If you have a modern Windows Mobile 5.0 device, live in the United States, and are interested in beta testing Windows Live on your mobile device, head on over to Microsoft's Connect site. There you can sign up to become a beta tester for Windows Live for Mobile by clicking on Available Programs, then logging in to your Passport account.

Windows Live for Mobile appears set to replace MSN Mobile, which currently only features support for Hotmail, MSN Messenger, and viewing MSN alerts. BetaNews has further details.

James Kendrick notes that it appears Steve Ballmer is dropping hints about an iPod killer that Microsoft is working on, which would be a hybrid digital audio player / cell phone. The justification for this is that people do not want to carry two devices to perform these functions.

While I can see some logic in that statement, this issue comes down to battery life for me. I simply don't believe that most people are willing to spend their day draining their phone's battery listening to music, just to have an important call be interrupted by a lack of juice at an inopportune time. Battery technology needs to come quite a bit further to the point where power consumption just isn't an issue before users will adopt this hybrid in large numbers.

So we have a few people who have figured out how to put Mac OS X on a Thinkpad, and even a few who have figured out how to put a hacked version of XP on an Intel-based mac. So my question is this, is there any value to having a triple-booting machine, other than to wow your less-savvy relatives at Christmas with your multiple operating system installation prowess? Where does it end? At what point does it become ridiculous? Booting 3 OS's, 4, 5, 6 (are there that many)? In mind this is where the virtual machine steps onto the stage, takes off its hat and bows to the crowd. Virtual PC's can really make a multi-booting environment easy, effective and keep costs down. Will we see more and more multi-booting environments in the future? Any chance we will see Palm OS and Windows Mobile OS on the same device? I doubt it, but you have to ask yourself, what is the point here?

I think by using multi-booting machines, users out on the sordid landscape are trying to tell us something. No one's operating system is perfect. Microsoft continues in their own classic way of writing OS's which typically doesn't change much, Apple keeps changing things, but only so much as they need to stay competitive and on the cutting edge, and Linux (not unlike rabbits) has so many cousins and distros now it's more like picking out jelly bean flavors with your kids than choosing an operating system. My point is that OS makers should really take a hard look at what the competition is doing, or at least what the major reasons are that consumers use their products. This will tell them why and how they should build their OS's to suit the actual needs of the actual public, not the developer (or CEO's) pipe dreams.

Perhaps the big reasons people use more than one or two operating systems is that the base functionality cannot be used in other OS's. Windows cannot be based on Linux and run like windows without a major or complete code rewrite. Hopefully Vista's strengthened kernel will provide that much needed stability we've all been missing and pinning for so long.

Over on Pocket PC Thoughts they point to a post by my old friend Anthony “the PDA guy” Caruana. He tells us that they will be using Microsoft Mobile technology to help people find their way around during the games. I find this particularly interesting for reasons other then the fact that I live in Melbourne where the games will be hosted. Unfortunately living in Melbourne I have been affected by the Commonwealth Games Time Zone change. This Time Zone change means that computers that are not patched to accommodate for the 1 hour offset will be telling the wrong time. The problem with this is that Windows Mobile devices do not have a solution. Let’s hope that the people giving out directions are also not giving out the time.

Jason had a post up yesterday about Microsoft's mysterious Origami Project. We then had Engadget show us what it actually looked like. Now we have the video from one of Microsoft's PR firms. Enjoy!