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Microsoft’s onslaught to persuade us Brits to try out a different flavour of search to Google has kicked off, with the first TV commercial for Bing hitting goggleboxes across Blighty.

The advert – the first of the three – can be seen across a slew of commercial channels such as ITV, Channel 4, Five, Sky Media plus IDS digital channels including Bravo, Dave, GOLD, Living TV and Good Food.

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We’re more stoked up than a Great Western Railway King Class 4-6-0 steam locomotive when it comes to Microsoft’s hotly rumoured Courier tablet/digital journal, so we were well chuffed when more details emerged over the weekend.

Tech site Engadget posted up what it says are a selection of leaked images and a video, and it looks like the device is building up a healthy head of steam – and it’s smaller than we expected too.
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To the accompaniment of whoops, slapping sweaty palms held aloft and champagne corks bouncing off unsuspecting exec bonces, Microsoft has revealed that its latest operating system, Windows 7, has sailed past the 90 million sales mark.

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For some unlucky users (including us), there’s been recurring problems with the sound vanishing from Windows and Windows 7 machines when they’re woken up from hibernation.

All our computers run 64 bit versions of Windows, but we understand that users on 32-bit Windows have suffered the same annoying glitch.

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It’s been lagging behind mobile versions on Facebook on other platforms, but Microsoft’s updated Facebook app for Windows Mobile finally adds a sorely missed feature: the ability to add comments to posts made by friends.

The updated app – now hitting v1.2 – also lets users “like” their friends’ posts.

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Microsoft has put the price stickers on its new Office 2010 suite, and has included a Starter version that will come free with new PCs.

The new Microsoft Office Home and Business 2010 package will be all yours to love and to caress for £239.99, representing a substantial saving on the previous Standard version of Office 2007, which sold for a hefty £349.99.

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Suitably impressed with the innovation seen in their new Windows Phone 7 series mobile operating system, we’ve been positively ladling the praise on Microsoft today.

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Looking suitably business-like and packing Microsoft’s brand new, all finger friendly Windows Mobile 6.5.3 mobile operating system is the Sony Ericsson Aspen (also known as the Sony Ericsson Faith).

Clad in moody black and ready to strike a pose in the boardroom, the Aspen candybar handset packs a full QWERTY keyboard for rattling off super-important businessy emails and sports a 2.4-inch QVGA TFT touchscreen LCD (that works out as 320 × 240 pixel resolution if you’re not hip to the acronyms).

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Spanish blog MuyComputer is insisting that Microsoft will be pulling the velvet rope and unveiling the “Zune Phone” next month.

The blog’s editorial director Javier Pérez Cortijo has confidently claimed that “the Zune Phone presentation at Barcelona’s Mobile World Congress 2010 is 100% confirmed.”

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When we think ‘BlackBerry’, we think flapping flip charts, swivel action suits, lantern-jawed pointing execs, pie-chart laden PowerPoint presentations and cappuccino-clutching folks hurtling along Fifth Avenue to a Very Important Meeting.

If that description fits you, then your executive Newton balls may start a-clacking over RIM’s new BlackBerry Presenter, a pocketable (86 x 60 x 23mm) module that lets you dump your laptop, wirelessly hook up your BlackBerry and fire off a PowerPoint presentation via a VGA or S-Video connection.

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Microsoft has lost its legal appeal with a small Canadian company called i4i, which will result in the sales of its popular software programs Microsoft Word 2007 and Microsoft Office 2007 being halted on January 11th, 2010.

The whole she-bang is over some XML code in the software suites which was found to infringe i4i’s patent, landing the smaller company a right little earner to the tune of some $290 million.

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Microsoft has been busily ramping up the features on its search engine Bing, with the showstopper being the release of Bing Maps Beta, a substantial upgrade to its online map application.

The Bing Maps beta site is now powered by a Silverlight interface, and comes with its own take on Google’s  Street View called Street Side, which serves up street-level views of specific locations.

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Nasa have launched a new website called “Be A Martian” which invites users to play games while helping the space agency to sort through hundreds of thousands of images of the Red Planet.

So many photos have been returned by spacecraft since the 1960s that scientists have got no chance of checking them all themselves, so they’ve turned to crowdsourciing.

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Majestic Swindon – birthplace of 70s prog rockers Supertramp, the handsomely proportioned Diana Dors and ace 80s post punksters XTC – will soon have another accolade to add to its rather slim list of achievements as it becomes the first town in the UK to offer free public wireless internet access to its entire population.

Swindon Borough Council has pledged that its 186,000 citizens will enjoy blanket coverage via a  “Wi-Fi mesh”  at no cost to users.

Set to be installed by April  2010, there’ll be no line rental or connection charges to pay, letting freeloaders access the internet and download emails for nowt,  but usage will be limited.

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Microsoft’s daftly named rival to Google has now officially launched in the UK after five months in beta.

Featuring a simple, photo-dominated homepage, the page shows a rather pleasing photo of Avebury stone circle at dawn, accompanied by the cheesy strappy line: “A new dawn begins”.

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