“Internal experiment” may pave the way to free, Chromebook-inspired Windows rethink.

Microsoft is at a crisis point. With calls to ditch their home-grown Surface line of tablets due to lack of sales; new installs of Windows 8 selling at a slower pace to its still-popular predecessor Windows 7 – to the extent that some PC makers now offer Windows 7 on their PCs instead and 8 as an optional upgrade; and a lack of smartphones being launched by third parties running Windows Phone 8, the company is forced to look at new strategies to drum up sales.

At the hands of new CEO Satya Nadella, it appears Microsoft are already on the works on this new strategy; and it may involve lowering licensing costs and setting less restrictions on using its systems in order to make them cheaper and easier to get onto more devices; thus expanding reach by targeting more markets including the lesser-tapped low-end market. Already we’ve seen Microsoft working on a new low-cost smartphone range with the Nokia X Phones; and rumours suggest Microsoft may even consider lowering the licensing cost for Windows Phone itself by as much as 70%, to make it more affordable for phone manufacturers to put on their models. Now, it sounds as if Windows 8 itself might get the same treatment.

According to reports by The Verge, Microsoft is experimenting with a new version of Windows 8 known as “Windows 8.1 with Bing”. This experimental rethink of Windows 8.1 is said to put Cloud services first, even more than Windows 8.1 does already with its SkyDrive OneDrive integration, emphasising services such as Office Online and Bing Maps, etc; in order to drive monetization through use of those, rather than through up-front software costs. In fact, the use of the Bing trademark in its name – which is also the name of Microsoft’s home-grown search engine and services linked around it like News, Maps, Social and so on – suggests Windows 8.1 with Bing could be geared mainly towards a browser-based environment and use of the Cloud as a platform, so what we could end up with might look a lot like Chromebooks, which seems to be Microsoft’s main competition of late.

The intention of Windows 8.1 with Bing could be to offer those still sticking with Windows 7 a free or low-cost upgrade to encourage them to consider upgrading to the latest OS; while allowing them to recoup the loss of licensing revenue through subscriptions to Microsoft’s online services. But other rumours suggest Microsoft is also pitching it to device manufacturers as a cheaper alternative for those devices where the cost of licensing traditional Windows would severely eat into profit margins due to low retail prices. Microsoft may reduce or even eliminate the licensing cost for devices priced below $249 if they run Windows 8.1 with Bing instead of a full-fat variety; this claim fits nicely with a previous rumour from The Gadget Show that Microsoft were looking at reducing Windows licenses to $15 on such products.

With the system said to be experimental, however – and with Microsoft yet to confirm, deny or even comment on the rumours – there is no guarantee as of yet that Windows 8.1 with Bing could ever become an actual product or is being considered for such. But with Google Chromebooks, Android and Mac OS X all eating into Windows’ market share due to the lack of any licensing costs – though only on older versions, in Mac OS X’s case – it makes sense that Microsoft may be considering such a move to remain relevant in 2014 and beyond. Only time will tell what becomes of these as-yet unconfirmed rumours.

While WhatsApp might be the most popular Mobile Messenger app in most of the world, in Japan there’s another name that’s making waves in the local market. Called Line, it works in a very similar way to WhatsApp; and given its success in its native Japan, the company is now gunning for global growth.

Line’s mission may have just had help in its goal thanks to this week’s occurrences to WhatsApp itself. After selling to Facebook for a proposed $19 billion in combined cash, stock and incentives, WhatsApp’s servers suffered a 210-minute outage that prevented people using the service, which many wrongly interpreted as Facebook either closing or doing behind-the-scenes work on the app following the purchase (more likely it was simply server overload). Following the deal and subsequent outage, Line saw its registered user account increase by over two million users over the next 24 hours, which Line claim is five times its usual user acquisition rate outside its home region of Asia, and specifically in North America, South America and Europe.

Following the news, the CEO of LINE Euro-Americas, Jeanie Han, issued a statement about the increased growth which makes a number of jabs at WhatsApp’s outage:

“Our growth strategy has always included providing a strong network that can handle unplanned and unexpected increases in network traffic … We pride ourselves on providing a safe, secure platform that will always work when our users need it the most.”

But Line isn’t alone in benefitting from WhatsApp’s woes. A third Mobile messaging app, Telegram, saw its user acquisition rate spike 3x after WhatsApp’s Facebook acquisition was announced – propelling it to the top of the App Store rankings and bringing it some 8 million new users in a handful of days. Many other similar apps also saw smaller growth levels, so it seems Mark Zuckerberg’s big spending may once again bite both Facebook and their new acquisition in the ass – at least for now.

