Moments ago, Engadget reported on a leaked memo from Best Buy which details the retailer’s early plans for the recently announced launch of Windows 7. Whilst their article falls into somewhat of a misled Vista-bashing rabbit hole, their readers even point out the juicer part of the scoop, the first indications of how much Windows 7 is going to cost.

Assuming the memo is legitimate and accurate, Best Buy will allow customers to preorder Windows 7 Home Premium Upgrade for $49.99 and Windows 7 Professional Upgrade for $99.99 from end of June.

If these prices are recommended retail prices, and not a special Best Buy discount offer (the 16 days might suggest otherwise), then what it could mean is Microsoft will be taking quite an aggressive Windows 7 pricing strategy. The original retail price of Vista Home Premium Upgrade was $129.95 and Vista Business Upgrade (nearest equivalent of Professional) was $199.95, ~60% and 50% cheaper respectively.

Having said, even if this was a Best Buy promotional offer, I can’t imagine them bearing a loss on each sale so retail prices should still be cheaper than Vista.

If we take these comparisons between upgrade versions and impose them onto full editions, then Windows 7 Home Premium could cost ~$99.99 (Vista $269.99), and Windows 7 Professional $149 (Vista $299). If these predictions are true, then Windows 7 could be quite the offer. If not, then you know where to order from to get the best deals on 7. 🙂

Update: As commenter “Andre Da Costa” pointed out, a similar if not exactly the same deal was also offered for the introduction of Windows Vista which could indicate this be an time-limited offer and will not reflect the retail price of Windows 7.

You see, I thought we had all learned a lesson with the Crazy Frog and ringtones based entirely on repeating single-syllable words, but apparently not. BingTones are now invading public places around the world. In a bid to maintain social order, I come offering some ringtones from Windows 7.

As part of Windows 7’s new foundation for managing communication applications at a system level (for example, lowering the volume or muting your music when you receive a call on Skype), the operating system actually now ships with ten soundclips which can be used as ringtones, stored as WMA files under the “%ProgramData%\Microsoft\Windows\Ringtones” folder, for your personalization.

There is of course nothing stopping these ringtones from being also used on a mobile phone. As such, I’ve edited them a bit and converted them to compatible formats for your convenience. Enjoy.

As with any collection of ringtones, not all are of equal standards. Personally I find numero 2 the best, followed by 1 and 4. Number 10 just sounds like the end of a circus act.

It’s no secret I have an icon fetish, and it makes me smile every time a new high-resolution device icon appears in Windows 7’s “Devices and Printers“. It wasn’t very long ago that most devices appeared in Windows with indistinguishable device descriptions and icons, but with Windows 7, devices not only work well, but look great.

A new feature in Windows 7 allows the operating system to display unique device icons alongwith detailed product information it downloads from the Microsoft-hosted device metadata web service.

If you’re wondering where Windows 7 keeps these high-resolution photorealistic icons it downloads from the device metadata service, then you’d be glad to know you can easily find them as ICOs under the “%LOCALAPPDATA%\Microsoft\Device Metadata\dmrccache\” directory. Inside the folder appropriate to your region (ex. en-US), there should be individual folders with GUIDs for each of the devices with metadata associated with it. The icon resides in the “DeviceInformation” folder of each device.

As it turns out, the GUIDs for each device can also be used to download the metadata package directly from Microsoft’s Metadata servers. For example, the metadata package for the Sandisk Micro flash drive is available here. Rename the file to a .CAB extension and you can simply extract the resources.

Some of you may have also noticed that out-of-the-box, Windows 7 supports a broad gamut of devices with generic device icons. For this, I stumbled across the “System32\DDORes.dll” resource file which appears to be the goldmine of device icons. Here’s a collection of all the icons I extracted with Anolis Resourcer.

By looking at the icons alone, Windows 7 natively distinguishes at least an 81 different types of devices. Of particular note are the 14 different types of sensors, as indicated by the icons that resemble a multimeter, that Windows 7 seems to support.

As with any hardware-related feature in Windows, it’s ultimately up to the hardware vendors to take advantage of them, however they don’t always have the best track record for fast adoption. Along with Device Stage, I think this is a great opportunity for hardware vendors to help distinguish their premium products from cheap generic counterparts with very little investment.

Share what devices (and their GUIDs) you have that’s got some cool icons show up!

I have a neutral perspective on Bing, but I found this difficult to watch. Readers of LiveSide noticed the $80million advertising campaign for Microsoft’s new search decision engine has been published to Microsoft PressPass, and if nothing else it proves money doesn’t buy you anything these days.

