My link referenced to this:

@UKBing followed up with:

It made me smile. Humanises the team behind Bing UK…

Yep – now there’s an alternative way to watch television broadcasts, movies on demand, radio, and music on demand…

For those in the UK, Microsoft have teamed up with the following content providers:

• BBC (both TV and radio)
• BSkyB
• Channel 4
• Channel 5
• Last.fm
• LOVEFiLM
• MSN
• Zune
• AlloCiné
• blinkbox
• Crackle
• MUZU.TV
• VEVO

And yes… Those of us with Windows Phone 7.5 handsets are also getting a little extra (see the video at around the 1:00 mark).

(Actually, it’s Windows Phone 7.1, but in marketing-speak it’s "Windows Phone 7.5".  Just as "Windows 7" is actually Windows 6.1.  Microsoft likes making product names complicated.)

After several months of waiting (but, impressively, less than a year since I blogged about the original launch), Windows Phone has just had a major update.  Welcome to Windows Phone 7.5.

• What Exactly is Windows Phone 7.5?
• It’s All About the People You Know, Not the Social Networks You’re In!
• Speech Commands
• Bing Search
• SkyDrive
• …And So Very Much More!

What Exactly is Windows Phone 7.5?

It’s the latest release of Windows Phone.  If you have a Windows Phone 7 device, then expect it to politely ask you to upgrade the software over the next week or two.  All current Windows Phone 7 devices are eligible for update (and if you weren’t aware – it’s free).

However, there are a few new hardware devices out there.  If you haven’t got a Windows Phone already, then I’d *highly* recommend getting one of these new devices – as they have shinier hardware (like a front-facing camera and faster processors) compared to the devices released a year ago.  If you already have a Windows Phone device, then you’re still going to see a lot of exciting new stuff anyway – so don’t feel too crestfallen…

There’s a lot to discover in Windows Phone 7.5 (find out more here), but let me step through the stuff that excites me most!

[Jump back to top]

It’s All About the People You Know, Not the Social Networks You’re In!

This is the major theme in Windows Phone – which is why Microsoft have gone so far as to make the Windows Phone slogan "Put people first".

When you think about your contacts on a mobile phone, do you *really* want to to have them scattered across your phone contacts, your Facebook contacts, your Twitter contacts and your LinkedIn contacts? Or would you rather deal with one list that meshes all of these details together?

The People Hub on Windows Phone does this (although you can, if you’re crazy, turn this off).  When you click on a contact, you can see what they’re up to in Facebook, or what they’ve tweeted in Twitter – all in a single view.

Oh – and you can use Groups to – well – group certain people together.  Like family, or close friends.  Selecting this group shows you only the social updates relating to these people, as well as allowing you to text or e-mail them all at once.  Nice!

Threads allows you to string your conversation with someone into a single view. So – I could chat with you on Live Messenger, then move to Facebook Chat, and finally to SMS as I head outside.  Your Windows Phone will stitch the conversation together in one place, saving you the hassle of jumping to different applications to view different pieces of your conversation.

The last big thing for me is the History View – when you look at any particular contact and pivot to their History, you see a nice summary of all of your interactions with this person. All your recent calls, e-mails, text messages and more!

There you go! Put people first.

[Jump back to top]

Speech Commands

Speech commands might seem like a gimmick, but you’ll quickly realise how invaluable it is when you’re driving.  Also – it’s faster to dictate a text message than to tap one out, so I suspect some people will use it as a lazy/easy way to send text messages!  The speech recognition is also great – it’s already part of Windows Phone 7 and has been expanded upon in Windows Phone 7.5.

Seriously – test this over your hands-free the next time you’re in the car!

[Jump back to top]

Bing Search

Bing Search on Windows Phone is already quite snazzy, thanks to the context search.  Do a search for "McDonalds", for instance, and you’re presented with the current share price and list of internet results.  You can pivot to Local and it’ll show you all the nearby branches of McDonalds.  Pivot again to News and it shows all the recent news articles that feature McDonalds.

Similarly, searching for "BA1317" returns the flight status for British Airways 1317 – the departure time, scheduled arrival time and expected arrival time.  Much easier than navigating to a specific web site or launching a specific application.

Search on Windows Phone 7.5 takes this a step further.  Music Search works just like Shazam, but is much faster to launch and also provides you with links to the music at the Marketplace (which can then be streamed direct to the phone with your Zune Pass).

Vision Search is arguably cooler – scan barcodes, QR codes or Microsoft Tags straight from search.  Even better – scan book covers or CD covers to get search results!

Oh – and did you know it can do text translation as well?  All of this powerful search functionality with two simple finger-presses!

