Wintel (slang for Windows+Intel architecture) tablets, which launch along with Microsoft's latest Windows 8 operating system, which grab a greater market-share than WoA (Windows on ARM) tablets by the end of 2012, DigiTimes research predicts. This, despite the fact that the x86 and ARM versions of the operating system will be released simultaneously. PC majors such as HP, Dell, Lenovo, Acer, ASUStek and Toshiba, have all pledged 1-3 models of Wintel tablets by the end of 2012. Although still an emerging market-segment, tablets will see a clash between x86 and ARM architectures, as they are wooing for the same exact class of devices for the first time in computing history. Intel has made a lot of progress in miniaturizing the Atom processor, while led by the likes of Qualcomm and NVIDIA, ARM processors are getting stronger.

Thecus has received hundreds of awards during its history for its innovative and reliable hardware, helping countless people all over the world to share our new digital-era treasure: data. Thecus believes in diversity. That's why they are releasing a new Windows Storage Server-powered NAS product line to help you share your files using Windows Storage Server 2008 R2: the W Series. Three models will be available: 8-bay W8900, 12-bay W12000 and 16-bay W16000.

"The release of the W Series is the start of a very fruitful relationship with Microsoft that will help us achieve our main goal: to satisfy more and more Thecus users with high-quality network appliances," says Florence Shih, General Manager of Thecus Technology.

Synology today announced RackStation RS812+ and RS812RP+, expandable 4-bay rackmount NAS servers bringing high performance, scalability, and reliability to small and medium businesses.

"Synology RS812+ and RS812RP+ are built to address the needs of businesses that require high performance and maximum system uptime to run mission-critical applications," said Peter Chen, Product Manager of Synology Inc. "They ensure business continuity with an array of redundancy and availability features," added Chen.

Shortly before launching its next-generation game console (codenamed "Durango"), Microsoft is said to be working on a new product (SKU, rather), called Xbox Lite. This new console will cost as little as $100. According to a source, Xbox Lite will be ARM-based, and scheduled for "late 2013 which does Arcade-style games & all the current & future media apps with Kinect (with near-mode)." What makes the rumor plausible is that ARM chips advancing faster than ever, and so is the ecosystem of casual games on Xbox Live Arcade, which don't have very high graphical detail (and hence, aren't resource-heavy). Many of these casual games, along with Kinect-enabled games, could make up the ecosystem around Xbox Lite.

To drive innovation and business opportunities in Finland's mobile ecosystem and beyond, Microsoft Corp. and Nokia will each invest up to 9 million Euros into a newly established mobile application development program at Aalto University during the next three years. The AppCampus program has been set up to foster the creation of innovative mobile applications for the Windows Phone ecosystem, and in addition Nokia platforms, including Symbian and Series 40, to create a new generation of self-sustaining mobile startups.

Kicking off in May 2012, the Finland-based program will be led and managed by Aalto University, which has a growing reputation as a hotbed of new startup companies. AppCampus is intended to attract thousands of application proposals from students and entrepreneurs from all over the world. Aalto University will make a significant contribution to the project by providing premises, coaching services, and access to both academic and business networks for budding app developers.

Ethisphere released its latest list of World's Most Ethical (WME) companies. The list honors companies for ethical practices. In its own words, Ethisphere defines WME companies as "companies that truly go beyond making statements about doing business "ethically" and translate those words into action. WME honorees not only promote ethical business standards and practices internally, they exceed legal compliance minimums and shape future industry standards by introducing best practices today."

Sorted by industry, you will find two short sections covering computer hardware and computer software. Under the hardware section, Intel Corporation is the only other honoree than Hitachi Data Systems. Microsoft and Adobe are honorees as some of the most ethical computer software companies. Find the complete list (sorted by industry) here.

We know from a slightly older article, that the first variants of Windows will be released to market some time in Q4-2012. A new report by Bloomberg pin-points that to October, exactly 3 years after the market-launch of Windows 7. Further, Microsoft should launch Windows 8 for both x86 and ARM machine architectures around the same time, in what could be a breather for tablet and low-cost netbook designers. Despite that, there are fewer ARM devices running Windows 8, which will launch around that time, than x86 notebooks/PCs. With an October 2012 launch Microsoft should be able to target shoppers in the crucial winter shopping season, in mature markets, according to Bloomberg Analysts.

