As it turns out, Microsoft is expected to announce this at E3. Tom Warren for The Verge says a heart rate monitor that will work with most games will be introduced. The wireless device and feature will be known as Kinect Play Fit.

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From Patent To Product: 22 Months

Live Mesh and SkyDrive have been working together to give me sync and cloud access. Unfortunately, all that’s about to change with Microsoft’s SkyDrive now turning into Dropbox. In doing so Microsoft achieved this:

• Made the service simpler
• Disappointed power users

Why? Because…

• Live Mesh offered any folder sync, SkyDrive now offers one folder sync
• Live Mesh let me choose which devices should the folders be available on (cloud only, cloud+other PC, other PC only)

This is Microsoft taking one step forward, and two backwards. However, for the common user, SkyDrive is by far the best solution today, an opinion shared by most tech pundits. More storage is cheap, multi-platform clients, remote access through the browser, etc. However here’s what happened and what I fear for Microsoft:

• Dropbox succeeded because it is simple
• SkyDrive copied Dropbox and compromised—made something awesome into something simple (this does not mean Mesh was complicated)

This means for any Microsoft’s competitor, they need to simply offer what Mesh canned while keeping everything as simple. Microsoft had it till yesterday, now they don’t.

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The Problem With SkyDrive

• The device is big is size and a pleasure to hold. The slim and smooth matte body just feels great to hold
• For the size, the Lumia 900 feels very light, in fact it is lighter than 800
• Unlike the screen top in 800 that is imposed on the body, the 900′s screen is housed inside the body
• The display is smooth and easy on the eyes. it’s pleasant. Though the close eye might notice some blurriness on the home screen and due to the larger tile sizes, the pixelated Me tile doesn’t look very appealing
• Despite the big size, I enjoy using the keyboard with two hands on the bigger screen; one-hand use is a little weird. I have a friend with small hands and she can’t use the device. She fear she’ll drop it–perhaps this is why Apple’s 3.5″ size works but then again, I love the big screen
• The battery, even with 4G turned ON the whole time, outlasts my Samsung Focus that connects using WiFi when I use it
• The one thing I don’t get is why won’t Nokia put symbols on the side buttons

More reviews of Nokia’s role in the ecosystem and Windows Phone 7 on Nokia will follow.

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Nokia Lumia 900 First Impressions

I’ve been writing about how we’re in the post-desktop era and not so much in the post-PC. The iPad is as much a personal computer as a MacBook Air. Those sucked into Apple’s Reality Distortion Field continue to call iOS as the post-PC OS and Microsoft’s Windows still stuck in the stone-age with a new skin for Windows 8 that makes for a poor post-PC OS since it has the traditional desktop interface. Fair enough. If it weren’t for their amusing commentary my life would be very boring.

When I wrote about Apple stealing Zune’s tagline, I realized that it has been a while since any Microsoft promotion material had a desktop in it. Microsoft’s 3-screen vision shows a laptop, television and a mobile phone. In one of my post-PC columns, I said the TV is the PC in the post-PC era. Apple’s Apple TV, Google TV and Microsoft’s Xbox 360 bringing more services to the television, the family desktop is now moving to the TV. Stream movies and music to the television and play games—that’s a huge chunk of PC (desktop) use. The other is browsing the web, which can be done on some television but I believe the phone and the laptop are now becoming the primary devices.

This brings me to Microsoft’s 3-screen artwork in their campaigns. It’s primarily been a laptop, TV and mobile; with Windows 8, they’re displaying tablets too. This is Microsoft very subtly conveying the point that they’re in this so-called “post-PC” era. All Microsoft needs to do is put in a line claiming this. I took an image shared on Facebook by one of Microsoft’s several accounts and added a line to it and suddenly Microsoft seemed to be well positioned in this post-PC era.

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Microsoft Is Already In The “Post-PC” Era

the entire Facebook application, is approximately 1.5GB in size.

Rolling out a Facebook update takes an average of 30 minutes—15 minutes to generate the binary executable and another 15 minutes to push the executable

Facebook created its own custom BitTorrent tracker [to distribute the updated binaries to all servers]

Facebook employees who access the social network from within the company’s internal network will always see an experimental build [...] When employees want to see the current production version of the website from within the network, they use a separate address.

Facebook hosts its own Internet relay chat (IRC) server for internal collaboration. [...] Rossi can send a command to a bot that will attempt to get the developer’s attention through several different communication channels

much of [Rossi's] his work was done in a browser and in terminal windows. When he was ready to roll out the update, he issued a command in one of the terminals to begin the process.

We watched the status of the rollout in one of Facebook’s Web-based system monitoring tools. The webpage displayed a large progress bar showing the percentage of the company’s servers that had successfully been updated to the new binary.

Any given page request can be handled by any of the servers in Facebook’s infrastructure.

Facebook continues operating at nearly full capacity during an update.

The many data sources tracked by Facebook’s internal monitoring tools even include tweets about Facebook. [...]

he’s only had to do it [reverting to a previous version] a few times.

When a developer’s code disrupts the website and necessitates a post-deployment fix, the incident is tracked and factored into Facebook’s assessment of the developer’s job performance.

Facebook’s developers all have a “karma” rating that is tracked through the code review system. Rossi can increase or decrease a developer’s karma by clicking on thumbs-up and thumbs-down icons (like Reddit)

Facebook’s developers are creating their own bytecode format and custom runtime environment, called the HipHop virtual machine [...] the company will be able to compile its PHP source into bytecode that will be executed by the virtual machine.

It is a fascinating read!

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Inside Facebook