One of the key new features in Microsoft’s next OS: an App Store!

Sure is nice to see that Microsoft has stopped copying Apple.

Well, they are doing some innovating: project Natal, now known as “Kinect,” may be integrated. The feature: you get logged in automatically when you sit down, and the computer goes to sleep when you walk away. Hopefully, all that tech will be used for more than just that. Sure, such a feature would be useful in some circumstances, but most people wouldn’t care much.

It’s definitely more for an office environment. But in the end, all it really does is save you a few keystrokes a day, maybe a minute or two over the whole workday, if (a) you are in a multi-user environment, (b) you want to maintain privacy, and (c) you leave and come back to your computer several times a day. Even at that, it’s a small benefit at best. Seems like a waste of tech to me.

The “near instantaneous” startup feature sounds best–but one has to wonder what the details are. Unless they’re talking about non-volatile RAM, then it’s probably simply a matter of making “sleep” the default option instead of “shut down,” and then improving on wake-from-sleep times. Me, I don’t have any problems with waking from sleep on my Macs. It’s already nearly instantaneous on my iMac (less than a second), and only about two seconds on my MacBook Pro. I hardly even notice it.

So, all these new features sound like they wouldn’t be much use at all to me. I already have the first and the third, and don’t care about the second one. Some businesses may make use of the facial recognition, but to me it comes across as one of those cool-but-specialized features most people like to show off but then never really use, like the fingerprint scanners on laptops and such.

Presumably, Microsoft has more than this under their belt.

First, of course, there were the huge lines for the pre-order, and of course the computer systems having trouble keeping up with the load. Then SoftBank had to stop taking orders. Then the huge lines again the day the phone came out. All these were pretty big indications of a blow-out sale.

Yesterday, a smaller indication: I saw the first iPhone 4 in the hands of a user, on the Seibu-Ikebukuro line–where I still haven’t seen a single iPad yet. I’ve seen iPads on the subway and Yamanote lines, but the Seibu Ikebukuro seems to be a bit more conservative. Even despite large releases, it does take time before you start seeing new devices popping up randomly in public here and there. Still, it could just have been a coincidence.

Another small indicator which annoys me is that I still haven’t gotten my iPhone 4 yet–despite having pre-ordered one from SoftBank the second day of pre-ordering. Considering that the first “day” of pre-orders was just three hours long, and that I was first in line the second day, the phone must be selling out pretty thoroughly. It could be that supply is really short, or my branch is not getting hardly any supply, of course.

But the site that tracks sales now has figures that include the iPhone 4, and the iPhone takes up three of the top 5 slots: the iPhone 4 32 GB is #1, the 3GS 16GB is #4, and the 16GB iPhone 4 is at #5. What is most remarkable about this is the fact that the numbers do not track pre-orders, but rather actual delivered products (the iPhone 4 was not on the lists at all last week), and the week covered only includes 4 days of iPhone 4 sales. I expect that next week, the iPhone will show even better–and considering backlog, will probably maintain that for a while.