Earlier this week, we learned about Nokia working on a Windows 8-driven tablet. Concept art of this tablet (probably designed by well-informed fans), suggests that the tablet, Nokia "Lumia Coffee Tab", is essentially a stretched-out Lumia 800, which is its flagship Windows-driven smartphone that's extensively marketed with the monies it received from Microsoft to go Windows. The tablet features a 10.1-inch screen, and is designed to be competitive with Apple's iPad.

Interestingly, Nokia will have to use Windows 8 ARM, since the tablet reportedly uses a Qualcomm-made processor, and it is reported that Windows 8 ARM could arrive much later than Windows 8 x86. Could this mean Microsoft handing out Nokia exclusive early-access to Windows 8 ARM? Microsoft is evidently desperate to give its mobile versions of Windows a single potent launch-pad manufacturer, and as one of the most competent mobile phone makers, Nokia is the chosen one. Microsoft looks aware that the post-PC future of computing is very real, and approaching fast.

Microsoft Corp. today announced that its board of directors declared a quarterly dividend of $0.20 per share. The dividend is payable June 14, 2012 to shareholders of record on May 17, 2012. The ex-dividend date will be May 15, 2012.

Founded in 1975, Microsoft (Nasdaq "MSFT") is the worldwide leader in software, services and solutions that help people and businesses realize their full potential.

Among its usual chunk of updates for Windows, Office, and other products covered by Microsoft Update, Redmond released a key security update for the Remote Desktop Protocol (2671387), and asked all users to apply it as soon as possible. It asked system administrators to give the patch "special priority," given the severity of the security hole. The security hole with RDP spans across all versions of Windows, across all machine architectures. The security hole allows hackers to gain access to RDP hosts and clients. Microsoft gives it 30 days before hackers can develop malware that can exploit the security hole. Find out more about the security hole, and its patch here.

Finger-lag is one specification buyers of touchscreen devices such as tablets and smartphones don't pay too much attention to. Finger-lag is a phenomenon when it takes a short but noticeable amount of time for a touchscreen-enabled device to respond to a touch interaction in progress (such as drawing something in a paint program, dragging an object around, etc.). Microsoft sought to address the issue by developing a new touchscreen technology that reduces latency to 1 ms, delivering much more responsive touchscreen interactions. Paul Dietz at Microsoft's Applied Science division has managed to lower touchscreen latency to 1 ms, in comparison, touchscreens in the market typically have 100 ms. The technology can also be applied to high-precision stylus-based devices such as graphics tablets, where touch-latency can affect the quality of graphics work.A video of the technology at work follows.

Finnish phone maker and Microsoft BFF Nokia is said to be planning the release of a tablet by the end of the year. Nokia's tablet would run Windows 8 and is supposed to have a 10-inch touchscreen and a Qualcomm dual-core processor (Snapdragon S4 most likely).

Rumored to arrive in Q4, the mobile device is claimed to be made Compal Electronics who'd deliver 200,000 units in the first production wave. Pricing info is not available at this point.

Microsoft's next-generation Xbox game console, codenamed "Durango", will arrive in 2013. More importantly, it is said to completely lack an optical disc drive. The lack of a disc drive could mark a milestone in the evolution of console game distribution. Microsoft already has a high-volume digital distribution platform in Xbox Live, its significance in a post-disc console era will only increase.

This is not to say that Microsoft will completely do away with physical media, an interchangeable NAND flash-based media could also take shape, seeing how prices of NAND flash-storage has come drastically down over the past couple of years. It would be a going back to solid-state game cartridges, for home consoles. Some portable consoles use solid-state media even today.

Another Patch Tuesday is closing in fast and it's going to bring us six fresh updates from Microsoft. According to the Redmond-based company, the incoming patches - one rated 'Critical', four 'Important' and one 'Moderate', will resolve seven vulnerabilities that could lead to remote code execution or denial of service attacks.