The first thirty seconds of the ad is like an art student’s first thriller movie. There’s references to popular internet memes, the financial crisis, government bailouts, flashing words, the stock market, the housing market, national debt, fuel prices and bankruptcy. Then comes the flashing visuals of a bald man acting unnaturally and another man attached with many sensors on his head showing a mild case of insanity, some guys in metallic suits fighting, a human head bulging, explosions and another man attached to a device straight out of Total Recall. If you’ve not already switched off the video, the heart pounding visuals come to a rest with a guy dropping his suitcase in slow motion. Classy.

For the final 30-seconds home run, it’s a little more upbeat. Cue colorful and lively stock imagery. “Starting today, we need the right information to make the right decisions. Decisions to make us feel right, decisions that help us get to the right place, at the right time, even if it’s right around the corner. And we need to make decisions about what the right stuff is. Right now, it’s time for the one and only 100% engineered to cut through the crap decision engine. Ladies and gentleman, boys and girls, it’s time to Bing and decide.”

And the thrill ride of W.T.F. comes to an end. The advertising agency says thanks for the bailout.

Update: A little more of my opinion if anyone’s interested, I get the “point” of the first 30 seconds – it’s to show me that there’s a lot of nonsense on the net and traditional search engines fail at finding “answers”, but I’m baffled at the visuals and story it conveys. I think there are less intimidating ways at delivering the same message.

The second 30 seconds of the ad does better at telling a story, but it feels like a story missing a few paragraphs. I’m told about decisions and the need to make the right decisions, but there’s no evidence Bing helps with making decisions, except being told it is a “decision engine”.

Update 2: Bing’s second and third ad appeals to me a lot more and seems to deliver more compelling reasons to stay away from traditional search engines. I understand they’re heavily constrained by time, but I think it would better if they spend a few seconds mentioning the benefits of Bing instead of leaving viewers with just a logo.

So the wraps came off “Bing” today and Microsoft’s Live Search replacement (and worthy Google competitor) is finally announced. Unfortunately because the service isn’t actually live yet, all the screenshots and blog posts can be pretty overwhelming and won’t make the name or what it is any clearer. Thankfully, here’s a 3-minute long video Microsoft prepared earlier (embedded above) to get you up to speed on this “decision engine”. Happy deciding!

Update: Since Bing.com is now live, I’ve made a search provider plugin which works for both Firefox and Internet Explorer 8 and support search suggestions too, add it by clicking here.

The Windows 7 blog today showed off a collection of multitouch-exclusive softwares and games collectively known as the “Microsoft Touch Pack for Windows 7“. As many eager Windows 7 users with multitouch-enabled PCs (ex. Dell Latitude XT2 and HP TouchSmart, etc.) may have noticed, you can’t actually download or install these today. You might be wondering, why would they announce something so interesting and not release it? Or even more so why not bundle the cool games into Windows 7? I think that’s because this is actually not aimed at end users, but a clever plan to compel OEMs to certify their touch Windows PCs.

For most people, a platform is only as good as its applications. Therefore to sell a platform, you need highly captivating demos. Up and until very much today, Windows 7’s (multi)touch capabilities were a bullet point for developers. It’s APIs offer developers a slew of touch gestures to implement into their applications, but relatively few built-in advantages for end-users. The taskbar buttons were bigger and you could flick some photos around, hardly captivating selling points in a retail environment if you could imagine.

Of course, some vendors took it upon themselves to come up with value-added touch functionality for their touch-enabled PCs, like HP’s TouchSmart software for their TouchSmart PCs (bonus points for consistency), but many and probably the large majority don’t provide any extras out of the box. This is where the Touch Pack for Windows 7 comes in.

Now Microsoft’s done the hard work to make multitouch look cool and practical on Windows 7 PCs and instilled the desire to have them in users, OEMs aren’t just going to get them for nothing, they’re going to have to work for it.

As mentioned in the blog post, Microsoft is only going to provide these applications to OEMs who certify their hardware under the Windows Touch logo program, a new quality-assurance program exclusively for touch-enabled Windows PCs. The Engineering 7 blog touched on the testing procedures a couple of months ago, and more detail is available on MSDN and WHDC too. Basically it’s a pretty rigorous process to ensure a quality touch experience with a set of standardized tests.

As someone who’s fiddled with many tablet and touch Windows PCs, I can see why Microsoft is being more strict on the touch experience. It is everything but consistent – including but not limited to accuracy, sensitivity and even the coating of the display. Frankly speaking, there might not be that much substance to the Touch Pack, but it’s a good leverage for Microsoft to enforce a minimum quality bar for touch-enabled Windows PCs going forward. Otherwise in the words of a popular meme, “it’s a trap!”