Johannesburg, 06 Jan 2011
As per tradition, Microsoft yesterday delivered its kick-off keynote address for the 2011 international Consumer Electronics Show (CES).
While conference rooms around Las Vegas have seen many press functions and gadget unveilings, the show only starts on the day following Microsoft's keynote speech, delivered by CEO Steve Ballmer.
Ballmer highlighted the company's achievements for the past year, including selling eight million Kinect units. He then looked at upcoming technologies.
He announced the Xbox 360 would receive a mid-year update, which would bring more Kinect functionality to the console. Some of the features include Kinect support for the Netflix, Hulu and ESPN streaming video subscription services. Users would be able to use the Kinect as a gesture-based controller to navigate these applications on their Xbox consoles.
Avatar Kinect is also one of the new features in the Xbox update. This will let users create visual chatrooms, with their Xbox Avatars as characters in virtual chat settings. The Kinect is able to map users' facial expressions and record speech.
Windows Phone 7, still seeing a slow start in SA, will also receive an update soon. Most of the features demonstrated on stage were those the mobile operating system has had since launch, but the new copy-and-paste functionality, Xbox Live gaming and Bing search engine integration were also shown.
Microsoft says 20 000 developers have registered to develop Windows Phone 7 applications, and to date there are more than 5 500 applications in the marketplace, with 100 applications added each day.
Also on show were some Windows technologies. Internet Explorer 9 was demonstrated on stage with full hardware acceleration. Microsoft says so far 20 million people have downloaded the beta of its latest Web browser.
This was followed by demos of new all-in-one computers running Windows. The highlight of this was a Windows 7 installation running on an ARM processor. Current computers run on the x86 and x64 architectures, on which the Intel and AMD processors are based. ARM architecture is different, and used more commonly in handheld devices and embedded systems.
Ending off his keynote, Ballmer noted: “Whatever device you use, Windows will be there.”
Share