply awesome. I am not using Office365 for any kind of business, but I see myself using SharePoint for document management and for intranet-type features (private blogs, wiki-style journaling, etc.) and maybe even photo management?
4. Lync: I have not used it extensively yet, but the idea of having not only IM and video chatting but also online meetings with anyone, included in the plan, is a huge plus in favor of Office 365.
5. Mailbox size: With Office 365, I get 25GB mailbox compared to ~7.5GB with Google Apps gmail. I have a mailbox of about 5GB, so I am glad about this quadrupling of my mailbox capacity.
6. Forums/Support: Forums were sparse and traffic was light earlier. But as more and more beta invites have gone out, I have seen participation increase and I like that a lot of Microsoft folks are active on the forums there and are helpful. This unlike anything Google can boast of.
7. Works awesome with my Windows Phone 7 (and would be the same on iPhone or Android, or any mobile device that supports Exchange ActiveSync): I had a problem with gmail where if I deleted an email on my phone, it would only be archived on gmail and not deleted. Not so the case here.

Of course, not all is rosy. This is a beta, and there are many things that need to be fixed. Some of the things that I don't like (or am extremely annoyed about):

1. The biggest annoyance has been some issue with hosting engineering which disables my access to adminstration of the account as well as individual user. This has been going on for a week and I don't have an ETA from Microsoft about when it will be fixed.
2. The lack of organized FAQ's, especially at the beginning of the process. I could not find the articles I had stumbled upon just before signup (and those were very useful and relevant to my situation). A lot of the help articles linked out to outlook.com instead of office365.com or microsoft.com which added to the confusion.
3. Lack of step-by-step instructions for adding a domain and setting up accounts. I am not an Exchange administrator so after I signed up with the default user, I was expecting some step-by-step guide to tell me what I should do and in what order. There wasn't. The help was all there, just not organized well. Update: Per Allen in the comments, Microsoft has made available a YouTube video for this exact issue. I thank them for this and I am sure it is going to help a lot of folks in my situation: [youtube [www.youtube.com/watch](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JQbdWXFTJfw?wmode=transparent])
4. Some efficiencies of gmail would be welcome here. For example, when I have to move some email to folder (applying a label in gmail), I can start typing the name of the label and it would pop up the names matching the letters. In Outlook Web App, I can only drag-and-drop or select from recently used folders.
5. Forwarded emails seem to attach winmail.dat files when opened in gmail. I am not sure if this is an Outlook issue or an Exchange issue or both, but if I forward an email as an attachment (vs inline), the attachment is interpreted as a winmail.dat file by gmail.
6. My email migration was not so successful. It completed very fast (about 10-12 hours for about 3.5GB) but a lot of older emails did not make it. Now, supposedly, there could be issues with those old emails because even in gmail, I had actually copied those emails via Outlook from the older email program. So I may have lost the message ID along the way and that would make it difficult/impossible to import. Also, related, Gmail has an All Mail folder which essentially duplicates all the emails in the various "folders" (labels). So after migration, there may be a lot of de-duping involved. I am not there yet. Calendar and Contacts had to be imported separately (not supported in IMAP migration method). Both went off smoothly and without any issues.

I have not talked about Office Web Apps (included for free) and of course, the possibility of going with a plan which offers Office 2010 a a subscription download (implying, you can free upgrades when the next version of Office is released). And, I have also not mentioned that this is a financially-backed 99.9% uptime guaranteed product!

I think Office365 is a fantastic bundle of software delivered as a service. Sign up at http://office365.com and try it yourself. If you signed up in the past, you should have already received email about the acceptance into the beta program. If you sign up now, there is a 2-4 week waiting period.

I was not sure about my transition from Google Apps to Exchange but that has been almost flawless. Add SharePoint and Lync and I think this is something huge from Microsoft and kudos to them for creating this bundle. I love it!

I own an iPad 1. I love it. I love it because of three main reasons:

1. Fantastic battery life: I don't really have to worry about plugging it in for an entire day's use. I really exceeds its rated battery life.
2. iOS apps, specifically iPad apps: I used to own an iPhone. I bought several apps then. And since I have bought my iPad, I bought several apps which were specifically made for the iPad. My kids love their two pages full of games/apps.
3. Form factor: Right, it is not a 7-incher that you can put in your jacket pocket or even back pocket of your pants, but it certainly is not as big as a laptop even a thin-and-light version. The iPad is thin enough and light enough to allow me to do casual computing tasks like looking up stuff on the internet (via browser or apps), checking and quick responding to emails, looking at my work calendar, etc.

