However, we noticed that the Photos app entry included several updated screenshots, showing a new home screen as shown below:

The new home screen now features a panoramic background photo, similar to Windows Phone’s Pictures hub, which we believe will be customisable and can be rotated based on your Pictures library. We believe this will also be reflected on the Live Tile for the new Photos app, giving the tile a much more refreshed look.

We also noticed that the Photos app now has a thumbnails view, something we think is missing in the Consumer Preview (edit: thanks to LiveSide reader doctorwhofan98‘s comments, thumbnails view is in the Consumer Preview):

This brings the app closer in line with how SkyDrive displays your photo albums on the web interface, and allows users a much easier view to see all their photos at a glance.

The updated apps are currently under internal testing, and is not available on the Consumer Preview. However, we expect the apps will be made available alongside Windows 8 Release Preview, announced to be coming in the first week of June. It’ll be interesting to see what other improvements Microsoft has made to these apps. Stay tuned!

However, even if you’ve opted in, you’ll only get the social sidebar (and that only after logging in to Facebook on Bing.com and/or connecting social services such as Twitter to your Windows Live ID), as the Snapshot feature is not yet live.  It is currently being tested on a small subset of users, according to a Microsoft spokesperson (so if you’re seeing it, consider yourself lucky!).  It should be available soon, however.  The press release announced that the new Bing will be “rolling out over the coming weeks and broadly available in the U.S. in early June”, so it shouldn’t be long before we see Snapshot results, although they won’t appear for every search:

Initially, snapshot will be displayed for searches where Bing can determine a clear customer intent focused on accomplishing a specific task including restaurants, hotels, businesses and movies. Over time, the feature will be expanded to a greater number of places, things and people. “The technology we built on the back-end can scale incredibly well so we’re particularly pleased,” says Connell.

In addition, Microsoft is making full use of its new tagline for Bing, “Bing is for doing”.  The new slogan, revealed back in January, is all over the new marketing materials for Bing, including a new video just posted today that shows scenes from the Search Summit and ends with Qi Lu saying that Bing can enable users to “Do More, Know More, and Be More”, and we’re sure we’ll be hearing that line more, too.

Compete has Google increasing its share (for the first time since December, 2011), up to 65.9% in April 2012 from March’s 65.5%.  It shows Bing at 18.3% of US market share (excluding Yahoo!’s numbers), numbers that have risen steadily since October of 2011.  Yahoo!, which Compete has tracked as gaining slightly over the past 3 months, dropped 0.7ppts from March to April, according to a Compete press release.

Meanwhile, comScore shows a similar gain for Bing and Google (with slightly different numbers, placing Google at 66.5% US search market share for April 2012, and Bing at 15.4%), and a similar decline for Yahoo!.

What may be a bit lost in focusing on the market share numbers is that total searches have not been gaining, and in fact according to comScore are down 7% over the past month, possibly an indication that users are spending more time searching (or just using apps to find what they need) on mobile devices and less on desktop browser searches.

So what does it all mean for Bing?  Certainly at 15% or 18% share, depending on who you believe, Bing has made strides from where it was when it changed names from Live Search, where it stood at some 9% share.  Unfortunately, most if not all of this gain in share has come at the expense of Yahoo!, while Google has remained stable (although perhaps not gaining as much as it may have without a serious competitor).

Bing’s most recent update, making Bing even more social by furthering its connection with the likes of Facebook and Twitter, may help to popularize the #2 player in search, but what would really help Bing is to increase its position as the search engine for Facebook, in addition to Facebook as the social element of Bing.  While Bing and Facebook continue to work closely together, we’ve heard nothing recently about either an increased Bing presence on Facebook, or a launch by Facebook of its own search engine, something that has been rumored in the past.

Should Facebook take on Bing as its search engine?  Will it?  Or will Bing’s continued socializing via Facebook, Twitter, and others be enough to gain share on Google (who are trying to do the same thing with Google +)?

However, what was also shown in the blog post is a video by Phil Sohn, Senior Program Manager for Family Safety, demonstrating features of the new built-in Family Safety. Those sharp-eyed would realise that he is probably using a pre-release version of Windows 8 Release Preview for the demo, as well as several updated apps possibly coming in the Release Preview. Below is a screenshot from the video showing the new-and-updated Mail app:

As you can see, when compared to the preview version in Windows 8 Consumer Preview, the new Mail apps seems to now retain the three-column view, with the left column no longer disappearing when you browse through your emails. The “accounts” and “folders” column seems to also have been merged into one, allowing easy switching between both accounts and folders, and potentially allowing drag-and-drop functionality. The app also seems to have changed from its green accent color to a bluish teal color.

