Tech QQ

Tre first to launch Windows Phone 7 in Sweden
In a joint press release Microsoft and Tre announce that Tre is going to be the official launch partner for Windows Phone 7 in Sweden.

"We're very proud to have been trusted this by Microsoft. Microsoft smartphones have always had a strong position in this country, especially among our corporate customers and we are very impressed by what we've seen of Windows Phone 7 so far"  - Says Nicholas Högberg, VP of 3 Sweden.

No specifics about what phones are going to be released are published, just a statement that "phones from among other HTC and Samsung will be released".

Read the full press release here. (In swedish)

What happens if you mix the Japaneese phenomenon Hello Kitty with other characters form popular culture?

Digital artist Joseph Senior sought to find out. Check his Flickr account for some great interspecies mixes with interesting results!

During the the process of Oracle buying SUN not a lot of SUN people have been very outspoken.

In what's probably the first really outspoken interview eWeek manages to get a chat with James Gosling, the father of Java. You can find it here.

And during JavaOne, The Basement Coder's managed to get Gosling to agree doing a podcast with them. The background noise is pretty bad as it's recorded in a cafe during lunch hours. But if you can listen through the clip it's got some interesting stuff in it. You can find the podcast here.

Gosling is not holding back in these interviews and is dishing crap out to Oracle, IBM, Google and a few more. Nothing really concrete about what Oracle's has in store for Java came out unfortunately, most likely because he's not privy to that information, as it turns out he wasn't really in the loop after Oracle took over.

One good quote regarding Oracle and Java was: “There’s only so much damage Oracle can do, because so much of their business depends on Java. It’s in their best interest to treat it well.”

Bodes well for Java I think...

In an ironic twist of events the site 80% of all teens are dependent on being connected too all their waking hours is down.

That's right folks, Facebook is having technical difficulties and is unresponsive, slow or even in some places completely unreachable.

Except from spreading angst among teenagers, it's also creating problems for other internet user, since almost every site and it's mother have added the Facebook "Like"-button it's pulling down some other sites in the social vacuum it has created.

Can this be the end of internet as we know it??

For those who got their interest piqued from the HTC presentation yesterday about the Desire HD, HTC now got a very nice promotion video out.

Check it out below.

Today the HTC event in London went off. I was watching the live blogs and hoping for a great Windows Phone 7 device to be revealed.
But no such luck as no Windows Phone 7 device was mentioned at all it seems...

Instead the HTC Desire HD and Desire Z was announced, both Android handsets with HTC Sense on them.

They talked a lot about improvements to Sense, and question is if they aren't building in too much stuff into sense, just making it harder for them to upgrade older phones to new Android version when they roll out. Although that might not be a priority as it would be better for them if people that wanted the latest versions all went out and got new phones.

The specs for the devices:
HTC Desire HD
4.3" Screen (what kind of screen was not divulged, but most likely slcd)
1 GHz Snapdragon processor
SRS and Dolby Mobile
8MP camera with dual-LED flash
720p video recording
802.11n Wifi
Estimated price 579€

HTC Desire Z
3.7" Screen (most likely slcd)
800 MHz Scorpion processor
5 MP camera with LED flash
720p video recording
Landscape keyboard with "z-hinge" that make it fold out from the screen
802.11n Wifi
Estimated price 499€

Both handsets to be available from next month on "Vodaphone markets" (and no further explanation here unfortunately).

Is reading all those tweets taking up your time?
Do you wish the information was more condensed and more factual?
Now there is hope, and it comes in the form of "Flutter"!

A short demo session by the Windows Phone 7 application manager at Microsoft was recorded by lockergnome. The demo in itself is fairly boring and no news are exposed, the device used are interesting news on the other hand!

The device used is the Asus device that there only have been a few leaked photos of so far. It looks way different from the Asus prototype device that was used as far back as the unveiling of Windows Phone 7 back in Barcelona. I held the Asus prototype at the developer hub in Stockholm, and this new version seems to be half as thick almost.

I like the sleek black look, I just hope it got some decent specs to taunt my curiosity even more.

Check out the vid below.

Yesterday I finally got my HTC Desire, I've been waiting for it for about 9 weeks now.

