With Windows 7, Microsoft is going back to basics. It's true of the product, which is as notable for its everyday performance as any one new feature. It's also true of how Microsoft plans to launch the new operating system on Thursday. Rather than go for flash, the company is focused on making sure that all of its partners are ready to sell lots of PCs and copies of Windows 7. "We're living in a different world today," Microsoft Vice ...

After months of talking about Windows Mobile 6.5, Microsoft is announcing on Tuesday that the first crop of phones to carry the Windows Phone brand are ready to hit the market. A host of new phones running the new operating system are expected to debut between now and the holidays, with many being announced later on Tuesday. AT&T has already announced two Windows Mobile 6.5-based phones -- the Pure and the HTC Tilt 2. In all, Microsoft has said ...

The Apple iPhone has boosted AT&T's subscriber numbers, but network problems and a bevy of complaints from frustrated customers are likely hurting the company's reputation. While a recent survey by the consulting firm CFI Group found that iPhone users are the most loyal smartphone users, with 90 percent saying they'd recommend the device to a friend, half of all iPhone owners surveyed said they would like to jump ship to another provider if given the chance. And for the first ...

Three weeks ago, I got a call on a friend's iPhone while in the middle of a desert; cell phone coverage had come to Burning Man. By contrast, several calls I made last night to my parents from my San Francisco, California, apartment were dropped and a subsequent connection became garbled. That happens daily when I try to converse on my first-generation iPhone in my apartment and in certain other neighborhoods. I've come to anticipate that if I can ...

Microsoft is hoping that a new crop of phones this fall will help the company in its quest to stay relevant in the cell phone market. The software maker said that the first phones running Windows Mobile 6.5 will launch worldwide on October 6 and will include phones running on AT&T, Sprint, and Verizon Wireless. The new crop of phones will also be the first that Microsoft will sell under the "Windows Phone" brand, an effort to tap into the ...

The Pirate Bay -- the BitTorrent tracker revered by file sharers across the globe and reviled by some of the world's biggest entertainment companies -- is under siege like never before. Black Internet, the largest Internet service provider supplying bandwidth to the site, said Monday that a court in Sweden has threatened it with fines unless it discontinued service to Pirate Bay. The site's operators did find an alternative Web connection and got Pirate Bay up and running, though ...

Can we all agree on something? There's no longer a difference between a Netbook and a notebook. Thanks to Netbooks' move to more features and larger-size screens, the distinction between the two can now be considered little more than marketing speak. We recently wrote about the fall's coming battle between Netbooks -- a category now 2 years old -- and thin and light notebooks with consumer ultra-low voltage (CULV) processors. In theory, the value of a Netbook -- ...

To thank him for letting them spend the last two hours of their workweek playing video games on the company dime, Kevin Grinnell's employees often single him out and shoot him in the head. To be fair, the employees at Grinnell Computers aren't firing real weapons at their boss but are instead releasing the stresses of their week in a multiplayer online game known as Combat Arms. Most Fridays for the last couple of months, the six employees of the ...

Verizon Communications has had a change of heart about using Wi-Fi to extend its wireless broadband offering as the company announces free access to Wi-Fi hot spots for its Fios and DSL Internet customers. On Monday the company announced that customers subscribed to its Verizon Fios Internet service with 20Mbps per second downstream and 15Mbps upstream or faster and customers who subscribe to its 3Mbps/768 Kbps or higher DSL service will be able to connect to Verizon Wi-Fi hot spots, ...

A significant redesign is finally coming to the Yahoo.com home page, one of the most well-traveled destinations on the Internet, and the company's search page will follow suit starting next month. Yahoo plans to let people in the United States start selecting a new, more personalized version of the home page beginning Tuesday afternoon. The revamp lets people select basic applications to use not just Yahoo sites, but also others' such as eBay, Facebook, and Twitter, said Tapan Bhat, ...