I'm in Scottsdale today to visit the off-Broadway tryout of a Microsoft store. (MSFT goes to the big city next week when they open in Southern California. As you can see from the photos, it bears a haunting resemblance to Apple Stores. (Despite Microsoft's desire to distance their retail outfit from that of Mr. Jobs, the fact is, they did hire one of the same designers as a consultant, among other things.)

Though Windows 7 starts belting out its big opening number today, we're here to see the whole show from Xbox to Zune. Still, the chanting before the store opening—as brought to us by brightly-shirted store employees—told us what today was: "Windows! Seven! Windows! Seven!"

Among those waiting in line were John Hernandez, an unemployed south Phoenix gentleman who jumped in line around 6 pm Wednesday and found himself in 23rd place. "I'm not much of a computer person," said John. However, he heard there might be free stuff, so he stuck out the night outside the Scottsdale Fashion Square Mall, and says he received food and drink from helpful Microsoft staff.

Most of the line, however, showed up this morning, including George Nesbitt. An IT third-shifter, he headed over around 7:00 am for the 9:30 am opening and found himself #134. Breakfast had already been served by 8:30 as energy bars and water kept the hardy-ish line nourished.

At 9:30, Microsoft COO Kevin Turner came out to bow and cut the ribbon, while another exec, David Porter, contented himself to stay out with the crowd and provide exhuberant high-fives to the team when the store flew open.

The store was touted as a local shop, just your Mom-and-Pop monolith in a town run by a former Wal-Mart exec. Towards that end, comically large checks with serious donations of $25k to $50k were presented to well-known local charities and partnerships announced, complete with training and software. (You'll hear $1 mil mentioned with one check, but most of that was software donation. Your charitable mileage may vary.)

Inside the store, though, a Southwest feel was curiously absent as sleek and stylish took the day. Entry into the left-hand side of the store greets you with one of a few Microsoft Surface tables scattered through the store, available to help you find the product you need or simply get your fingers virtually wet.

The only local touches that were visible were Arizona Cardinals-skinned hardware and Grand Canyon panoramas on the constantly-shifting screens lining the walls. These changing panoramas gave the store an unexpected sense of space and breathing room on a very hectic first day.

No product is left behind as laptops from numerous manufacturers always flank you from the right and Windows 7 and Media Center PCs cover the wall to your left. A kids section rests in the back left in front of the relatively few shelves of PC software (mostly games).

Center back yields to the Microsoft Answers Suite (not a bar), where Technical Advisors (not Geniuses—or Gurus) meet you to take your hardware in and make it well. One gentleman with a dead laptop and an Xbox in for its fourth replacement received more help from Microsoft today than most celebrities in a year.

Oh, don't rely on the store employees to be color-coded for your convenience. Microsoft Store employees are empowered to wear one of four colored shirts as desired, so you'll have to ask your Customer Advisor to direct you to your Product Advisor or your Technical Advisor. At least that's my advice.

In the end, it is an awful lot like an Apple Store, albeit one with Surface tables, Xboxes and more employee t-shirt colors. There's no shame in that to start with, though; there's certainly something to be said for building a show similar to the one that's doing gangbusters down the street before taking it out on the road.

Copy and Paste

Browser

Google Maps

Contacts

Settings

Text messaging

They use an emulator, but it gives a perfect idea on how each of these features and apps work. [Palm Pre Forum's YouTube channel via Crunchgear]

The biggest point to get out of this video is that the copy part of copy and paste works fine, but the paste part is tricky. It's not incredibly clear (right now, in the beta) where you should double tap to enable it. It seems like you need to be doing this inside existing text. The phone refused to paste into a blank spot below actual text. You'll see what I mean when you watch the video.

Other than that, the beta is pretty sluggish overall. That comes off most inside the iPod app, but it shows up as random stalls and hangs in apps all over the place.

Oh and if you like the music, buy the CD!. They're The Lonely Island, the guys behind the SNL digital shorts and the movie Hot Rod.

The video walkthrough of the new T-Mobile G1, the first Google Android phone, shows all the details you will ever need. It feels smooth and fast, although the interface looks a bit dated and mixed. It kind of reminds me of a 1990s Windows desktop manager, especially next to the glossy, ultra-polished iPhone interface. However, there are certain aspects of it that are droolworthy, like the accelerometer-based Google Maps Streetview.

...the dual-slide format brought on another problem: no one wanted a device that was too thick. A number pad and a QWERTY keyboard would normally require two sets of springs and hinges—one for each slider. This would tend to fatten the gadget. What's more, Helio wanted the sliders to be rugged and to have a firm "feel," like the luxu­rious thwunk of a BMW's door. "We need to avoid those indeterminate states, when it can slide halfway out, and it is neither fish nor fowl," Duarte says. The Ocean needed a very special kind of mechanism: a single spring that could not only control hinging action from two directions but impart that hum-to-yourself satisfaction to the keyboard-sliding experience.

