In the News

Microsoft has released a Forza Horizon 3 demo for PC on the Windows Store. Forza Horizon 3 is an open-world racing game that puts users in the latest and greatest cars in the motorsport world and unleashes on the Australian outback. Reportedly, alongside the release of the game demo for Windows 10, Microsoft has also released an update for the Forza Horizon 3 demo on Xbox One S that adds support for HDR on supported televisions.

In an interaction, Phil Spencer, head of Xbox, said, “Big leap is an interesting one…I’ve been around Xbox since the original Xbox and I remember the shift from SD to HD. I remember seeing Gears of War 1, which for us was the first game that I saw on pre-release 360 hardware, and I went, ‘Wow, that just looks like something new…’ The first time you saw a sporting event on live TV in HD, you went, Okay, that is something different.”

Alcatel showcased its Idol 4S smartphone with Android Marshmallow at MWC earlier this year. Now the company has launched the Windows 10 Mobile variant of the device priced at $469. The device will be sold exclusively sold through T-Mobile and customers will also get a free 45-day trial for Hulu Plus and an additional 30-day trial for Microsoft Groove music service.

Updating Windows takes forever, and it seems like Windows 10 gets one every other day. But now Microsoft is going to make the update process much less painful with the new ‘Unified Update Platform’ (UUP), starting by making downloads a lot smaller.

The article is about the game ‘Watch Dogs 2’ which is going to release on 15th November 2016 on Xbox one. The Season Pass for Watch Dogs 2 will contain even more of Marcus and Dedsec’s high-tech hacking antics with extra content that includes new co-op challenges and difficulty levels, new outfits, new vehicles, and new world stories.

Microsoft has launched Minecraft, an education gaming software targeted at school children, to make learning more interesting. Minecraft’s education edition, which is now ready to hit the market in both Windows 10 and Mac OS versions, includes classroom tools and a way to roll out accounts to every student in a class. The new version of the software is different from the older one in a way that it will help teachers locate students with the help of a map embedded in the software. New tools in the software will also reduce work pressure of teachers.

Mike Ybarra, Director of Program Management for Xbox, confirmed the backwards compatibility on Twitter when he posted, “360 Backwards compatibility will of course work on Scorpio.” The no-nonsense response was to a user who had asked Ybarra whether they would be able to play the Xbox 360 version of Red Dead Redemption on Scorpio.

After months of public testing, Microsoft has officially launched Flow, its app automation tool that rivals IFTTT and Zapier. The service lets you connect cloud-based apps to chain multiple actions together. For instance, you could set it deliver a notification in Slack when someone modifies a shared file in Dropbox, or save tweets with a specific hashtag to Google Sheets. You can choose from any of 58 supported apps to connect and trigger actions with, including Basecamp, Facebook, OneDrive, G Suite, Instapaper and Wunderlist. Flow can be configured using its Web, iOS and Android apps.

Expanding its verticals to retain the market leadership, Microsoft has open sourced its next-generation hyperscale cloud hardware design. The new offering by the Redmond giant is a part of the Open Compute Project (OCP) that was jointly launched Facebook, Google, Intel and Microsoft in 2014. The design, called Project Olympus, is a new model for open source hardware with the OCP community. “We are taking a very different approach by contributing our next generation cloud hardware designs when they are approximately 50 percent complete – much earlier in the cycle than any previous OCP project,” writes Kushagra Vaid, General Manager, Azure Hardware Infrastructure.

Microsoft put an end to sales of Windows 7 licenses to computer makers, marking a major milestone for the seven-year-old OS. The Redmond, Washington company stopped selling Windows 7 Professional or any version of Windows 8.1 to OEMs (original equipment manufacturers) as of October 31, 2016. The end of Windows 7 and Windows 8.1 left only Windows 10 as a long-term choice for OEMs that pre-load Windows on their wares.