This is the first Redstone 5 build which has been released to Fast Ring as the earlier RS5 builds were released on the Skip Ahead Ring which was specifically created by Microsoft for giving an early start to their development process of the next major update. This build has introduced some new features and under the hood changes that will lay the groundwork for upcoming features.

Microsoft has started converging their snipping tools on Windows 10 by creating the Windows Ink Workspace’s Screen Sketch as a standalone app which has some easy sharing and sketching features. Since it is now an app, it also means that users can multitask with it and can find it in taskbar or Alt-Tab as well.

Microsoft has enabled a keyboard shortcut for easy snapping, so by pressing WIN + Shift + S, a new snip toolbar will pop up. After selecting the snipping area user will get a notification which can be opened in the Screen sketch app. Surface Pen or any other button can be now set up for bringing the new snipping experience. The other changes are:

• A new “Screen snip” button is also added to the action center for easier reach.
• Those insiders who opted to skip ahead branch and received ‘Sets’ enabled will continue to get it as now skip ahead and fast ring branches are merged again.
• Microsoft has also introduced the acrylic blur in Task View.

Along with the above-mentioned features, there are improvements in Windows Security and Focus assist when gaming. You can receive this build by opting into Fast Ring of Windows 10 by visiting Settings > Windows Update > Windows Insider Program in the settings app.

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Earlier this year, Qualcomm had also released their next generation Snapdragon 845 processor which is now powering all major flagship smartphones. Microsoft has today updated the Windows 10 April 2018 update in the minimum hardware requirements documentation for this version of Windows 10.

Despite the gap of around 6 months between two consecutive Windows 10 Updates, Microsoft has again pointed Snapdragon 835 as the only Qualcomm processor to support the latest Windows 10 April 2018 update.

It looks like Microsoft and Qualcomm are not in a hurry. They are expected to launch the next batch of Windows 10 devices running on Snapdragon 845 in the latter half of this year and by that time the next major Windows 10 Update aka Redstone 5 update will be ready to be shipped. And at that time Microsoft will enable Windows 10 supported on Snapdragon 845 processor.

While we have recently seen the dismal performance of these Windows 10 on the ARM-based Snapdragon 835 chips in the leaks of the various benchmarking results. But the promise of longer battery life of up to 20-22 hours by these ARM-based Windows devices was actually delivered in those leaked benchmark tests. Microsoft had earlier commented that what we have seen for Windows 10 on ARM vision is just the beginning of their work and future updates of Windows 10 will bring more improvements for these ARM devices.

We hope that Microsoft will be able to deliver the best performance as promised for the upcoming devices running Windows 10 on ARM.

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Microsoft has also informed earlier that the broader rollout will begin on May 8. If you can’t wait to install Windows 10 April 2018 Update, Microsoft does offer you various other options to force the Windows Update settings to get you the April 2018 Update. You can visit the Microsoft page to get the Update Assistant which will help you install the latest version of Windows 10.

Microsoft has today also released the official ISOs of the April 2018 update that you can download below and update from it directly or you can also create a bootable USB flash drive if you want to clean install Windows 10 April 2018 Update. Official ISOs are available for 32 Bit and 64 Bit version of operating system. To download the ISOs, do the following:

• In Microsoft Edge, press and hold Ctrl+Shift+I. Navigate to Emulation tab and select Windows Phone in browser profile.
• In Google Chrome’s new tab, press Ctrl+Shift+I and now press Ctrl+Shift+M. Select any mobile device option from the drop-down menu.

• Open Microsoft’s Windows 10 download page in this tab.
• Download the update.

Microsoft last year reported the reason behind this phased rollout for Windows 10 Update was to addresses the incompatibilities that can happen on few computers when an update is released. So when it is released in stages Microsoft is able to address fixes for the incompatibilities issues before rolling it out to more users and hence it delivers a smoother upgrade experience.

You can also visit our post and learn the different ways to upgrade your existing Windows 10 PCs to the version. Windows 10 April Update contains a long list of changes with the likes of features such as Timeline, Focus Assist and Near Share among the popular ones. You can visit this post which highlights the major changes included in the Windows 10 April 2018 update.

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April 20, 2018, was the 20th Anniversary of this Blue Screen of Death which Microsoft showed the world when Bill Gates and Chris Capossela were launching a new plug and play feature for Windows 98. The catch here is that Microsoft was embarrassed to see this blue screen themselves as they were at COMDEX conference to launch the new features and not the Blue Screen of Death.