I've been playing around with it a bit and I must say it's a really nice piece of hardware. The only thing that's annoying me so far is the small top status bar where you click and drag down to see incoming updates about messages, calls, installed applications and so on. It seems the bar isn't really the same size as my fingers and I have a hard time "gripping" it. (And I who got such thin sleek coder fingers!)
When playing around with the device I found an option for tethering and got a bit surprised. After checking the info tab my suspicion turned out to be true. It was actually shipped to me with Froyo already installed! Sweet.

I was thinking that I would have to update it when I got it, but it seems this batch was already updated before shipped.

Pocket-Lint is reporting today that several high ranking sources are reporting on an early October launch of Windows Phone 7.

The big launch event will be held in New York and broadcasted over the world. This event is set to be held on October 11:th. Wp7 devices will then be available later that month.

And the good news about Windows Phone 7 doesn't stop with that today. Apparently Gizmodo got some photos of the upcoming Samsung i8700 unit from a tipster.

It looks pretty cool, a lot better than the old Omnia prototype that have been floating around. Let's hope this device is one of those being released in late October!

Microsoft says the revolution is coming - the question is when?

We know the Windows Phone 7 release is to be in October in Europe, question is what date. Come on Microsoft, spill the beans!

Since the announcement about Windows Phone 7 (Series) in Barcelona earlier this year, the fans have been speculating about a HD3. That is, some kind of follow up to the mighty HTC HD2 that is running WinMo 6.5.

The HD2 was big and chunky some claimed, but it had great hardware specs and gathered quite a following among the hardcore smartphone fans. A lot of mock-ups and prototypes form fans have been floating around since then, some of which actually has been mistaken for the real McCoy by some blogs and tech sites that wrote news about a HD3 leak - hehe.

Today this legend lives on courtesy of Engadget, claiming they have gotten their hands on the UK carrier O2's upcoming release plans. In this Excel sheet the model HTC HD7 is listed. So it seems the HD2 might actually get a successor, but renamed to HD7 to fit the new smartphone OS better.

Personally I of course hope this is true, even if it's not the killer smartphone I'm praying it will be, then just for the sake of seeing some new hardware that we might not have seen any leaks about before. Secrets are fun and according to the leaked document we'll see if there is any truth to it on the 18:th October at latest.

Today Microsoft announced that WP7 has gone RTM. That's right, it's now in release candidate status and the final image is being shipped to all the hardware vendors. It feels like the wait just got a little bit shorter :)

Even a small improvement in the Facebook handling have been implemented, amongst that more ability to filter the import of contacts and the ability to post to a users wall straight from the people hub.

One impressive thing is the figures of testing hours published:

Windows Phone 7 is the most thoroughly tested mobile platform Microsoft has ever released. We had nearly ten thousand devices running automated tests daily, over a half million hours of active self-hosting use, over three and a half million hours of stress test passes, and eight and a half million hours of fully automated test passes. We’ve had thousands of independent software vendors and early adopters testing our software and giving us great feedback. We are ready.

I am eagerly looking forward to see the different retailers and networks starting with the promotions for their offerings here in Sweden. So far I think I'm leaning towards the LG E900 if it's to be released here, but as always we'll have to see what HTC hardware becomes available here as they have produced some pretty cool hardware lately.

Are you getting one and if so what model? Leave a comment below!

As I was coding on my app for Windows Phone 7 I ran in to an issue and found no reference to it on the web, so I thought I would post about it.

I was making a test page to show what's in the Isolated Storage, to verify that my writes was working as they should. When writing this test page I used a textbox and wrote some results too. I wanted to use the SelectionChanged event to catch the selection but I could not get it to work.

After scouring the web I couldn't find any one with similar issues except people posting about a bug that was firing off two events instead of one for the SelectionChanged event. I could debug and see that the event really fired. But I could not get it to return any value other than an empty string.
The code used was a simple:

private void textBox2_SelectionChanged(object sender, RoutedEventArgs e)
      {
          textBox1.Text = textBox2.SelectedText;
      }

The screenshot below shows the selection but lack of resut in the upper texbox.


Since I only wanted to select items from this textbox I had set the property IsReadOnly to true. And it seems there is a bug in the beta tools, because when setting this property to false the event returns the proper value. So, using a textbox which is editable will enable you to receive the proper value. The screenshot below shows the event having returned the proper value after the textbox control has been marked as editable.


Now I know this isn't proper usage of a textbox, showing static texts and making them selectable should be handled by a listbox, but some one still might try this out so the information could be pertinent.