There is another feature which is huge for the iPad: its price. Having the lowest capacity iPad start at $500 has now become essentially unbeatable at the moment.

Which brings me to iPad alternatives. Today I see virtually no company which can deliver a tablet with the price, the ecosystem and the battery life which will make me reconsider my iPad purchase.

• Android tablets at the very low end: There have been several no-name tablets in the $150-$200 range which are good on one point (price) but horrible on the others like battery life or even Google's official support (lack thereof, of course, seen by the absence of Android Market in some cases).
• Android tablets at the top: The Galaxy Tab launched via the carriers and required data contract with the purchase. Tablets are essentially not a giant phone despite what the form factor might suggest. Tablets are smaller computing devices which should be available more at stores like Best Buy and Fry's than at at&t or Verizon stores. The XOOM had promise with its super-awesome specs, but it was priced too high and again, launched by carrier. Both of these have now WiFi-only versions now, but even with the price being slightly above or about the same as the iPad, the Android ecosystem is pathetic. Yes, there are hundreds of thousands of Android apps but there are no tablet apps (or to be correct, less than 100 or so). Also, Android out of the box is pathetic for media purchase/rent capabilities. Yes, there is amazon mp3 app and maybe the Samsung Media app may do something but there is no coherent message from Android about the media experience. Maybe the upcoming Google Music initiative will help, but what about TV and movies? What about sports? As a result, Android tablets have a very very long way to go to catch up with the iTunes store.
• HP/Palm: I have not seen this thing in person, it has not launched yet and we don't know what it is going to be priced at or what kind of battery life we can expect. Of course webOS app and media ecosystem is also a huge unknown at this point. So I am not going to consider this device in the conversation at all.
• RIM Playbook: This one sounds promising at the moment and with their strange move to include a way to run Android apps, they can at least claim the same depth and breadth of the available app catalog as Android does. But again, I am not sure if developers have a clear understanding of what the heck they are going to develop for. There are so many environments to possibly program for the Playbook. Also, the battery life is unknown at this point.
• Any Windows 7 tablet: I actually don't mind the full-blown Windows 7 on a tablet but the problem is none of the tablets I have seen are light (3lbs may be light for a laptop but not for a tablet. I am looking at you, Asus EE Slate) and none have the battery life even close to the iPad's. Sure, they can run the full version of Microsoft Office but I don't need that in a tablet ;-)
• The mythical Amazon tablet: This to me seems like the big unknown, but the one with the best position to attack the iOS platform. Amazon has been making devices so it knows manufacturing. Amazon recently added the Appstore for Android which from most reviews seems to be a delightful experience (minus the initial setup). Considering they have a large mp3 music store, video on demand and now subscription-style instant streaming of movies and shows, I think they have a decent competitor to the iTunes store. Since we have absolutely no idea on the type of tablet, I cannot comment on the battery life or the price. But Amazon knows retail and it has an ecosystem to support a tablet-like device. Should be interesting. It's not if, it's when.

What about the next Windows (Windows 8 for this post)? Some leaks have started coming out, and there were some rumblings earlier about the platform and the application model earlier.

I must say, I am just a little bit excited about how things seem to be shaping up for Windows 8. As I understand, Windows 8 will be running on all platforms (well, just exclude Embedded, Compact, etc.) including phones and tablets along with "normal" PC's. The core will be shared and most of the stuff will be modularized and will be included or excluded in the install based on the device. And most importantly, the UI will be different based on the device on which Windows is installed. The leaks show Metro-inspired tile-based UI for touch-centric devices like phones and tablets and a standard Windows UI for PC's. In this way they have taken the beauty of the Windows Phone UI and put it on core Windows which is good news for people like me who love Metro.

The common core and split UI makes a lot of sense - combine this with the fact that Windows 8 will run on low-power Intel CPU's like Sandy Bridge series and Oak Trail along with the newly announced ARM-based architecture support, it promises better battery life on Windows 8 devices. Already, my 3-year old PC can do instant on when I replaced my hard drive with an SSD drive. So tablets with Windows 8 and flash/SSD storage will have a decent form factor, good battery life and will not take 30+ seconds to boot up. So far, all awesome.

