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Nokia will try Microsoft Windows Phone to fight Android »

Nokia announced today that it will adopt Windows Phone as its primary smartphone strategy. It is quite understandable that Nokia wants to be “different” from the Android crowd. Given that Android is pretty successful, it is no easy task, even for Nokia to make its dent.
After trying hard with Symbian and MeeGo, it is now partnering with Microsoft to push Windows Phone platform. It also plans to use Bing for its Search services and its maps (Nokia Maps) service will be a core part of Microsoft’ mapping services. Interestingly Nokia partnered with Intel to create MeeGo a year ago, and it did not take off too well. I am not sure if tying up with Microsoft will help much in the long term. In the short term, it might help, but one has to look at the loyalty of its user base. iPhone users love Apple. Android users love Android for a totally different reason. While Android has nice features, it has Google’s aura around it. It gives a different appeal to the product. I don’t think users look at Microsoft’s products as cool…do you remember Microsoft Zune and Microsoft Kin?? I believe Nokia embracing Microsoft is probably not that smart, but again, what option does it have now?

Windows 7 SP1 releases on February 22 »

Still on Windows XP? Microsoft announced today the Release to Manufacturing (RTM) of SP1 for Windows Server 2008 and Windows 7. While the article does not elaborate on fixes/ enhancements on Win 7 SP1, it discusses Dynamic Memory and RemoteFX features on Windows 2008.

Here is the link to Windows lifecycle fact sheet.

IE Screen Resolution and Caching issues »

I am having multiple problems with IE 8. Here are the two main issues I have:

1. Screen Resolution issue – I don’t understand why a web page would render differently on two different computers, that are on the same OS (Windows XP SP3), using IE 8.06 and the same resolution 1024×768???? The page renders fine on both Chrome and Firefox. As is normal in such cases, the page works fine on IE on my laptop and other machines in the office.
2. Caching issue – We have a desktop application that reads an XML file on the server. While the application works fine on all the machines, on one of the machines, it caches the XML content. The desktop app (C#) uses dataset.readXML and specifies the URL. What is weird is that if we open the XML in IE, it too shows the cached information. If we hit CTRL+F5 in IE, it loads the latest version and interestingly, our desktop application also gets the latest content automatically. I am assuming that the readXML call is using the same libraries that IE is probably using. While we have a workaround on the server side (cache-control and page expires HTTP Headers), I am wondering why it has this problem only on that machine. We did try clearing the cache and set “Check for newer versions of stored pages everytime I visit the page”, but that does not help on the machine.

Any thoughts?