In the News

This summer, the Xbox One will be receiving two updates, equivalent to the Anniversary update for Windows 10. These updates will be substantial and will continue Microsoft’s attempt to unify Windows 10 and Xbox One together into a coherent ecosystem. The update will add Cortana to Xbox One in the U.S., U.K., France, Italy, Germany and Spain, bringing the familiar and highly accomplished digital assistance to gaming consoles worldwide.

EA has revealed when users can play FIFA 17. It will be available in the US from September 27 and the rest of the world (India included) from September 29. No price has been announced yet for India though one can expect it to be in line with last year’s cost – Rs. 3,999 on the Xbox One and Rs. 3,499 for the PC (available only digitally via Origin) and Xbox 360.

Tom Clancy’s The Division will be receiving its first paid DLC Underground on June 28th. This is according to listings on Amazon UK and Amazon Germany. Available on June 28th, users will be able to pre-load the DLC on June 25th. As initially announced by Ubisoft many moons ago, the DLC will be available first on Xbox One for 30 days before releasing on PS4 and PC. This will only apply to Underground and Survival, the second DLC slated for release in Summer.

Cloudera announced it has collaborated with Microsoft to reduce the burden on application developers leveraging Spark. Together with other open source contributors, Cloudera and Microsoft have built a new open source Apache licensed REST-based Spark Service, called Livy, which is still in early alpha development. Tiffany Wissner, Senior Director, Data Platform Marketing, Microsoft, said, “Microsoft is focused on simplifying big data and advanced analytics to make technologies like Apache Hadoop and Spark available for everybody.”

Microsoft has released its team productivity app Planner for free to eligible Office 365 subscribers. Planner follows the standard Trello and Asana model of task management for teams: set up custom columns for different work stages, create cards for certain tasks and drag them around to track progress. Office 365 subscribers with eligible plans (including Enterprise E1–E5, Business Essentials, Premium and Education) should see Planner popping up automatically in their Office 365 app list in the next few weeks.

Microsoft Band 2 now supports Cortana for Android users with the latest update for Microsoft Health App. Previously the voice-assistant feature for Band 2 was restricted to Windows Phone users only. The Microsoft Health app is currently limited to the US only, and users will need Cortana installed on their Android smartphone to use the feature with the band.

HP is going big with Microsoft’s new operating system on their latest superphone, the Elite X3. The device was announced a few months ago and is scheduled to be released later this year. As for now, HP has not yet announced any prices for the phone or the Continuum dock and the Mobile Extender laptop. The possibility of the phone and the accessories launching would be later this year when Microsoft celebrates their Windows 10 Anniversary update.

Microsoft Research has introduced FlashBack technology to bring VR across all devices, targeting especially the low-end ones. The FlashBack is a design point for head-mounted displays (HMD) VR that tries to utilize the storage on a device rather than the CPU and GPU. The Redmond giant claims that it evaluated a prototype implementation of FlashBack technology and noticed up to 8x improvement in framerate, 97x reduction in energy consumption per frame and 15x latency reduction compared to a locally-rendered mobile VR setup.

Dambusters have announced Update 1.4 for Homefront: The Revolution on PC, with an Xbox One update coming next week. It fixes a lot of the issues with the game. Some of the things that will make it into this patch for all platforms are Save Stalls, Missing Map Icons, Crash Fixes, Multicore CPU’s (PC) and Resistance Mode Content.

Microsoft has just announced a brand new Outlook watch face for the Android Wear platform. Instead of releasing just another app for email and calendar, Microsoft has made the Outlook app into a watch face which gives users the latest updates on their schedules, appointments, mails and much more at a glance. The colors on the dial will match the colors of the calendars added to users’ Outlook. They can archive, schedule, flag and delete emails just like the Outlook app.