More on their solution, the triangle spring, and the undocumented third orientation of the phone meant for gaming:

...Helio had hired Pantech of Seoul, South Korea, to build the phone, but it also hired a small engineering company, Teus of Suwon, South Korea, specifically to solve the hinge problem. Teus's people came up with something new in the realm of mobile communications: an ingenious triangle-shaped spring that governs the opening and closing of both of the Ocean's sliders. The triangle simply gets pushed on different sides, depending on which slider is being used. Using one of the sliders feels like pushing something over a little incline and then dropping it firmly down into a locked position. With the design of the spring, Helio was on its way to a device that worked well as both a phone and a messaging device—­without being too fat.

The feature also reveals something I had no idea about: When the phone is flipped 180 degrees from QWERTY mode, the navigation cross becomes a gaming D-pad. Ingeniously designed and ingeniously reported and written about by Talbot:

Connecting to one's friends was the organizing principle.
But while the hinge spring made the dual-slide concept feasible, the dual-slide concept brought on the d-pad problem. "D-pad" means direction pad: four arrow keys with a center button. For messaging and Web surfing, the d-pad should be to the right of the screen. This is because most people use their right thumb to navigate. But in gaming, the right thumb has a more important job: It must keep up a rapid staccato on a firing button. So for game consoles, the d-pad needs to be on the left. Another Korean engineer at Helios, gaming-product manager Leo Jun, insisted that if the Ocean was really going to be the best of everything, there could be no compromise on the d-pad. The device had to have a left-side pad for gaming—whether or not it also had a right-side pad for messaging. It was another "conflict of requirements."

Jun's solution: give the device not two orientations but three. The first orientation, of course, is vertical—for the phone. The second, with the QWERTY keyboard open, is horizontal; in this configuration, the d-pad is on the right, for scrolling through messages. The Ocean's software changes the orientation of the displayed material depending on which slider is pulled out. But Jun asked game manufacturers to give Helio versions of their software that essentially played upside down. Flip the device 180 degrees, keeping both sliders closed, and the game is now playing right-side up—with the d‑pad on the left. "That was a nice move on his part, so it doesn't undermine the gaming experience," says Duarte.

Here's a quote from Sky Dayton, which explain's Chen's Annoying habit of flipping the Helio phones we used at CTIA together over and over again:

"If you go talk to the CEO or COO of one of the major carriers, I doubt you will hear much about the color of icons, the feel of the soft-touch paint. I can wax poetic about the spring-loaded action [of the sliders]." And he does: "We really thought about the movement and the sound it makes when it opens, the sound it makes when it closes. You see a mannerism when people open and close their Ocean. It's like humming to yourself."

– Brian Lam

Part I: Soul of a New Mobile Machine [MIT Tech Review]
Homepage [Helio]
Helio Ocean [Gizmodo]

Ocean Specifications Form Factor - Dual Slider - alphanumeric keypad + full QWERTY keyboard Color - Black Dimensions - 4.33" x 2.20" x .86" Weight - 5.61 oz Display - 2.4 inch QVGA display, 240 x 320, 260K colors 3G Speed - EV-DO network support for fast multimedia downloads Talk Time - Up to 5.1 hours Memory - 200MB internal memory expandable via microSD™ with USB Mass Storage Mode Camera - 2.0 Megapixel, digital zoom, built-in flash Video Camera - MPEG-4 video recording Audio - Stereo Bluetooth® wireless technology Personal Entertainment Center - Supports: MP3, AAC, WMA, MPEG-4, H.264, VOD, MOD Additional Features - POP/IMAP Email Support Supports Helio Music GPS-enabled services and applications Photo caller ID,

Ocean Comes With
Battery + Charger
Stereo Headset
USB Cable
2.5 to 3.5mm Headset Adapter

Accessorize in Our Store
Car Charger
Carrying Case
Bluetooth® Stereo headset
Bluetooth® headset

Hit the jump for part 3 (and if the video is too small for part 2, there's a larger one after the jump as well).

Update: Made the videos non-private. Oops, I'm a dumbass.

Part 2:

Part 3:

– Jason Chen

Homepage [Helio]
Helio Ocean [Gizmodo]

We're still working on part two, so drop a note in the comments if you've got a feature you definitely want to see. Or, if you've got any questions, leave those as well. Stay tuned for stuff like music playback, the calendar, some more browsing and various things. – Jason Chen

Update: So I was actually looking at the WAP version of craigslist. If you hit "go" and directly type in the URL, you'll be able to get a link that allows you to switch to the full version. It's harder to view on a small screen, but sometimes pages aren't formatted correctly if you view the full version—hence, the condensed one.

iRiver Clix Unboxed, Groped [Gizmodo]
2nd Generation iRiver Clix Now Available [Gizmodo]