Before Microsoft bought out Nokia’s mobile division, rumours were spreading that Nokia planned to release phones running versions of Android as a new investment in the company’s future. Indeed, pictures released online of a supposed new Nokia phone seemed to show that a prototype was at least being worked on prior to or during the deal taking place. However, with Microsoft having its own, long-established mobile OS in the form of Windows Phone; and with Google, who “owns” Android, being a major rival to Microsoft, it’s fair to say a lot of us saw Microsoft as putting paid to that plan with their buyout.

Last night, at the start of the Mobile World Conference, the new Microsoft-owned Nokia phone division took to the stage… but to our surprise, it WASN’T to promote the existing Lumia range of Nokia-branded Windows Phones. Instead, what was revealed was a new range of smart phones, known simply as “X”, which run… Android?!?

Pictured above: The Nokia XL with the customised Android Build on display. Other phones in the X range have a smaller profile, but all run the same system and have the same choice of colourful backplates to select from.

The announcement comes only a short while after Microsoft announced its willingness to keep Nokia’s legacy alive and allow Windows phones to target lower as well as higher-end markets, following Nokia’s own established business practices. However, there’s no plans for the X range of phones to hit major markets like US, Korea and Japan – the X line is apparently geared more towards the emerging markets of lesser countries, where interest in new technology is high but the economies are low (which probably rules out the UK too, but nothing’s been said there yet).

The phones themselves take a lot of design cues from the pre-existing Nokia Asha 503, consisting of the same matte polycarbonate chassis but without the transparent crystallic case surrounding it. So far three models of the phone have been announced: The X phone – out right now for 89 Euro – is 10.4mm thick and sports a 4-inch LCD screen with 800 x 480 pixel resolution, a 3-megapixel camera, a 1GHz dual-core Snapdragon processor, 1,500mAh removable battery, 4GB of internal storage, a microSD expansion up to 32GB and 512MB of RAM. For ten Euro more, Nokia will soon release the X+, which bumps up the RAM another 256MB and comes with a 2GB microSD card included, but is otherwise exactly the same. Finally, announced for the second quarter of 2014, the third model is the XL, which sports a five-inch screen, TWO cameras – a 5-megapixel rear snapper and a 2-megapixel front with an LED flash, 768MB of RAM and 4GB of built-in storage along with the microSD support. This has an expected retail price of 109 Euro. All three phones are dual-SIM, so separate SIM cards can be utilised for phone and data plans – a practice common in these emerging markets.

While the new Nokia X phones may run Android, however, they’re far from a pure Android experience – instead, the whole experience has been customised using a mix of Microsoft and Nokia’s own design cues, resulting in an experience that, perhaps unsurprisingly, looks similar to Windows Phone. As you’d also expect, this customised Android experience also ditches all the usual Google services with Microsoft or Nokia-branded alternatives – the sole exception being the internet browser, which is built on a mobile version of Opera. The X launcher consists of a series of neatly lined-up tiles; and unlike Windows Phone, which only recently added folder support via add-ons released by Nokia itself, the X line has folder support built-in for those who like to keep their apps organised. Keeping with the “similar to the Asha” theme, the X phones also have Fastlane; here it takes the form of a side menu which is the X’s version of a notification menu; and logs most-used apps, nearly all of your activities, open apps and background processes on the same page in a neatly organised manner.

The new X phones even have their own App Store, in the Nokia Store. This store contains modified versions of Android apps specifically designed for the X line of phones, but Nokia say a developer needs to add no more than a few extra lines of code to a standard Android app to make it compatible. Nokia then curate the store, deciding if apps go in or need changing. But if the app you’re looking for is nowhere to be found in the Store, a screen pops up with suggestions for other third-party app stores which should feature that particular title. Nokia also claim that as the X phones are built around Android’s OSP, sideloading APKs and apps are also possible, potentially allowing anything to run that would run on a standard Android phone – and I’d put money down on resourceful developers calling their bluff soon enough.

Nokia also state that the system itself; and the individual apps contained within will receive regular updates according to consumer demand, which should act as a reassurance that the phone won’t lag behind current Android releases or end up stuck on the same version forever – a common problem with Android phones – unless it sells badly. Honestly, this is an article I never expected to write and it colours me as quite impressive, but will it come up trumps for Microsoft and Nokia? And if it does, will it be at the expense of Windows Phone itself? Only time will tell.