Other apps also appears to have had a color-change too, based on the Live Tiles shown on the Start screen below:

In particular, the built-in People, Photos, Music and Games apps now features a dynamic Live Tile imagery, bringing them closer to their Windows Phone counterparts. We also noticed a new News app, which might come as part of the Release Preview.

The built-in Mail, Calendar, People, Messaging, and Photo apps from the Consumer Preview had been subject to much criticism, and so It will be interesting to see what improvements Microsoft would bring to these apps in the upcoming Release Preview. With only 3 weeks to go, we can’t wait to see what else is in store. Stay tuned!

According to reports from Spanish website Mi Movil Windows (via WMPU), it appears Microsoft and Facebook had flicked the switch on their back-end servers, and users are now able to send offline messages to contacts via Facebook Chat. Check out the video below showing this working on the Windows Phone:

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

The Messaging app will still notify you that the contact is currently offline, and recommends you to try SMS instead, but unlike the previous experience, the message will actually flow through to Facebook Chat and the contact will be able to check it when they next sign on to Facebook.

Are you able to send offline Facebook Chat messages on your Windows Phone? Let us know in the comments below!

Recently details have emerged via The Verge that Microsoft is currently in development of a version of Internet Explorer for its Xbox 360 console. The console-based browser will have integrated Kinect gestures for browsing, as well as voice controls to allow users to quickly search the web via Bing. Below is an excerpt from The Verge:

Microsoft is currently testing a modified version of Internet Explorer 9 on its Xbox 360 console, according to our sources. The Xbox 360 currently includes Bing voice search, but it’s limited to media results. Microsoft’s new Internet Explorer browser for Xbox will expand on this functionality to open up a full browser for the console. We are told that the browser will let Xbox users surf all parts of the web straight from their living rooms.

Microsoft has also integrated Kinect gestures and voice control heavily into the experience, allowing Xbox owners to quickly search using the existing Bing functionality and pull up relevant web pages. Kinect support is not mandatory according to our sources, but the browser is said to be tuned for Kinect usage.

Whilst we’re not expecting any new consoles to be announced during E3 this year from Microsoft, we know we’ll be hearing more about Kinect and Halo 4. Rumors have also been floating around of a new music service, codenamed “Woodstock”, that apparently will become an Xbox Live replacement for the existing Zune music services.

Stay tuned at LiveSide as we’ll bring you the latest from Microsoft’s E3 Media Briefing to be held in Los Angeles on Monday June 4th at 10am PDT, to be broadcast live on Spike TV and Xbox Live.

Image Credit: LiveSino.net

Based on Samsung’s naming convention, “M” stands for “Magical”, and is positioned as a high-performance handset at an economical price-point. Which means that the phone will have lower specifications but also lower prices compared to the Samsung Omnia W (“W” stands for “Wonder”, which are high quality models which strikes a balance between style and performance). Interestingly, the phone does sport a larger screen than the Omnia W, with an 4-inch display. Other specifications include:

• Screen: 4.0” Super AMOLED display
• Processor: 1GHz
• Storage: 4GB
• RAM: 384 MB
• Camera: 5 MP (Main) with flash / VGA (Front)
• Battery: 1500 mAh
• Dimensions: 121.6 x 64.1 x 10.5 mm
• Weight: 119 g

The phone will also come packed with Samsung’s exclusive apps, including Family Story, ChatON, and AllShare. Given the amount of available RAM on the device, we believe that the device will come pre-loaded with Windows Phone “Tango”, which supports devices with memory as low as 256 MB. As such, we expect the device will have certain restrictions imposed.

According to Samsung’s press release, the Samsung Omnia M will first be available in Europe and eventually rolled out to other regions.

Here’s a quick screenshot showing the new look, fully implemented:

After Lu’s initial remarks, Harry Shum talked about how Bing is focused on not only documents, but the over 300 million “entities” (such as a hotel, for example), and the trillions of relationships that socially connected users have with those entities.

Bing is using social signals, coming from the likes of Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Quora, to not only improve the search rankings for documents, but to bring together the “entity graph of the physical world” and the “social graph of people”, with Bing’s architecture, to a unique approach to search.

