How and Why You'd Use Windows Phone 7 With A Mac - Wired News

One of the major advantages of Windows Phone 7 is its tight integration with Microsoft’s other devices and software. In a terse statement, Microsoft let Mac users know they can eventually expect a light version: “Later in 2010 Microsoft will make a public beta available of a tool that allows Windows Phone 7 to sync select content with Mac computers.”

The “tool” will probably be a version of the Zune desktop software, if a Microsoft UK marketing head early tweet is any indication: “ANNOUNCEMENT: I’m glad to confirm that Mac users would be able to use Zune on their Macs to sync with #WP7… More details soon.”

This makes sense for Microsoft: not only have they always made software for Macs (notably Office), you’d never want to put too many limitations on what PCs you can use with a post-PC handheld. Imagine if Apple had kept the iPod and iTunes Mac-only. Or if the Zune had never included support for Macs. (Wait, that second one actually happened.)

But why would a Mac user want to use a WP7 phone — particularly when the iPhone works so well with a Mac? Basically, it’s the same reason a Mac user might pick an Android phone over an iPhone. Either you like the physical phone better, or (more often) you’re more tied into Google’s or Microsoft’s software than you are to Apple’s.

Here are some scenarios where that might be true.

You’re a heavy user of Microsoft Office. Windows Phone 7 has the full Office suite built-in. iPhone’s Office offerings aren’t as strong; it’s a little better for iPad, but not that much.

Windows Office 2011 for Mac is coming at the end of the month, and it’s the best, most-interoperable Office suite available for the Mac. It’s also finally bringing a real Outlook application, not the baby Outlook they called Entourage. (Entourage the application provided the exact opposite experience of the TV show Entourage.) By default, iPhone on the Mac syncs with iCal, Address Book, and Mail; a phone that synced with Outlook could be a huge upgrade.

This is where the lack of OneNote on Office 2011 for Mac really bothers me; it’s WP7’s Office showpiece, very smartly implemented on the handset and nearly completely useless to Office users on Macs.

You’re also a heavy user of Windows Live. Android users love their experience with Gmail, Google Docs, etc. Some of my friends who don’t love Windows love Windows Live, preferring it over Google’s cloud apps and Apple’s MobileMe. Office 2011 and WP7 are both extremely well-integrated with Windows Live. iPhone and Android aren’t. You’re a gamer who loves Xbox 360 and Xbox Live. Apple may have a set-top box, but it doesn’t play games. The iPhone offers a lot of good casual games for handheld, but WP7 will too. If you have a Google TV, it’ll be better with your Android phone; if you have an Xbox 360, it’ll be better with a WP7 phone.

The whole industry is moving towards greater interoperability between computers, handhelds and set-top boxes. The Xbox – WP7 combo will be one of the most versatile handheld-to-boxtop media combinations available. Add a Mac to the mix, rig it to stream content to your Xbox and that’s a pretty powerful power trio. Particularly if you don’t care about buying movies and renting TV shows through iTunes, which is the only advantage an Apple TV would offer.

In the tech world, Mac users are stereotyped as Apple evangelists and/or fanboys, people who’ve bought into the ecosystem from top to bottom. But think about your average student with a MacBook, or your parents you convinced to buy an iMac. They are usually agnostic about this stuff.

Most Mac users probably don’t think long and hard about Apple’s long-term peripheral strategy, or whether Android’s lack of hardware standards will cause them problems down the line. They use Office on their Macs, use PCs at work, play Xbox in their living room and want to buy the phone they like on the carrier they use for a price they can afford. They bought their Macs for the same reason.

The last piece of this puzzle is really how well Windows Phone 7 and the Mac will be able to talk to each other. History bears this out: for a long time, Blackberry desktop software on PC was fantastic, but the version for the Mac wasn’t anywhere close. In my case, it eventually drove me away from the Blackberry and towards the iPhone.

If Microsoft decides that it doesn’t really need to give Mac users anything more than the bare minimum, or that they can capture more value by trying to pull WP7 buyers to the PC platform, then it won’t work. They’ll keep their current customers and add value within their existing ecosystem.

But if Microsoft begins to see their world as one that doesn’t have to be centered around the PC, where they can make great software and compelling experiences for all platforms, and shift more of their institutional weight towards the cloud and the living room, then even Mac users might have to take a long hard look at those new phones.

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Report: Apple Holding Off On iPhone 4G Support - ChannelWeb

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Verizon and AT&T plan to roll out 4G LTE (Long Term Evolution) networks next year, but Apple may not be part of the initial wave of handset makers building 4G devices.

On Monday, Techcrunch contributor Steve Cheney reported that Apple won't support 4G LTE in the iPhone until 2012, and in the meantime will offer a dual mode 3G iPhone that works on CDMA and GSM networks.

According to Cheney, Apple is well aware that the road to 4G LTE may be a bumpy one and plans to wait for the technology to mature before making the transition.

