Handset maker, Nokia and software major, Microsoft might be planning to release the new Lumia 800 smartphone through Microsoft's chain of retail stores on Valentines Day next week.

According to a report by The Verge, Nokia's new smartphone will initially be available only as a bundle and will be available fro sale on 14 February. The bundle might include Nokia Play 360 wireless speaker, a Purity HD Stereo Headset and an in-ear Bluetooth unit besides the unlocked version of the handset.

Software giant, Microsoft has launched Kinect for Windows SDK and runtime as promised by the company earlier.

The company also said the Kinect hardware will now be offered through distribution partners. The Kinect motion and voice sensor was originally designed for Microsoft's Xbox gaming console but it also attracted a lot of developer interest for new apps.

Microsoft's upcoming Windows 8 operating system is expected to move to its beta stage later in February and the company is likely to release the new product this fall.

Software giant, Microsoft has announced details of the yet to be released Windows 8 operating system in a blog post claiming it will come with built-in support for mobile broadband devices and will allow users to better manage their Wi-Fi and mobile broadband networks.

Billy Anders, a Microsoft group program manager wrote in a post that, "We looked at the fundamentals of wireless connectivity and re-engineered Windows 8 for a mobile and wireless future, going beyond incremental improvements."

Software giant, Microsoft’s Chief Operating Officer Steve Ballmer has released its new ‘picture unlock’ facility at the ongoing at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.

The picture unlock’ facility will allow users to touch the right parts of a picture in order to unlock their smartphone and tablet devices without the use of traditional passwords. A user will be able to choose a photo and perform certain gestures in the right order of taps, lines, and circles in order to log in.

Software giant, Microsoft is planning to develop a new way to log in to its tablet computers instead of tradition way of typing software.

The company is working on a mechanism in which it will allow users to log in using gestures on the screen. A user will be able to choose a photo and perform certain gestures in the right order of taps, lines, and circles in order to log in.

Software giant, Microsoft has released a new update for its Xbox 360 video game console to add more features to the popular gaming system.

The launch saw a slight delay as it was first expected to be released before 7 a. m. PST Tuesday morning, but Larry Hryb, the director of programming for Xbox wrote on Twitter that "FYI: The timing for Xbox 360 dashboard update has been slightly delayed. I'll have a status update later today."

Bill Gates has offered his testimony on Monday in the $1 billion antitrust lawsuit filed by the former owner of WordPerfect.

Gates said that the release of Windows 95 was a very challenging task for the company and several last minute pre-launch changes were made to the platform, which meant that the support for a rival software maker's word processor was dropped.

"We worked super hard. It was the most challenging, trying project we had ever done," the Microsoft co-founder said.

Software giant, Microsoft has blown away the myth by revealing that less than one per cent of the attacks it detected were trying to exploit zero-day vulnerabilities.

While releasing Volume 11 of its Security Intelligence Report at the RSA Conference in Europe on October 11, the company said that the level of threat posed from so-called zero-day vulnerabilities are overestimated.

Software giant, Microsoft has said that the roll out of the next generation of its Windows Phone mobile software, dubbed "Mango" will begin in "a week or two" for handsets being used by the customers.

The announcement indicates that the company will meet its October deadline for releasing the new software to the public. The company has sent the new version to carriers for testing back in July.

Some of the Windows Developer tablets, which were distributed for free by the company to 5,000 people who attended the Microsoft's Build conference last week, are now being available online on auction site, Ebay.

Samsung made devices are selling for as much as $2,000, showing that those who recieved the tablets for free are now trying to make a profit from them. Product description on auction pages for the devices states that the tablet features a second-generation Intel Core i5 processor, an 11.6-inch 1366x768 pixel display, 4GB of memory, and a 64GB solid state drive.

London, Sept 19 : Software company Microsoft paid over one million pounds to silence a female executive who was unfairly overlooked for the role of managing director at the firm in Britain.

Natalie Ayres, who worked at Microsoft for 15 years, was seen as an outstanding candidate to become the general manager of its "Small-Medium Enterprises and Partners Group".

Software giant, Microsoft has claimed that the next version of Windows operating system, the Windows 8 powered devices will have a faster boot up time than Windows 7 devices.

The company has released a video showing a device starting up from a cold state within two seconds. The device in the video uses a solid state disk (SSD) allowing faster reading of data. The company is planning to present Windows 8 to developers and analysts at its big conference in Anaheim, Californis. The new version will be shipped over the next year.

London, Sept 1 : Tech company Microsoft intentionally designed a mobile software to track its users without their consent, it has emerged.

According to a new lawsuit filed in a Seattle federal court, Microsoft designed camera software on the Windows Phone 7 operating system ignoring customer's requests that the tracking software be turned off, the Daily Mail reports.

The Windows Mobile Marketplace now boasts of more than 30,000 apps in its offering, which is not a big compared to hundreds of thousands offered by rival Apple's App store and Google Android Marketplace, but displays an upward movement in Microsoft's own app store.

Software giant, Microsoft is not likely to release its Kinect Star Wars and new console bundle in this holiday season. According to a report, the company is delaying the launch date in order to "ensure the full potential of this title is realized." The company has not announced specific launch date for the bundle. The bundle will most likely be available in the market sometimes in 2012.

Though the market share of Google is 65.1% when compared to its Microsoft competitor Bing share which is 14.4%, the award for more accurate platform would go to Bing and not to its competitor said Experian Hit wise, the analytics firm.

As per this week released report, Bing and Yahoo were considered to be the most sought after sites, irrespective of their low market share in comparison to Google. The figures in the report goes like this: roughly 68% internet surfers visited the recommended websites of Google and more than 81.36% in Yahoo and for Bing the figure rose to 80%.

Software giant, Microsoft will make Hotmail users have strong, less apparent passwords for their email accounts in order to fight spamming and hackers.

The company said in a blog post that users creating a new account will not be allowed to choose a password typically used by millions of others. Users who are already using a banned password will be asked to change it in the future, according to Dick Craddock, group program manager for Hotmail.

According to a report, Microsoft has entered into an agreement with China’s popular search engine, Baidu for an English-language search service.

Microsoft aims to expand the presence for its Bing search engine in China while Baidu, which is the leading search engine in China, looks to expand outside its home country. The agreement comes after US search giant, Google moved its operation from China following a spat over censorship and a hacking attack with the Chinese authorities.

Software giant, Microsoft is position its new cloud-based office productivity suite, the Office 365 for small and medium-sized businesses.

Office 365 brings together its Office, collaboration and communications software. It offers productivity and collaboration tools as well as others needed by small and medium-sized businesses to compete with larger organizations, according to Steve Ballmer, Microsoft’s chief executive.