Today, 11th February 2011, is an unfortunate day in the history of mobile computing. Microsoft and Nokia has announced partnerships for Windows Phone 7 (WP7) as the primary smartphone platform on Nokia devices. Besides WP7, Nokia will also run Bing and in turn Bing will use the Ovi Maps for their backend. Nokia will also get X-Box live and Office services up and running on their devices. But above all, Nokia’s primary smartphone platform will be a closed source platform. If one reads the press release, it is but natural to see that the deal is real good for Microsoft. It gives WP7 a chance to survive in the already competitive market. But it does not bring anything new for Nokia (except that they could probably be getting a WP7 phone in the market in 6 months)! WP7 seems like the last straw that Nokia will ever have to survive and in the sea of already selling OSs like Android and iOS, it would be hard to barge in with just the HW and expect greater sales then other HW providers like HTC, Samsung, etc.

I had an ASUS 6000VM laptop and had partitioned and installed XP on the 80 GB Fujitsu 2.5" hard drive. I had created a root partition (C:) of 20 GB and 60 GB worth of data partition (D:). My computer charging circuit burned because of a problem with my charger and I am now trying to get a replacement board for that computer. In the meantime, I bought a 2.5" external hard drive casing which exposes a USB interface. Internally it features a PCB which hosts a IDE/ATA-100 interface for my hard drive and converts to a USB 2.0 interface outside. Everything worked out fine and my fingers were twingling to connect it to my office laptop and recover some of my important data.