The list of software targeted by Tuesday's patches includes Microsoft Windows, Visual Studio, and Expression Design. The updates will become available on March 13 at about 10:00 am PDT (5:00 pm GMT).

Over the past year, Microsoft has been discussing the vast possibilities offered by the emergence of a new category within the traditional embedded market - intelligent systems.

A critical component of Microsoft's enterprise strategy, intelligent systems enable an unprecedented flow of data with the power to transform industries such as retail, manufacturing and medicine, by connecting devices where data is generated through employees and customers to back-end systems and services where it is translated into strategic insight to inform business decisions.

Microsoft's Hardware team has today revealed some colorful new additions to its mouse offer, five fresh artistic patterns, for the Wireless Mobile Mouse 3500 and Arc Touch Mouse, and several limited edition shades, for the Explorer Touch Mouse and WMM 3500.

The added Artist Edition surfaces come from five new designers - Kenzo Minami, Stina Persson, Oh Joy!, Tchmo and Sally Zou, and are available here (Wireless Mobile Mouse 3500 Limited Edition Artist Series) and here (Arc Touch Mouse Limited Edition Artist Series).

As for the limited edition colors, they are Dahlia Pink and White for the Explorer Touch Mouse, and Aqua Blue, Citron Green, Cobalt Blue, Dahlia Pink, Flame Red, White and Black for the Wireless Mobile Mouse 3500.

NEC Corporation of America (NEC), a leading provider of innovative IT, communications, and biometrics solutions, today announced the launch of NEC's new generation of servers based on the new Intel Xeon E5-2600 product family supporting ProgrammableFlow networking.

The new generation of Express5800 E5 Generation Series servers will benefit from the performance boost and energy-efficiency of the new Intel Xeon processor E5 family combined with NEC's own innovations for higher manageability, energy efficiency and higher scalability. Combined with NEC's new ProgrammableFlow support, these new features will become an important factor to help accelerate cloud computing by maximizing the effectiveness of operational expenditure, especially business critical applications and database consolidation at corporate data centers. The Express5800/R120d-2M and R120d-1M family of platforms will be powered by these innovative features.

In his CeBIT keynote speech today, Kevin Turner, chief operating officer at Microsoft Corp., showed how Windows 8 will bring together the potential of a tablet with the power of a PC. He also invited IT professionals around the world to test the recently released Windows 8 Consumer Preview, now available for download at preview.windows.com. The Windows 8 Consumer Preview offers a more robust experience for testing the world's most popular operating system and is available to the widest range of people yet following the initial release of the Windows 8 Developer Preview late last year.

"Windows 8 will deliver no compromise experiences on a range of devices from tablets and PCs to desktops. It will give people functionality they love and the enterprise-grade capabilities that IT departments demand," Turner said. "We encourage IT professionals to begin using it to get a firsthand experience of how Windows 8 will give people a beautiful, fast and fluid experience with the mobility and familiarity they need to effortlessly move between what they want to do and what they need to do."

Easy to deploy unified communications (UC) solutions are increasingly important as more companies must address employee mobility, better utilization of office real estate and an ever increasing need for collaboration. Plantronics (NYSE:PLT) today announced its participation in the Microsoft Lync Hosted Pack Reference Architecture Partner Ecosystem. The ecosystem is designed to support Microsoft Lync Server 2010 Multitenant Pack for Partner Hosting, a special deployment configuration scoped for Hosting or Telecom services providers.

Customers can quickly identify tested options, incorporating audio devices and hosted Microsoft Lync services, which will help speed their implementation times. Optimized endpoints from Plantronics, a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner, coupled with Microsoft Lync can help deliver a better experience by accelerating UC adoption within an enterprise or an SMB.

