In the ongoing CES 11. Microsoft has announced that Avatar Kinect would soon be available for the Xbox 360 this season, maybe this spring. Xbox Live Gold members might get their hands on it first than others.

Details are sparse — a place where you can virtually hang out with your “friends” — but Kinect is shown to now be able to detect facial gestures like eyebrows, smiles, and laughs. Impressive, but after all we’ve seen with the Kinect hacks, can’t say we’re too surprised the camera’s capable of such detection.

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Mobile phones powered by Microsoft’s latest mobile OS, Windows Phone 7 will be available from one of the United States’ more popular cellular carriers, Verizon.  According to the official Windows Phone 7 twitter feed, Windows Phone 7 powered mobile phones will be available with Verizon as soon as this year’s holiday season.

The announcement makes the availability of the Windows Phone 7 devices earlier than previously announced.  I don’t think anyone would be disappointed over getting WP7 devices earlier than expected.  One more good thing is that, based on the post, it says “devices” so that means more than one phone.

Also, since Thanksgiving day is already upon the people in the United States, doesn’t that mean the holiday season has already begun? Well, we will just have to wait and see what exact models are coming out from Verizon and what exact date will they start coming out.  Also according to some posts, we can expect more models to come from Verizon early 2011.

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The Dell Inspiron Duo’s Pricing and Availability details has been announced. Dell has released pricing and availability information for it’s Dell Duo tablet.  The Dell Duo is a tablet-netbook hybrid wherein it can be a regular netbook with the usual keyboard and screen configuration.  Flip the screen and the Duo becomes a touchscreen tablet.

The Duo is considered a netbook because of it’s specs, Intel dual core Atom N550 Processor, 1366-by-768 display, 2GB of RAM, and a 320GB hard disk drive.  The Dell Duo hybrid is expected to start at $549 and will be available for pre-order from the Microsoft Store today and from Dell starting next week.  According to Microsoft blog Windows Steam, the pre-order starts together with the grand opening of the Microsoft Store in the Bellevue Square Mall in Washington.

Overall, the design and concept of the Dell Duo is very impressive, but since the specs are comparable to a netbook, performance is not too impressive.  The main difference of the Dell Duo from previous hybrid tablets is the way the screen is rotated.  Instead of the usual 180 degree horizontal rotation, the Duo’s screen is rotated 180 degrees vertically via hinges of the screen holder itself.

Once the screen is rotated and the lid closed, the Duo automatically detects this and displays a touch-friendly interface for browsing through photos, videos and music.  When the screen is put back to the normal laptop/netbook configuration, the Duo goes back to the regular Windows 7 mode.

AT&T Officially Launches the Galaxy Tab. AT&T today gave it’s final pricing on the Samsung Galaxy Tab.  The Galaxy Tab will be priced at $649 and will be available on November 21.  This is very interesting news since AT&T has given the cheapest price for the Galaxy Tab, beating it’s competitors, Sprint, T-Mobile and Verizon.

You might be wondering how AT&T did this, considering that they are all selling the same hardware specs.  One answer is that AT&T is using the same flexible, pay-as-you-go data plans pioneered on the iPad, priced at $14.99 (250MB/month) and $25 (2GB/month). If you plan on making use of the Tab’s Wi-Fi capabilities, having the option of paying as little as $14.99/month makes this competitively more affordable in the long-haul.

Still haven’t got enough of those Tablet PC news?  This time we have news on the HP Slate, HP’s competitor aimed directly at the Apple iPad.  HP’s initial announcement was that the demand for it’s Slate has exceeded the company’s expectations.  New leaked information says that HP actually only planned to build 5,000 units  and had to actually reinforce their work force to get out 9,000 units.

The 9,000 units though is still very small compared to the iPad’s 46,555 units sold per day last quarter.  Hopefully, HP doesn’t go the way of the other Microsoft partnered gadgets like the Zune and KIN phone who have found it hard to compete with the now mighty Apple products.  The HP Slate runs on Windows 7 and has an 8.9 in. (diagonal) screen capable of 1020×768 maximum resolution.

Unfortunately, there is nothing extra ordinary about the Slate or its technology.  And we can expect a lot more competitors that will come out with better features, let’s see how the Slate will compete against these tablets.

As if the world of tablet PCs is not crowded enough, Viewsonic has entered the tablet PC foray with it’s own Viewpad 7.  According to Viewsonic’s American team, the company will begin it’s US Tablet invasion with the introduction of the Viewpad 7 in November.  The Viewpad will run on the Snapdragon processor, on top of that, the Android 2.2 operating system will take care of the Viewpad’s operations.  The Viewpad will have 2 cameras, a 3 mega pixel rear camera and a front facing VGA camera.  Memory will be at 512 MB and will also include 3G capabilities.

Viewsonic tries to differentiate the Viewpad from other tablets by including access to the Google market and will have pre-loaded Google Apps.  The Viewpad also tries to up the price point ante, initial cost will be about $479, and that $100 cheaper than the Samsung Galaxy Tab.

The Viewpad 7′s larger brother, the Viewpad 10 will only be available next year and rumors have it that the Viewpad 10 will be able to dual boot Android and Windows 7.  We’ll just have to wait and see how this develops.

A New York based company Adafruit announced a price of USD 2000 for anyone who comes up with an open source driver for Microsoft Kinect that could enable it for the PC use along with its exclusive Xbox 360 support. It was also anticipated a while ago that this technology might soon be developed further to be used in PCs.

The reward has been scored and now we can control our Windows 7 PC with the help of Kinect. We can integrate the Kinect with PC and control it through our gestures. Not very efficient because its a hack but nonetheless, its something really fun to try.

Here’s what Microsoft had to say about this incident:

“Microsoft does not condone the modification of its products,” a company spokesperson told CNET. “With Kinect, Microsoft built in numerous hardware and software safeguards designed to reduce the chances of product tampering. Microsoft will continue to make advances in these types of safeguards and work closely with law enforcement and product safety groups to keep Kinect tamper-resistant.”

Here’s the demo of Kinect running with a Windows 7 PC:

The latest accessory for the XBox 360 is now available. The Kinect, which will enable motion detection on the XBox 360, opens up new concepts on how we look at the Xbox games today.

The Kinect will directly compete against the Nintendo Wii which is the current leader in the console wars. Nintendo first introduced interactive game play by actual actions in their Wii console. Things look differently this year with the launch of the XBox 360 Kinect and the Playstation Move. In line with the release of the Kinect, game makers have also released new games that will work with the Kinect.

The initial list of games for the Kinect are Joy Ride, a driving game, Kinect Sports, a bundled of sports games including soccer and volleyball and Your Shape, a fitness game. The Kinect is available on pre-order for $149.99 at Best Buy, and will be coming soon to major retail stores in the United States within this month.

The new windows phone 7 ad is about how much time this new product of Microsoft can help you save. Normally, people spend a lot of time on their cellphones, ignoring their surroundings or responsibilities because they are stuck in doing something important on their mobile phone and it takes ages to be completed (not a fact actually). The ad shows that Windows Phone 7 helps you to completely do your task in lesser time and helps you get out of the mobile screen.

Here’s the video below of Windows Phone 7 ad:

Microsoft has aired two new commercials for their upcoming windows 7 mobile phones. You can checkout the commercials below and leave your feedback if you like.