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Filed under: Cellphones

Microsoft My Phone now live, in screenshots originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 17 Feb 2009 12:41:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Last month, we took a tour of Microsoft’s “fake” retail store. Meant to show what it would look like “if” Microsoft ever decided to open a dedicated store. Like the ones they’re now actually opening.

The company have announced that, yes, they’re going to follow Apple into the dedicated retail space, and will be opening an undisclosed number of stores across the US. The chain will be overseen by David Porter, formerly of Dreamworks Animation, who was hired by Microsoft this week to act as vice president of retail stores.

No word yet on what the stores will actually sell, but since the concept store was full of Xbox and Games for Windows stuff, we’d be expecting the actual stores to follow suit.

Microsoft to open own stores [Reuters]

Firefox’s mobile browser, Fennec, is available in “milestone” (read: very alpha) downloads for HTC Touch Pro phones, but also most any Windows Mobile phone running at VGA (480×640). Early reports say it’s working, if slow.

As the Mozilla team itself notes, this release has plug-ins disabled, features no soft keyboard input, doesn’t allow for program or add-on updating, and a few other “punts” made to get a working release out. Still, if you want to test out Fennec’s unique navigation and mobile browsing helpers and you’ve got a Windows Mobile phone, it could be worth a try—even if web site loading is not exactly snappy at this point.

Fennec is a free download, built for the HTC Touch Pro but capable of running on Windows Mobile phones. A direct CAB link can be found right under the “Installation” heading in the link below.

This beautiful concept, inspired by the curves and tapering of the Macbook Air coupled with the touch’s back, is even better than the cool Macbook-inspired iPhone 4G we featured at the beginning of the month.

The thing that excites me most about these concepts, however, is not the aesthetic aspect of it. It’s the the front camera and the fact that people seem to be excited about getting videoconferencing on the iPhone. Specially about the idea of interacting with desktop videoconferencing software on both the PC and the Mac. This is a must for the videochat feature to be really useful, and personally I think it’s one of the reasons it hasn’t been done by Apple before.

My hope is that they are working to make it crossplatform, either with Apple releasing iChat for the PC at one point or, ideally, working on the connection with existing PC videoconferencing software like MSN and Skype…

Google just announced a new service for pushing Gmail contacts and Google Calendar updates to mobile devices. For iPhone and Windows Mobile devices Google is using Exchange ActiveSync with some limitations due to the beta nature of the service, but it’ll also work on many other devices that support SyncML (a vendor list is here). Google Sync works automatically, and replaces all existing contact and calendar information on the device, so sync-er beware — we wouldn’t let Google get close to our contacts without some serious preflight cleanup and maintenance. Google Apps users can enable the service per domain. There’s an explanatory video after the break.