Poking around the registry of Windows 8 Consumer Preview, Windows8Beta discovered the operating system, at least the PC version, as having six variants. There are also mentions of ARM variants (for ARM tablets and notebooks), but let's look at the PC SKUs:

• Windows 8 Starter Edition, for low-cost PCs, netbooks, nettops, etc., probably targeting emerging markets only
• Windows 8 Home Basic, for value desktop PCs, netbooks, and notebooks
• Windows 8 Home Premium, for mainstream desktops and notebooks
• Windows 8 Professional, for home, office desktops and more functional notebooks
• Windows 8 Professional Plus, for office desktops and notebooks in dense local networks, probably has extra management, data security features
• Windows 8 Ultimate Edition, has the complete feature-set of the OS

Microsoft's Windows 8 is reported to come with a "killswitch", which can by flipped by Microsoft to delete malware downloaded from its App Store by unsuspecting customers. Last year, Google's Android Marketplace was swarmed by malware disguised as popular applications from various other publishers. These applications were bought and downloaded by unsuspecting users. When word reached Google, it flipped a killswitch with Android that instantly removed these bogus applications across thousands of devices. It's not just Google, Apple too has a similar killswitch with which it keeps its App Store users safe from malware.

News of killswitches with Windows (in-turn the PC platform), isn't going in too well with advocates of privacy and free-speech, who fear that Microsoft's planted killswitch gives it unwarranted power to remotely erase applications and user data (connected to these applications), without the consent of the user. It could then be used as a potential censorship tool, or even an anti-competition tool, by synthetically-engineering market-shares of software used by people.

With Windows 8, Microsoft is integrating an eXtensible Host Controller Interface (xHCI) driver, which serves as a common driver for USB 3.0 host controllers. Expreview put this driver to test with a Renesas USB 3.0 controller, and compared its performance to when the controller is backed by Renesas' own driver (ver. 2.1.28.0). The controller is a μD720200F1 found on ASUS P8P67 Deluxe motherboard. The reviewer used Orico UE3 16GB USB 3.0 flash drive that uses SLC NAND flash memory.

The flash was put through four synthetic tests on a constant hardware setup, differences in performance were attributed to the drivers. Tests included HDTune, ATTO, AS SSD, and CrystalDiskMark. The xHCI driver provided by Microsoft trailed a tiny/insignificant notch behind the third-party driver provided by Renesas. In HDTune, the performance graph was smoother (fewer variations) with the Microsoft xHCI driver. In sequential speed tests, variation between the two drivers seldom exceeded 2%. The xHCI driver will ship with Windows 8, letting you run USB 3.0 host controllers and compatible devices right out of installation. The drivers pass through Microsoft's WHQL, although the update cycle of drivers provided by Microsoft is traditionally known to be slower, in some cases they have found to be more stable. Screenshots with "MS" markings (below) show results for the xHCI driver.More results follow.

Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd., the world leader in advanced memory technology, today announced test results for servers utilizing the world's first 20 nanometer (nm) class Green Memory that were conducted at the Microsoft Technology Center (MTC) in Munich. A system based on Samsung's 20 nm-class DDR3 memory and solid state drives (SSDs) together with Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2 and Hyper-V proved to be twice as fast as current memory configurations for servers setting up virtual machine instances and recovering data in private cloud environments. These advanced configurations also consumed as much as 50 percent less power per server.

When the Kinect for Microsoft Xbox 360 launched in 2010 the world was so captivated by this exciting new way to play video games via motion control that it became the Guinness World Record holder for fastest-selling consumer electronic product. With over 18 million sold to date, that's great news for Microsoft, but questions of in-home security and privacy have continued to plague the platform ever since. Now Catalyst Components has launched the Pritect Sensor Cover, the first and only product designed to address these security issues surrounding the Xbox 360 Kinect and Kinect for Windows.

Paul Harper, Pritect's inventor and the President of Catalyst Components, comments: "For the first time ever, we have invited into our living rooms a technology which can not only capture video and sound data, but can also identify specific individuals using advanced biometrics, or 3-d facial recognition. The Kinect can see everything when powered on and for most users, has a direct connection to the internet. It's like a giant window into your home, but you can never know who might be looking in. With Pritect, you can now close the blinds."

NVIDIA confirmed today that it is working with Microsoft on a program to distribute Windows 8 test PCs to software developers and device manufacturers powered by the Tegra 3 quad-core mobile processor with 4-Plus-1 architecture.

This seeding program enables these parties to create a rich ecosystem of apps and devices for Windows 8 on ARM-based processors.