[Jump back to top]

SkyDrive

SkyDrive, if you didn’t already know, is your personal store on "the cloud".  It’s 25GB of free online storage which can be used to store and share your files.

Windows Phone 7.5 hooks up to SkyDrive in a couple of major ways.  First, you can set your phone to automatically store backups of any photos you take onto a private folder in SkyDrive.  This is a great way of keeping a backup of your images on the cloud, in case your phone suffers a terrible accident.  You can also choose to share those photos directly from SkyDrive, or to spend a few moments tagging people and captioning it, and then uploading to Facebook.

You can also store your Microsoft Office files on SkyDrive, and access them via your phone.  Handy for files on the move, but ultra-handy when you realise that any Office documents you have on SkyDrive can also be accessed on any PC, with any web browser, using Office Web Apps!

[Jump back to top]

…And So Very Much More!

I’ve only really just scratched the surface on the functionality offered by Windows Phone.  If you want to discover more, head to the comprehensive Help and how to page.

Also, jump into some of the community action to find out more:

• Windows Phone Facebook page
• Windows Phone UK Facebook page
• Windows Phone YouTube page
• Windows Phone blog
• my kind of phone – the official Windows Phone UK blog

If you want to find out more, or to see the phone in action, then give me a buzz!

[Jump back to top]

As a long-time Microsoft proponent, there is definitely a sea-change in the perception of Microsoft and its products in recent years – especially around its consumer products.  Windows 7 and Office 2010 were really well received, Xbox 360 has been the best selling games console for over a year, and Windows Phone 7 has been universally lauded (although the commercial success has yet to materialise).

This is great news all-round, and I’m eager to see how warm a welcome the next wave of consumer products and technologies will receive!

Anyway – for the uber-geeks amongst us, feel free to get excited about File Copying here!

There’s been a lot of news in the UK recently about how “Social Networks” have become the new tools for anarchists, troublemakers and terrorists…

Just look at BBC News yesterday (click through for the full article):

Twitter was also labelled a potentially dangerous tool, with police considering a temporary shutdown of the service:

So – it appears that, yet again, new technology is a large part to blame for the ills of today’s society.

What utter tosh!

It appears that the police, politicians and certain segments of the media have yet again failed to understand that technology is merely a medium for content.  Let’s face it – Facebook and Twitter help to connect people together – nothing more and nothing less.  If we had found out that certain subsets of the London rioters had coordinated their gatherings through (voice on) mobile phones, would we not scoff at the idea of the police proposing to shut down the mobile networks for a period of time?  So what makes Twitter exceptionally bad?  It’s just a different (and newer) medium of communication, after all…

I still remember the early days of the Internet – when the public and press were sceptical to this brave, new, connected world wide web.  Just over a decade ago, the Internet was perceived by some to be nothing more than a festering cesspit of porn, paedophilia and instructions on how to build bombs.  At least we’ve grown out of that mind-set!

Common sense dictates that if you find people inciting unrest on Facebook or Twitter, then you close down those particular accounts, not the medium.  Just as you’d take down a racism-inciting web or blog page, and not over-react by blocking the entire Internet.

Hopefully the stone-age technophobes come to their senses and understand that we shouldn’t be criticising the medium, but rather focussing efforts on those who are abusing the medium.  Facebook and Twitter are no different from mobile networks or anything broadcast over the airwaves – it’s just a newer, faster way of connecting people…

In short – I will be indignantly outraged if I read any more headlines like the one below…

If you own a semi-serious digital camera, and run either Windows 7 or Windows Vista – then you might be pleasantly pleased to hear that Microsoft has now provided support for handing RAW photo files.

Windows Live Photo Gallery is a free download which allows you to import, organise, edit, publish and upload your photos.  Yesterday, Microsoft released the codec which supports RAW files – download it here…

If you haven’t come across Windows Live Photo Gallery 2011 (did I mention it was free?), then I’d encourage you to check it out – it enhances the basic photo handling capabilities of Windows quite significantly!  On top of the usual photo editing and touch-up tools, you can also quickly create panoramas, movies, slide shows and other fun stuff.  It also makes it utterly simple to upload to places like SkyDrive, Facebook for Flickr.

If you want more in-depth information on RAW support, then read more at the official blog.

A quick snippet of what’s new and changed here:

Find out more from the official preview site.

Although the software is code-complete and ready to be handed over to the phone handset manufacturers, remember that those manufacturers and the mobile networks will also need to run their own testing and slap on their own software, which takes a bit of time.  General availability is expected around the Autumn…  Co-incidentally, that was around the time last year that I picked up my Windows Phone 7 handset – and what a fantastic year it’s been with the phone!

