Windows 7 wants to be your trusted upgrade from Windows XP—so much so that the Redmond giant will offer a virtualized “Windows XP Mode” in Windows 7 Professional and Ultimate editions when they drop.

Image via Paul Turrott’s SuperSite for Windows.

It won’t be baked directly into the Windows 7 Release Candidate, the free download officially due out May 5 but already circulating on BitTorrent. Instead, an XP Mode plugin will be made available as a free download for Release Candidate users and, eventually, paid Professional and Ultimate users.

What’s XP mode? According to Windows watcher Paul Thurrott, it’s a licensed, virtualized copy of Windows XP Service Pack 3 running inside Microsoft’s own Virtual PC framework, customized and framed to allow anyone who needs a picky XP application to run to simply install it while XP Mode is enabled, then have it run as a virtualized app in the future without thinking about it.It is, in a way, a 100% compatibility promise, but it remains to be seen how smoothly Virtual PC can be integrated into Windows 7 itself.

Also unknown is just how XP Mode will be licensed and provided. It’s a certain no-go on the Starter and Home editions of Windows 7 meant for notebooks and lower-end PCs, but there’s now word on whether XP Mode will be restricted to corporate licenses or available for retail and new PC customers.

Does a licensed, virtualized XP running inside Windows 7 change your outlook on the OS? Tell us your take in the comments.

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iPhone/iPod touch only: GV Mobile brings Google’s one-number-to-rule-them all, voicemail-transcribing, call-recording, sms-sending serviceGoogle Voice to your iPhone.

We gave you a peek at GV Mobile already, and now all the features you see in the video are available to your iPhone. The app comes in both free and pay ($2.99) flavors; the free version does the basic dialing out from your iPhone, but it doesn’t do SMS, call history, or visual voicemail, so it’s not nearly as awesome, unfortunately, as the full price app. Still, whether you take the free or pay route, it’s great to see Google’s exciting new (and currently closed to new users) service make its way to the iPhone.

One can’t help but wonder how long it’ll be before Google releases its own Google Voice app for free, but then again, GV app for Android wasn’t made by Google either (though you’d think that would be the first place they’d develop an app of that kind). It seems likely that they’re taking their time releasing mobile apps for Google Voice, waiting until they open the service for all comers. In the meantime, GV Mobile is a free and pay-for download for the iPhone and iPod touch only.

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We’re still not sold on the $250 price tag for Skytone’s Android-powered Alpha 680, and these video hands-on of the tablet / netbook from netbooknews.de don’t help. While the apps shown off run smoothly — browser, Maps, Skype, Office, etc. — they also serve as painful reminders that multitasking’s just not gonna work when each app takes up the full screen and can only be opened one at a time. Not that we necessarily expected to do nine things at once with an ARM-based processor, but something tells us we’d be reaching for the Jaunty Jackalope before too long. See for yourself in the two-part video series after the break.

Continue reading Skytone’s Alpha 680 tablet, Android interface gets underwhelming hands-on treatment

Filed under: Laptops, Tablet PCs

Skytone’s Alpha 680 tablet, Android interface gets underwhelming hands-on treatment originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 27 Apr 2009 19:24:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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