With the core search results page being cleaned up, Bing has made room for two new features, Snapshot and Sidebar.  Snapshot brings forward much of the material that previously showed up in the left hand sidebar, but also new entity information, which may be a map of a number of search results (for a restaurant search, for example).

The Snapshot, which will be always on, can be minimized, and consists of two parts: your friends, and “influentials”.  In the top “your friends” section, your Twitter and/or Facebook friends will show up, and your interaction with them will be based on your privacy settings in those accounts.  For example, if you create a message in Bing, adding some links from the search results, you can post it to your Facebook Wall, but that post will only be seen the same way that any post on your wall would, based on your privacy settings.  In addition, public messages from “influentials” (Paul Thurrott was called out in the webcast, for example) will be highlighted in a lower section.

Some notes from the demo:

• The home page will feature a new, larger home page picture
• The tiles across the lower part of the home page,which we’ve seen in tests, are coming back
• Google + integration, when the influentials are on Google +
• A new mobile experience will carry over the people sidebar, only stacked below the search results
• A new swipe design for mobile is in the works, keeping the core search results separate from social results
• Social networks coming include Skype, Quora, Foursquare, LinkedIn
• Ads will continue on the core search experience, and Bing will be looking at ads in the Snapshot and Sidebar, with nothing to announce at present
• Entity segments include tech, automotive, events

Whew, there’s a lot to digest here!   To sign up to be invited into the new Bing experience, you can add your email to the list at www.bing.com/explore/new

A video appearing on www.bing.com/explore/new gives us a quick overview of the way this new sidebar will work:

The new experience will consist of three parts, as outlined below:

The new Bing is transforming search through integration with industry leading companies such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Quora to bring in the best information from across the web and social networks, and present it in a way that makes sense. The new Bing will be comprised of three distinct columns:

· Core Web Results: Relevant, Comprehensive, Trustworthy

Bing will continue to deliver relevant, comprehensive and trustworthy results. Core web results on Bing make it easy to focus on the links you need to get things done, without the clutter of social updates.

· Snapshot: Get It Done Faster

Bing is helping you take action and complete tasks faster with the new snapshot pane. Located between the web results on the left and the new sidebar on the right, snapshot brings relevant information and services to your search, including maps, restaurant reservations and reviews. Through partnerships with industry leading companies such as Yelp, Open Table and Fansnap, Bing is helping you do more and get things done faster.

· Sidebar: Social Search Done Right

Bing believes that connecting you with people who can help you with your task is a natural step in the evolution of search – one that simplifies actions you take today like asking friends for recommendations – while unlocking useful knowledge from your social networks. With sidebar, Bing is bringing together the best of the web and letting you share, discover and interact with friends like you do in real life.

o Ask Friends: As you search, you can post questions to get help from your Facebook friends. You can also “tag” friends Bing suggests might know more about the topic.

o Friends Who Might Know: Bing suggests friends on Facebook who might know about the topic so you can go quickly from searching to doing. Suggestions are based on what they “like”, their Facebook profile information, or photos they have shared, allowing you to easily ask them about relevant experiences and opinions.

o People Who Know: The new Bing also identifies top experts and enthusiasts from leading networks like Twitter, Foursquare, Quora, LinkedIn Google Plus and Blogger, so you can do more.

o Activity Feed: In the sidebar activity feed, you can see real-time posts and queries, answer friends’ questions and “like” interesting posts. Since these activities show up in both Bing (activity feed) and Facebook, you can comment on them from either place.

o Always present, never intrusive: The sidebar, located on the right, will appear as part of ever query, allowing searchers to decide when/how to interact with it.

In the coming days we will beginning rolling out the new experience in the United States. To be among the first to preview the new feature, visit http://www.bing.com/new.

Here’s the embedded webcast, which has just started:

Well, as you may have noticed on some other blogs using Disqus, they’re starting to roll out their latest version, Disqus 2012, and today we turned it on here at LiveSide.

We’re still going to allow you to comment as a guest, or log in via Disqus, Twitter, or Facebook.  We really do want to make it as easy as possible for you to comment when you feel the urge, all while keeping this site safe and free of spam.  Disqus helps us do that, and we hope you like their latest version.

You can learn more about what Daniel Ha and his team have created with Disqus 2012 on their blog, and leave them (or us) feedback on what you like and don’t like about the new version.

In the meantime, thanks once again for joining in the conversation!