As Mobile World Congress 2010 inches ever closer, an interesting bit of fact about Windows Mobile 7 has leaked early courtesy of an unusual suspect, Google AdWords.

Thanks to a heads-up from Rafael Rivera, a keyword ad for “Windows Mobile 7” placed by Microsoft on Google.com pointing to its My Phone service clearly indicates a new feature which will be supported in WM7, the syncing and remote management of phone contacts and calendar appointments.

This would be a great step up from the current limited ability to only backup photos, contacts and text messages as well as the ability to locate and wipe lost phones. Fittingly, MobileTechWorld also recently noticed a job ad pointing to a My Phone 2.0 release which hints at even more integration and services.

Update: It appears this feature may already be available on My Phone today, false alarm sorry. Unfortunatel since I use Exchange on my Windows phone, My Phone is severely crippled so I wasn’t aware of this.

Just as I’m about to leave for Mobile World Congress, an interesting video caught my attention that seems to be more timely than ever considering Microsoft’s upcoming announcements about its future mobile strategy.

The video by Barton Smith, a designer from Australia of all places, appears to be a prototype UI for a conceptual “Locus OS” which is described as a “location-based operating system”. What makes it special is that it appears to be Microsoft branded, however without any background information I can’t say for certain if this was commissioned by Microsoft or not.

The video itself presents some very interesting concepts, the main focus of which is a multiple “desktop” arrangement that is location-aware – giving you flexibility in the widgets and applications you see based on your location and what you might be doing. Although some elements of the UX appear inspired by the iPhone, Palm Pre and Android, the designer points out that this was created in 2008 making many of the ideas original at the time. Nevertheless, definitely worth a look.

• Open Blockable Items – To see how many advertisements scripts have been blocked. You will be surprised with the number of block items...
  

• Disable on XXX page – For example, I disable that for all my blogs. :) Maybe you can do the same as well? Hahaha...
  

Without a doubt, Microsoft has set its eyes on the consumer mobile space this year. Unless you’ve been hiding under an iPhone, you might have noticed excitement has been building around the mobile event of the year, Mobile World Congress 2010 where Microsoft is expected to reveal the much anticipated Windows Mobile 7 platform, among other things.

Join Tom Warren from Neowin.net and I as we will attempt to capture the live Ballmer and co. experience for all of you using the magic of capturing light and the English language in a group liveblog of the scheduled Microsoft Press Conference at MWC 2010.

Please check back on Monday, 15th of February from 3-4pm Central European Time (UTC+1) (find out when that is in your local timezone here). Alternatively for the organized among us, download the iCal.

Disclosure: I am attending Mobile World Congress as a guest of Microsoft Australia.

When faced with a buggy piece of software, most users probably work-around the problems in silence, others might voice the issue at the developers, but there’s also a growing minority who whip out their development tools and attempt to fix it themselves.

In the case of the broken Adobe Reader 9.0 PDF preview and thumbnail handler on 64-bits versions of Windows 7 and Windows Vista, Leo Davidson did just that.

For the past two years, Adobe has neglected a simple issue with Adobe Reader that broke the default and extremely useful file thumbnail and file preview features in Vista and 7 under 64-bit. The problem also extends onto other applications that use the preview APIs such as Office Outlook, throwing out the window what would have been an elegant and streamlined PDF viewing experience, especially since you can scroll within the PDF without awakening the beast that is Adobe Reader.

After some detective work by Leo, not only did he pinpoint the root cause of both the preview and thumbnail issues, but today released a dead-simple fix in a neat executable package that fixes both problems faster than you can say “what the hell Adobe”.