Chris Capossela was on the stage with Bill Gates and as he was showing the crowd the new features of Windows 98, the blue screen made the computer unresponsive at a live event. He paused for a few seconds to fix the bug and boot the computer again, while the audience was laughing at that moment.

Bill Gates who was smiling at this incident jokingly said for the situation that this must be the reason why they have not released the Windows 98. Bill Gates could have fired the engineers worked on Windows 98 demonstration including Chris but he decided to move on, and Chris Capossela is still working for Microsoft. You can watch the whole incident on the Blue Screen of Death below.

The Blue Screen of death still exists on the latest version of Windows 10 operating system, and it appears that Microsoft would never ditch it. It is worth noting that Microsoft delayed the next version of Windows 10 due to the likelihood of Blue Screen of Death errors on systems installing it.

“As Build 17133 progressed through the rings, we discovered some reliability issues we wanted to fix. In certain cases, these reliability issues could have led to a higher percentage of (BSOD) on PCs for example. Instead of creating a Cumulative Update package to service these issues, we decided to create a new build with the fixes included,” Microsoft said in a statement last week.

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While Windows 10 is growing, the market share of Cortana has not increased considerably. Amazon’s Alexa which neither had a mobile nor a PC presence was able to gain attention with its smart speakers which became popular. The smart speakers trend were immediately followed by Google, Apple and other OEMs including Microsoft, but Cortana yet again failed to increase its presence in the consumer market.

However, when looking at the usage of Voice assistant for businesses with AI-powered smart chatbots there is a clear contrast between the business and consumer market share of Cortana. In the business market, Microsoft’s Cortana is leading the race followed by Apple’s Siri for Voice Assistant who are ahead of other competitors by a larger margin. A recent report from Spiceworks with about 500 IT companies in North America and Europe shows that Cortana and Siri are among the topmost used voice assistant for powering the bots.

Of those companies which are using at least one AI-powered chatbot service, 49% uses Microsoft’s Cortana and 47% uses Apple’s Siri while popular Assistants from Google and Amazon are far behind and doesn’t look to be coming neck to neck with the leaders in the recent times. Microsoft had started their own chatbot framework quite early and added it to their video messaging service Skype. It looks these businesses data for Smart Assistants are the fruits of their early adoption of the Bot framework.

Microsoft has recently started testing a couple of new features in Windows 10’s Cortana and the company a while ago announced that it would bring its own digital assistant to Amazon’s Alexa platform.

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Earlier, Microsoft used to built features separately for both desktop and UWP versions as UWP is not available on other older version of Windows. Today Microsoft has confirmed that they will be moving away from the OneNote desktop to OneNote UWP app for both Office 2019 and Office 365 consumers. Microsoft has been adding new features to OneNote Windows 10 app regularly along with performance enhancement.

OneNote UWP has been used by Microsoft to demo the inking capabilities of Microsoft Surface devices during their launch event and has been displayed on various TV commercials of these products.

Along with inking OneNote app also offers various features and Microsoft has also announced more features will be soon available for Windows Insider to test. The upcoming features include the ability to create and search for tags inside the notes, view and edit office files that are attached to notes, the class notebook feature of OneNote 2016 will be also available.

Microsoft has also cleared the two most important doubts regarding the future of the OneNote 2016 app. One Microsoft will provide security updates for OneNote 2016 app as per the official support for the Office 2016 and two Microsoft will be adding all the features of OneNote 2016 which are currently not present on the UWP version of the app.

Microsoft had last year released a new look for its OneNote app that now has a consistent improved interface across all the platforms. As Office 2019 is Windows 10 exclusive, the decision to move to UWP version of OneNote is certainly makes sense.

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Those unaware of this Cricket tournament, IPL is the World’s biggest T20 franchise-based competition which is played in the months of April and May every year. Hotstar seems to have updated their streaming methodology before the start of the new season from 8th April and since then Hotstar no longer streams IPL matches and when the page is opened on Microsoft Edge, an error “This content is best experienced on the latest update of Chrome browser or Firefox” is displayed.

Hotstar also offers most of the popular Movies and TV series like Game of Thrones, West World in India, and in comparison to rivals such as Netflix and Amazon Prime, Hotstar is way ahead in both; number of content and subscribers. Most of the sports coverage in India is licensed to Star Sports, the parent company of Hotstar.

It is worth noting that except Live matches, everything else works fine on the Edge browser. When a Twitter user complained about the compatibility issues, Hotstar replied that they have implemented content protection protocols which aren’t supported by Edge Browser.

