It’s Microsoft time. Get in here to check out what went down at Microsoft’s Mobile World Congress press conference.
6:15pm
We’re standing here at the Microsoft booth (it’s standing room only!) waiting for it to begin.
6:20
The music here is pretty good. So far we’ve had Pharrell Williams, Passion Pit and Phoenix. Funky.
6:25
Five minutes to go and the place is packed.
6:26
This is the first “Microsoft Devices” presser. Last time we were here, we were looking at Stephen Elop announcing new Nokia devices. Ah, how times have changed.
6:30
Here we go.
6:31
We open on a video of a hipster using Microsoft products.
6:31
Stephen Elop is back!
6:32
Elop is talking up Windows. Everything starts with Windows.
6:33
There are 2.8 million people registered as “Windows Insiders” after the Windows 10 event. “This is shaping the future of Windows,” says Elop.
6:34
Time for some new phones!
6:36
Meet the new Lumia 640. It’s in a gorgeous blue!
6:37
Oh. He made a dress joke.
6:38
“It builds on our achievements in the affordable space.”
It has a 2500mAh battery, a 5-inch HD display with outdoor visibility and has either 3G or 4G compatibility.
It also has the new Lumia Camera update out of the box, and an 8-megapixel camera.
It ships with Windows 8.1, but will be upgradeable to Windows 10 later in the year.
6:39
“It is our ambition to bring Windows 10 to all Windows 8.1 devices,” says Elop
6:39
Demo time. We’re looking at new Windows 10 experiences, starting with the Lumia 930.
6:40
There’s a new “Recently Installed” area in the menu for access to new apps, and an improved Notification Center that gives you access to more quick buttons.
6:42
We’re about to take a look at Project Spartan on the phone.
6:43
The new UI is quite clean.
6:44
There’s a new reading view which strips text and images out of an article to read it easier. “It’s like an e-reader for your browser.”
If you’ve ever used Pocket, it looks like that.
6:44
We’re now looking at the Maps universal app on the Surface Pro 3.
We’ve just looked at a map on the Surface, and it’s going to seamlessly dump it to the phone. Nifty.
It saves search history across locations, similar to Android and Google Maps.
6:47
Now we’re looking at Cortana on the Surface Pro 3. That’s pretty cool. It gives you access to everything you’ve looked at across your devices, and you can talk to your device.
Uh oh. Audio live demo time.
6:47
You can also add topics to Cortana’s Notebook. That’s what she remembers about what you like.
We just added the Formula 1 as a topic we like on the Surface, and it’s immediately showing up on the Lumia 930. Nifty.
6:49
I you want to try this stuff out for yourself, says Stephen Elop, head over to insider.windows.com.
6:50
The Lumia 640 is 139 Euros for the 3G version and 150 Euros for the 4G version.
Hold up! There’s a big version! The Lumia 640 XL!
The Lumia 640 XL has a 5.7-inch screen, a 13-megapixel camera with LED flash, and either a 3G or 4G model. It’s only 9mm thin, and comes with a free year of Office365, 1TB of OneDrive storage, 60 Skype World Minutes per month and a free bonus license for a PC, Mac or tablet. That’s pretty goddamn awesome.
And it’s cheap: 189 Euro for 3G and 219 Euro for 4G. It’s going on sale globally soon.
6:54
Now we’re talking Office universal apps.
6:55
New Outlook looks awesome. So clean.
You get rich format editing on the new Outlook app and can send any file as an attachment.
6:57
Microsoft has a sexy new foldable keyboard. Do want.
6:58
We’re now looking at Microsoft Excel on the Microsoft Lumia 640 XL. Confusing.
Still nifty though. Using Excel is painful, but adding touch isn’t the pain you think it is.
Word on the tablet will now have a new menu called Insights. Click on the word “Shutter” for example when talking in a paragraph about cameras, and it will open up a pane snapped to the right telling you contextual information about the word and what it means.
7:01
Sony has just started blasting dance music from its booth across the way. That’s annoying, you can barely hear the Microsoft press conference. Smooth, Sony.
7:02
Word will also have a Tell Me function, which allows you to search Ribbon menus to find features you might not be able to locate. Mac has something similar and it’s a godsend.
7:04
“No amount of noise can overcome the new features,” jokes Elop.
7:06
Sadly, no new news about Hololens. We just got to see the cool concept video again.
7:07
And that’s all she wrote! Thanks for joining us for the Microsoft live blog from Mobile World Congress!