RIP WhatsApp? That’s the first thought that came to my mind when reports hit that Facebook had apparently negotiated to buy the cross-platform messaging service to incorporate it into Facebook’s own software portfolio.

That’s right, according to a release from Facebook today, the social network everyone loves to hate is buying out WhatsApp for a total sum of USD$19 billion. This apparently breaks down as $4bn cash and $12bn-worth of Facebook stock to be distributed among WhatsApp’s staff; plus, perhaps interestingly, a further $3bn in restricted stock. The reason this restricted stock is interesting is because it requires the staff members to remain at Facebook for four years before it vests, allowing them to monetize the stock; those who leave beforehand forfeit their share. In other words, everyone who works for the company now is getting has a huge incentive to stay on.

For some, Facebook’s offer of restricted stock shows the company is interested in the talent that worked on the service in addition to the platform itself – which could be seen as an investment in sustaining WhatsApp’s future as the most popular cross-platform mobile messenger, ensuring it will be kept going for the foreseeable future through the guidance of its original staff. This has done little to alleviate concerns by others that the merger will result in dilution – Facebook itself is already fairly splintered as it is, with its purchase of Instagram last year, as well as several home-grown apps for Facebook itself – which makes it difficult enough already for people to understand what Facebook means when it talks of “Monthly Active Users”. And when Facebook already has its own private messaging system, email and the Facebook Messenger client, will they really spend a lot of focus on another chat platform that connects users to each other through their phone’s data allowance?

A look at Facebook’s own rationale for the deal seems to suggest that the main purpose of doing the deal was a numbers game, bringing WhatsApp’s large, active user base into Facebook itself:

WhatsApp has built a leading and rapidly growing real-time mobile messaging service, with:

– Over 450 million people using the service each month;

– 70% of those people active on a given day;

– Messaging volume approaching the entire global telecom SMS volume; and

– Continued strong growth, currently adding more than 1 million new registered users per day.

However, perhaps Facebook DOES have an incentive to care about keeping WhatsApp alive and keeping its users rosy – money. Unlike Instagram, which has never monetised itself, WhatsApp has been a profitable enterprise that makes its money simply from being used – the service as of late charges users yearly subscriptions to utilise the entire app, at a cost of 69p (99¢) per year. Times 70% of 450 million users, and well… let’s just say, that’s a LOT of money potentially being raked in every year.

Time will tell what befalls WhatsApp in the future. Until then, cast me as a doubter. I wouldn’t be alone either – latest reports indicate Wall Street investors have sent Facebook’s shares down 5% in after hours trading following the news. Then again, similar losses also happened when Facebook bought Instagram and a number of other services, so perhaps we can take the stock broker’s opinions with a pinch of salt. With many people seeing Facebook’s own stock as toxic even before such deals, any news has the potential to be bad news to those risking their money to play the game – so perhaps we should give it time to see whether the deal will be a winner or a loser.

After a trademark dispute with broadcaster and British pay-TV Provider BSkyB – which owns the “Sky” trademark for TV services in the UK – Microsoft announced in January it would re-brand its cloud storage service, SkyDrive, to the new name OneDrive in order to erase confusion. However, despite this announcement, the name “SkyDrive” has remained top of most of the service’s access points – until now.

It appears Microsoft are finally acting on their claim; and starting today, all SkyDrive services are gradually being updated. So far, the website, mobile and desktop apps have all been updated to use the new OneDrive branding. Ironically, Windows 8 and 8.1 itself, as well as the recent Office Releases – which both incorporate the service for online file storage and retrieval – have yet to be updated and continue to refer to the service as “SkyDrive”, but we’re sure this will be corrected soon enough.

With the rebranding, Microsoft have apparently also seen fit to launch a new referral system to reward users for referring others to OneDrive, which echoes a similar system by another popular cloud storage platform, Dropbox. For each referral that subsequently joins OneDrive, Microsoft are offering a free 500MB increase to the referrer’s available storage, up to a maximum of 10 referrals. Another 3GB storage can be unlocked for free for accounts which utilise the OneDrive app on an iOS, Android or Windows Phone-powered smart phone. With the most recent update to the Android app, all three platform’s apps now offer an option to upload photos taken on the phone directly to OneDrive – and if you opt in, the extra 3GB storage will be added to your account.