Hi! We have implemented content protection protocols on Live matches. Edge doesn't support those. Hence Live will not work.

— Hotstar (@hotstar_helps) April 16, 2018

Hotstar doesn’t have a working app for Windows 10. At the moment, the only solution for Microsoft Edge is to browse Hotstar and similar sites with Google Chrome or Mozilla Firefox. Windows 10 Mobiles users are the ones who will be affected the most as the platform is discontinued and lacks support for third-party browsers.

It is worth noting that Microsoft’s Kyle Pflug is already in touch with the Hotstar team and if an update is required, it will be released only with the next version of Windows 10.

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Microsoft has also announced the introduction of Fluent design language for their web services and they had posted few demos for the web fluent design as well. An important highlight of those demos was that Microsoft made sure that the design language feels same across web and Windows ecosystem.

Microsoft has today teased us with their upcoming changes to the Microsoft Account website dashboard which now has Fluent Design language to make the website feel more informative and interactive.

The changes in the Microsoft account dashboard page mainly contains the introduction of the Depth and Motion component of the Fluent Design language. When a user hovers over a card on the MS account page it slightly pops up with a shadow in the background and gives an effect of depth with respect to other cards. Hovering over card also has the motion effect with beautiful animation on the icons to highlight a little more detail about the content.

@mehedih_ https://t.co/5vpDGjBqpV now has fluent design on the home page pic.twitter.com/JgqImViW9j

— Isaac Daly (@DalyIsaac) April 13, 2018

Currently, it is not available to everyone rather only a handful of users were able to try this out. Our readers can check out the MS account page here and see if they can get an early look at what Microsoft been working with their accounts web page. The public rollout depends on the feedback from the users and if everything goes as per the plan, you can expect the new design in the coming weeks.

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Microsoft will be soon adding another feature into the LTE connectivity of the Surface Pro. Microsoft will allow users of the LTE version of Surface Pro to select and purchase their data plans directly without needing to contact their carrier for information and all this can be done via the Windows 10’s Microsoft Store itself. This new feature will be available after the launch of Windows 10 Spring Creators Update this month.

Please note that this is not a Surface Pro LTE specific feature rather it will be available for all those Windows 10 devices which have e-sim inbuilt either with Intel’s new processors and any snapdragon one. It was confirmed by the General Manager of Microsoft,  Erin Chapple during a conversation with PCMag that Microsoft is working bringing this feature compatible with most of the carriers.

Currently, Microsoft Store is offering the carrier Transatel for this feature with data plans like 200MB for one day, 1GB for 15 days and 3GB for 30 days. Those who are unaware of the Surface Pro LTE, it can support up to 20 cellular bands to deliver global connectivity.

The device which is available for pre-order at above-mentioned countries is equipped with an Intel Core i5 processor, 256GB of SSD and 8GB of RAM. It can be pre-order from Microsoft Store here for a price of $1,449.

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Twitter user Maneesh Juneja today posted a video and mentioned Microsoft in it about the weird answers Microsoft’s digital assistant Cortana gives on iPhone when asked that “he was bleeding”. And the reply’s from Cortana Surprised him because rather than helping a user on such queries it replied with “okay” and “interesting” which is bizarre.

https://twitter.com/ManeeshJuneja/status/983735221307797504

But Microsoft was also quick to take care of such anomalies of Cortana and soon they updated the backend of Cortana with some useful answers for questions like “I’m Bleeding” which need emergency responses. Maneesh Juneja was soon told to ask the question again and he had then posted the newer Cortana replies for which are actually helpful. You can see the newer replies from the tweet below.

Kudos to Microsoft. Shortly after I tweeted the earlier video of #Cortana‘s unimpressive response to “I’m bleeding” @robmargel pinged me to say try again, we’ve updated the response #AI #DigitalHealth pic.twitter.com/Oz99pV7wwa

— Digital Health Futurist 👨‍💻 (@ManeeshJuneja) April 10, 2018

Cortana replied, “If you are bleeding heavily the first thing you do is to try to stop the flow and then seek medical help”. There was also an option to get more details on the with the text “see NHS advice on cuts and bleeding”.

Microsoft might similar features with selected users and in the coming months, the digital assistant is likely to offer other useful responses depending on the medical emergencies. Microsoft is still developing Cortana as it is part of the company’s AI push and the company has been pushing hard to make Cortana widely available across all platforms including the Amazon’s Alexa.

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