What about the ecosystem? Here's where it gets very very interesting. Windows Phone already has about 12,000 apps and the developer interest is increasing (maybe the Nokia deal has increased the interest, maybe not) and the Marketplace is adding apps at a pretty decent clip. All these apps are written in Silverlight so they should run on Windows 8 with minor adjustments rather than complete re-build.

At the same time, Microsoft is pushing extremely hard (esp. since the availability of Internet Explorer 9 with HTML5 and other modern web standards support) the concept of rich apps in the browser without plugins, even their own Silverlight. This push should ultimately result in a lot of apps that rely mostly on the cloud or webservices to be web apps rather than native apps.

And one last point re:app ecosystem - it would be reasonable to assume Microsoft will have a bridge for their existing Windows developers to port their apps to Windows 8 including enabling those apps to run on devices like tablets and where applicable, on phones. This is an if at the moment but safe to assume that there will be some path provided and enough time given to developers to prepare for the new Windows.

That was just app ecosystem. What about the media ecosystem? Well, they do have (in some countries at least) the much-underrated Zune Marketplace which has a pretty rich catalog of music, music videos, tv shows and movies. That marketplace, under whichever name it takes, should be a huge boost to the Windows 8 platform compared to its non-iOS competition. A media market owned by and fully supported by the platform maker goes a long way in creating a singular identity for the platform rather than having disparate music and movie stores from different providers.

What the big unknown (to me at least) is, is the price. Apple has a lock on some of the crucial components which go into making a tablet. This lock not only ensures that Apple gets a great deal on prices for those components for its own devices but it also puts a squeeze on the market supply, creating a spike in the cost for the same components for the other manufacturers. As a result, I am not sure anyone can truly compete with the iPad on price, given the current supply-demand situation.

Regardless, I feel there is more to be excited about a non-existent Windows 8 tablet than say the webOS Touchpad if it has no app support or a RIM Playbook if there is no music/movie store or an Android tablet because there is no such thing (there is a Motorola XOOM or a Samsung Tab or an HTC Flyer, but not an "Android tablet").

What do you think? @ me on twitter or put your comments here. Would love to discuss this fascinating period in our lives as we move from full-blown laptop PC's to more thin-and-light tablet type computing devices.

The Windows Phone bloggers have been active recently, for good and bad reasons. Just yesterday, the ESPN ScoreCenter app finally was released for Windows Phone so I thought it may be a good idea for me to look back at what I thought were missing features/apps for me going from iPhone to Windows Phone.

The list was something like:

1. Corporate email: I still don't have access to my work Exchange server and that is the single-biggest issue I am facing. I am completely handicapped without knowing what my next meeting is about and where it is. I am dying to get *some* access to my corporate Exchange server. (note: access to Exchange server is available but my company does not allow it outside of McAfee EMM app or Good Technology's app, neither of which are available on windows phone yet)
2. Notifications: I was looking for Boxcar type, clean and universal notifications. I did not get that yet, but a lot of the apps are slowly building some sort of indicators (Live tiles, toast notifications) and it can only get better. I am not missing it as much as I thought I would be.
3. ESPN: Done! Finally, it is here.
4. Hipporemote: There are many remote desktop apps but since I have my iPad with Hipporemote, I have not bothered to try any other apps. Don't miss this one too much.
5. Amazon: Done! Came a while back.
6. In-browser video/Flash/HTML5: Coming in Mango at the end of the year. Or maybe sooner? Who knows. Not there, but coming soon.
7. Hidden wireless networks: Not resolved and not sure if NoDo is going to resolve it. But I guess it's fine for now.

Now, what I am missing today:

1. Bank of America app: This has been made visible in public but I am not sure what the hold up is.
2. E*Trade app: This is not in order, but this is one app that I can use which is not yet in the Marketplace.
3. Liveshare is one app that was released for iOS, Android and Windows Phone at once. I would love more apps like that, especially the social ones (Instagram, anyone?) so that I can include my friends on other platforms in my mobile sharing life :-)

Not going to look at features that I feel are missing because that will make this a 15-page post :-)