As an aside – I wonder if the release will be known as “Windows Phone 7.1”, “Windows Phone 7.5”, “Windows Phone Mango” or some other name…

That’s a long, long passage of not much happening in this space, if measured in Blog Time!

I guess it’s because I’m usually in the habit of writing overtly long, pompously pretentious drivel that spilled across multiple pages and required hours to read.  I haven’t had time recently to write that sort of guff…

However, I do realise that I’m remiss for not popping any updates at all, so this will now be rectified…

I commit – at the very least – to write (or notify) about stuff that gives me a raging hard-on.  Thankfully, these are usually technology-related, so no hentai schoolgirl links here (clean dictionary definition here).

On the odd occasion, I may also find time on my hands…  At which point I’ll write another bit of overtly long, pompously pretentious drivel that I know no-one will read.

Yippee – the interweb being polluted with yet more nonsense!

Waterboarding, despite sounding like a fun beach activity (like sandcastle building), is apparently lambasted as a cruel form of torture.  “Nonsense”, say I.  It’s a fairly necessary, if painful, fact of life – very much like getting your wisdom tooth removed.  Let’s look at the facts:

Waterboarding is not lethal

Like MMR jabs, waterboarding is a perfectly safe – and well tested – form of interrogation.  As far as I am aware, no-one has actually drowned or otherwise died from waterboarding techniques.  It’s as permanently harmful as a particularly smelly fart.  In short, there is no lasting physical damage.  In fact, one could argue (weakly) that enduring waterboarding may actually have positive health benefits – being able to hold your breath for longer, being one such bonus.

As for psychological damage?  Well, just about everyone has encountered at least one harrowing psychological event in their lives (like accidentally peeing themselves while having a night in the town).  We deal with it, get over it, and move on.  Let’s face it – frightening though it may be at the time, people like to boast about scars and broken legs and near-misses after the fact.  Being interrogated by waterboarding is just another badge of honour to wear and boast about!

Waterboarding saves lives

Waterboarding, as an intelligence gathering technique, has a reasonable success rate.  If it didn’t – then more effective (and potentially more permanently damaging) techniques would have been employed.  Now – neither our government nor the US government is likely to be able to divulge exactly what incidents have been prevented thanks to intelligence gathered by waterboarding interrogations (for our own national security, you understand).  But most certainly, lives have been saved due to information gathered by waterboarding.  And if we don’t have faith in the word of our democratically elected leaders, we may as well move to China or Zimbabwe where the ruling party don’t even pretend that you have a say…

Optional Interrogations

Well then – I think I’ve fairly well elucidated how waterboarding is completely acceptable – the double-whammy of saving lives without taking any is quite a nice combination.

Of course – you have the human rights activists who are all about mollycoddling people with cotton gloves.  However, in this wonderfully democratic society (that waterboarding techniques have been invented for in order to keep safe) they are most certainly entitled to have an opinion.

And definitely, we need to be seen to be a benevolent and respectful country.  Which is why I propose the two-stage interrogation technique – thus giving potential life-takers the option of how they wish to divulge information.

Naturally – being a civil British lot – we’d offer them a lovely cup of tea with biscuits, and have a pleasant natter for information gathering.  For civil and intelligent terrorists – they know that they will ultimately have to divulge any information our governments require, and proffering information at this early stage will save a lot of hassle, pain and bad feeling all around.  However, should they not appreciate the tea/biscuit gesture, then we’ll all have to go through the non-lethal, less convenient interrogation routine.

But really – along with flu jabs, pulling wisdom teeth and removing appendices, what is all the fuss about?

Anyone who has been near me for the past few months will not have failed to know about this.  It is all I talk about, and something I’ve been gearing up for over the last few months.  Back in May, I blogged about how Windows Phone 7 would knit your social universe together in one device.

Well – the time is nearing where we, the general public, can get our hands on these phones – launch day is tomorrow!

Yes – as of Thursday, 21st October 2010 – you will be able to buy Windows Phone 7 handsets from your local store, or online.  I have two handsets lined up for myself from Orange – the Samsung Omnia 7 and the HTC 7 Mozart.

If you want to know more about Windows Phone 7, discover the major features here.  Engage with the community at the official Windows Phone UK Facebook page, and chat with like-minded individuals at the Windows Phone Backstage forums.

And finally – I’d recommend avoiding me in the near future if you don’t want to get oversaturated with demos of what Windows Phone 7 can do.  In addition to having two handsets to demo, I’ve also today become a "Windows Phone 7 Expert” and will fire all my newly learned sales patter directly at you!

(P.S. If you want to become an Expert yourself, pop over here to learn and certify!)