If you’re thinking about taking a leap of faith and trying the Windows Phone mobile operating system, Microsoft is now giving away free Windows Phone handsets. However just like the saying “there’s no such thing as a free lunch”, there is a catch to this deal, which states that you will have to spend at least $499 or more in order to qualify for this deal.

There are several pros and cons to this deal, with the cons being that the phones offered (HTC Surround, LG Quantum, HTC HD7, Dell Venue Pro) are first generation Windows Phone handsets, which means that they aren’t very attractive in terms of hardware specs compared to the newer generation models. The upside is that these phones are being given away to you off contract, meaning that you will not be required to sign on with a carrier on contract, and if it so happens that you’re shopping around for Microsoft products anyway, a free phone will just be icing on the cake.

If the idea of being able to get your hands on a free Windows Phone handset to try before making the leap and purchasing any one of the upcoming Windows Phone handsets, then just head on down to the Microsoft Store and start piling on that shopping cart!
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Microsoft has officially announced the coming of Windows Phone OS to India, complete with Windows Phone Marketplace, voice recognition support, and three new Mango handsets.

The first of the Mango devices is the HTC Radar, which will be available in the land of Bollywood as early as next week. It features a 3.8-inch WVGA SLCD display, a 1GHz single-core processor, 512MB of RAM, a 5-megapixel rear-facing camera, a front-facing VGA shooter, and 8GB of internal storage. The HTC Radar comes preloaded with localized apps that cater to the Indian market and will be price at 23,990 rupees (about US$485).

Second in the list is the Samsung Omnia W, which comes with a 3.7-inch Super AMOLED screen, 1.4GHz processor, 5-megapixel rear camera with 720p video recording, and a VGA camera at the front.

Lastly, the Acer Allegro is expected to be the cheapest of the lot, providing budget-conscious smartphone users access to Microsoft’s platform. As for the specs, nothing has been provided yet, but who cares about specs if its price is all that matters? The Omnia W and Allegro are expected to be available in November, with the latter costing roughly $400.

Meanwhile, the Windows Phone Marketplace will also provide a number of third-party applications for Indian users like the Times of India newspaper and daily deals service SnapDeal.
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Microsoft finally came out in open and revealed the reason behind yesterday’s Xbox Live Outage. According to the details revealed by Microsoft, Xbox Live outage was due to human error, and the service is already back up and running.

Microsoft’s Eric Neustadter said, “The root cause of this outage was human error. a change resulted in an interruption to normal traffic flow within our datacenters, which logged users out and prevented them from logging back in.”

Microsoft also says that they are already working to fix their system so that the same issue does not happen again in near future.

“We’re sorry for this, and we’ll be updating our processes to prevent this from happening again in the future.”
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Apple has really been doing well in the tablet market with ARM chips and Microsoft is soon going to have an operating system on the market called Windows 8 that works well with ARM chips. It seems that companies are going away from traditional chip manufacturers like Intel and AMD and instead using manufacturers that used to be only for smartphones like ARM. Intel has plans to keep their place in the changing market but AMD has been kind of quiet. But it looks like their plans have just been leaked.

So AMD has their Fusion chips which are pretty much the equivalent of Intel’s Atom chips at the low end. In 2012 around the same time Intel plans to launch their tablet chips it looks like AMD is going to launch their Hondo Fusion chips which will be designed for Windows 8 and tablets. It will remove a lot of the features that tablets don’t really need like VGA output, PCI Express support, and extra USB ports.

Instead the chip will use around 2 watts and support Active Standby which is a way for the Windows 8 machine to still run but use less power. Think of it as an improved Windows sleep feature. The chip will be a dual core with DX11 graphics and should be showed off in December of this year and the production should start during the second quarter of 2012. Then in 2013 there should be Samara which will have next gen graphics and still be designed for tablets.

What are your thoughts on this?

Microsoft just earned itself a boatload of geek-cred and made Apple and Sony look pretty bad in the process. We knew the Windows Phone team was playing nice with the jailbreakers from ChevronWP7, but we didn’t realize just how cozy the two were going to get. Today the devs announced that ChevronWP7 Labs would open up soon, with the approval of Redmond, allowing users to load homebrew apps on their handsets. Unlike tools from the iPhone Dev Team, this service won’t be free.

Instead, customers will have to cough up a small fee via PayPal — but we’re sure many of you are more than willing to pay a reasonable price to avoid the sort of cat and mouse game Apple has been playing with hackers since 2007.

>Are consider to buy a Music Player? Good news for you  Zune has just getting a price cut again.  Right now, customers can get the 16GB Zune HD for about $162.54 at Wal-Mart. Just FYI,  it regularly retails at a price of $199 before. This price will make a good competition between Zune and iPod Touch which has higher price with an equal amount of memory.  I guess if this price cut effets the market maybe Apple will follow Zune to cut iPod Touch’s price soon. [MW]

On February we have the leaked shot of project natal prototype, and today this Microsoft’s forthcoming motion controller for the Xbox 360 has a new name. The official name for Project natal will be “KINECT”. Gamers!, the product is said to be available on November 4th of this year, there is no official price at the moment but Gamestop has stepped in to leak the price, putting Kinect up for $150. Do you want to get one? [Gizmodo]

It seems Best Buy has making a good decision by offering the Kin One for free and kin Two for $50 with two-year contract, and no mail-in rebates. Why? well the Kin’s original price is pretty expensive compare to the iPhone, Palm Pre, or other android smartphone at least you could get a better device for the same price. with Best Buy’s offer, I believe you have found a reason to buy this gadget for your teen children. [Engadget]

Microsoft Project Pink has just announced two new phones named the Kin One and Kin Two. Microsoft announced it via live stream announcement before. This Kin one and two will be available starting from next month and it looks like Microsoft trying to aim the young people market with social networking easy access features in this phone. Verizon will carry the devices in the U.S. Market FYI check it on Verizon.com/KIN. The Kin one and to will hit Europe in the late 2010 via Vodafone. More Picture, Video, and Specs after the jump. [KIN]
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Microsoft has just announced that it’s latest Zune HD with 64GB storage capacity is now available for $350. If you think 64GB is too much for you, there is also a 32GB version for $270 and a 16GB type for $200. This new Zune HD comes with a 3.3-inch colorful display screen with scratch-resistant glass, HDMI out, a built-in FM and HD radio receiver, and can playback HD video content. You can choose plenty different colors from black, red, blue, green, orange, purple, and more. [MW]