Apple, of course, didn't respond to a request for comment. But for a company that pays so much attention to user experience, it wouldn't be surprising that Apple would want to soft-pedal its 4G LTE support plans, especially at a time when 3G iPhone sales are still booming.

Michael Oh, founder of Tech Superpowers, a Boston-based Apple reseller, doesn't expect Apple to jump on the 4G bandwagon right away but says a dual mode GSM-CDMA iPhone makes a lot of sense.

Next: Why VARs Say This Makes Sense

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Men Who Play Nazis Try to Explain - New York Times

The revelation that Rich Iott, a Republican candidate for Congress from Ohio, was an active member of a group of dedicated to understanding the experience of soldiers who served in the Nazi Waffen SS by dressing up in their uniforms — and staging recreations of their battles — has forced historical re-enactors to defend their hobby.

That Mr. Iott engaged in this pastime came to light on Friday, when Joshua Green of The Atlantic published photographs of him in an SS uniform beneath a headline asking, “Why is This GOP House Candidate Dressed as a Nazi?”

Mr. Iott admitted to Mr. Green that he had spent time playing a character he named Reinhard Pferdmann as a member of the 5. SS Wiking re-enactment group, which is described on its Web site as “a nonprofit, nonpolitical organization dedicated to the preservation of the history of WW II and the lifestyle of the German combat soldier (specifically Waffen-SS foreign volunteers).”

Even so, the Ohio businessman — who quickly posted photographs of himself playing American soldiers in recreations of three conflicts — insisted that his admiration for Nazi Germany was purely based on its achievements in battle. He told Mr. Green:

I’ve always been fascinated by the fact that here was a relatively small country that from a strictly military point of view accomplished incredible things. I mean, they took over most of Europe and Russia, and it really took the combined effort of the free world to defeat them. From a purely historical military point of view, that’s incredible.

As my colleague Brett Sokol reported last year, Mr. Iott is far from the only American to play the part of a Nazi soldier in his spare time. Reporting on a re-enactment of the Battle of the Bulge in Pennsylvania, complete with men in Nazi uniforms carrying authentic weapons (loaded with blanks), he noted:

Almost every weekend, there is a re-enactment somewhere around the country, and while most are invitation-only affairs drawing from several dozen to several hundred participants, last year’s World War II Weekend in Reading, Pa., attracted more than 20,000 to witness the liberation of a faux-French village.

Another former Nazi re-enactor in the news, a police captain in Portland, Ore., who may be disciplined for constructing a memorial to a Waffen SS commander in a public park, offered a similar excuse, calling himself “a history geek” after his hobby was made public.

As Maxine Bernstein reported in The Oregonian on Friday, an investigation by Portland’s police force found that the officer, Mark Kruger, had brought “discredit and disgrace upon the Bureau and the City,” by nailing five memorial plaques in honor of of Nazi soldiers to a tree in a city park.

Mr. Kruger’s former commander wrote that the officer should have known that a plaque honoring “a Waffen SS member and the commander of a battalion responsible for a large-scale massacre of prisoners of war could alarm a member of the public familiar with these historical events.”

While Mr. Iott’s Democratic opponent, Representative Marcy Kaptur, and the Republican minority whip, Eric Cantor, joined Holocaust survivors in saying that his hobby rendered him unfit for public office, the candidate told a local Fox News affiliate the dismay over his role-playing was “a good example of why people look at career politicians and say, ‘We just can’t trust these people — look how they act, they behave like children.’”

Changes have been made to the Web site of the group Mr. Iott used to be a member of, Wiking.org — and an affiliated YouTube channel — but The Atlantic managed to save a copy of a “recruitment video” for the group posted online (embedded above) as well this text, which attempts to justify the group’s apparent celebration of the Waffen SS Wiking unit:

Nazi Germany had no problem in recruiting the multitudes of volunteers willing to lay down their lives to ensure a “New and Free Europe”, free of the threat of Communism. National Socialism was seen by many in Holland, Denmark, Norway, Finland, and other eastern European and Balkan countries as the protector of personal freedom and their very way of life, despite the true underlying totalitarian (and quite twisted, in most cases) nature of the movement. Regardless, thousands upon thousands of valiant men died defending their respective countries in the name of a better tomorrow. We salute these idealists; no matter how unsavory the Nazi government was, the front-line soldiers of the Waffen-SS (in particular the foreign volunteers) gave their lives for their loved ones and a basic desire to be free.

But Robert M. Citino, a military historian and professor at the University of North Texas, told Mr. Green that the Nazi division’s role in the Second World War was far from heroic:

The entire German war effort in the East was a racial crusade to rid the world of ’subhumans,’ Slavs were going to be enslaved in numbers of tens of millions. And of course the multimillion Jewish population of Eastern Europe was going to be exterminated altogether. That’s what all these folks were doing in the East. It sends a shiver up my spine to think that people want to dress up and play SS on the weekend.

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