26/03/2012

Microsoft admits it might've been a tad harsh.

I asked for a reason and was told Windows Phone won because “it displays the weather right there.” That was rather unclear. I showed her my device which also was showing off the same information with two side-by-side weather widgets on the center home screen. After pressing for a better reason, I was told that Windows Phone won “just because.” 

   And what on earth is that quote about you may ask; well I'd be pleased to tell you dear reader. The story began a while ago where Microsoft was so confident about how good WP7 was at displaying information through it's tile system that they challenged another operating system to beat the OS to a certain feature, it's called the 'Smoked by Windows Phone' challenge. 

   

   Sahas Katta went to his local Microsoft store equipped with his Galaxy Nexus and he demonstrated his GNex beating a Windows Phone to display the weather in two different cities. He did this by removing the lockscreen and placing a widget on his homescreen whereas the Windows Phone had the obligatory swipe up  before it displayed the information, whereas he just had to push a button to display the information.

    The story has been picked up by the internet and some press outlets and Microsoft has been force to eat some humble pie and now everything has been made better and there was even an apology, well done Sahas for following up your injustice and well done Microsoft for actually managing to say sorry and the picture below shows you exactly how Microsoft did it.

 

GAME officially enters administration, have you got GAME points?!?!

 

   In a continuation of last weeks tale of woe, GAME has this morning announced that it has officially entered administration after a winter of poor sales and a reluctance of game creators to negotiate more reasonable deals with the company. 

   When times are tough there is only one thing to do and GAME has done it; they've purged the Reward system as of today, so if you had thousands of GAME points saved up, sorry they've been wiped from existence. AND If that wasn't a huge kick in the teeth the company has announced they will not accepted returns or refunds for the foreseeable future. The company has also warned that there will be intermittent problems with the companies website because of a lack of funds to guarantee its uptime.

 The news  from today also indicates that the high streets will be losing an iconic brand too the company has announced a slew of closures for both GAME stores and Gamestations. The closures mean that there will be 2104 jobs lost, which is 40% of the workforce and that is the beginning figure. If there is a positive from this it's that there are 333 stores remaining open.

The complete list of closures is as follows;

GAME
Croydon
Bristol Cabot Circus
Bath Southgate
Milton Keynes Midsummer Place
Coventry West Orchards
Norwich
Bromley
Exeter
Plymouth New George Street
Bournemouth Commercial Road
Birmingham Palisades
York
Liverpool
Telford – both stores
Manchester Arndale – both stores
Burton-on-Trent
Birmongham Fort
Canterbury
Falkirk
Stevenage
Blackburn
Glasgow Buchanan Galeries
Reading Oracle
Basingstoke
Barrow
Bridlington
Weston Super Mare
Stockton on Tees Wellington Square
Newcastle
Edinburgh Ocean Terminal
Edinburgh Princes Street
Stirling
Portsmouth Cascades
Cardiff Queen Street
Dorchester
Gloucester
Preston St George’s Centre
Slough
Glasgow Sauchiehall Street
Isle of Wight
Northampton
Galway
London Victoria
Sittingbourne
Dublin Dundram

GAMESTATION
Birmingham New Street
Sutton
Enfield
Bromley
Llaneli
Sunderland
Norwich
Great Yarmouth
Taunton
Ilford
Cumbernauld
Coventry
Hyde
Bournemouth
Brighton
Liverpool
Shrewsbury
Stafford
Leicester
Skelmersdale
Perth
Halesowen
Walsall
Gainsborough
Harlow
Dumbarton
Cannock
Kettering
Stockton on Tees High Street
Salisbury
Hartlepool
Stevenage
Nuneaton
Cheltenham
High Wycombe
Glasgow Sauchiehall Street
Hastings
Long Eaton
Leamington

In other news:

• Skype for iPad gets updated to support the new 'retina display'.
• The Australian government has banned Huawei for bidding for the honour of building out the country's internet network, sighting the same security concerns the United States did because of Huawei's affiliations with China and the country's history of cyber attacks.
• Rovio has done it again with their hit new game Angry Birds Space building on the success of Angry Birds and the Rio and Seasons varieties, nabbing 10 million downloads in the first 3 days of the games availability!!!!!
• Kim Dotcom has revealed today that the US Military had 92,245 Gigabytes of data stored on MegaUpload's servers when the company was raided. It's good to see inter-departmental communication at it's finest right there. Although, the military will likely have ahd that data backed-up somewhere else as well.

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