Microsoft India has slashed prices of the Xbox360 Arcade unit throughout the country. Previously sold at Rs. 16,990, the console will now be available at Rs. 14, 676 nationwide.

The Arcade comes bundled with an Xbox 360 Wireless Controller, standard AV cable, an Xbox Live Arcade Compilation Disc (that includes 5 arcade games) and a 256Mb Memory Unit.

The price cut is effective immediately so if you’ve been waiting to pick the Xbox 360 up, now would be a good time.

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Microsoft has officially unveiled its long-awaited consumer antivirus offering. Formerly code-named “Morro,” it’s now been christened Microsoft Security Essentials, and it will enter public beta testing next week. If you have a licensed copy of Windows XP (Service Pack 2 or above), Windows Vista, or Windows 7, you’ll be able to download and install the software at no additional charge. No subscription is required for ongoing definition updates, either. The final release is scheduled for this fall.

The public beta will be limited to 75,000 downloads, Microsoft says, and the targets are global. The initial beta release is limited to the United States, Israel (where a core development team is based), and Brazil. Next month, the beta will open up for users in China. It’s no coincidence that Microsoft is rolling out early in Brazil and China, which are large-scale vectors of malware infections because of the sheer number of Windows users running without antivirus protection. According to Microsoft, barriers to adoption of paid security software are especially high in developing markets, where internet access is slower and credit cards are unavailable to a large percentage of the population.

Over the past few days I’ve been testing recent builds of Microsoft Security Essentials on two machines, one running a 32-bit edition of Windows Vista, the other running a 64-bit copy of the Windows 7 release candidate. The software I describe in this post is a more recent build than the current beta that has been floating around back channels on the Internet.

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Google has added Docs support for Microsoft Word (.doc and .docx). When you receive an attachment with a document in one of these formats, you now have the option to open them in Google Docs. I could have sworn this feature already existed, but apparently that functionality only worked with other document types.

The new feature works in the vanilla Gmail, as well as in Google Apps (all editions). To use this feature, simply click “View” at the bottom of a message that contains one of these documents, and you will be whizzed off to the Google Docs viewer for your attachment.

It’s great that Google is building out support for all these document types — it really does make “Going Google” easier. If Microsoft wants to combat this, they are going to have to start offering similar features — like the ability to open Google Docs directly into Word.

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We might all be eagerly awaiting Windows Phone 7, Microsoft’s brand spanking new mobile OS scheduled for release this fall, but the folks at Redmond have been thinking about other things in the months since WP7′s unveiling.

Microsoft yesterday announced a mobile operating system for enterprise handsets, Windows Embedded Handheld. Set for launch sometime in the next six months and based on Windows Mobile 6.5, WEH was announced in conjunction with Motorola’s ES400 Enterprise Digital Assistant. The ES400 is aimed at the enterprise user in field sales, field services, retail, health care and small and medium businesses. Steve Ballmer said yesterday that Microsoft’s Windows Embedded Business is focused on extending the benefits of cloud computing to specialized devices.

“Windows Embedded Handheld is a new software platform designed to meet key line-of-business (LOB) scenarios and boost productivity of the mobile enterprise work force by enabling users to capture, access and act on business critical information where and when they need it,” Microsoft said in a statement.

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Toshiba is reportedly developing a tablet with two 7-inch displays, which folds like a book. That would make it the latest in a long line of companies-both big names and start-ups-who have toyed with these dual-display devices.

The concept makes some sense. A design with two displays maximizes the screen real estate while keeping the size down. You can mix-and-match different display technologies and operating systems to serve different applications in a single device. And the success of touchscreen smartphones, and more recently the Apple iPad, demonstrates that many users are willing to forgo a physical keyboard. But so far the dual-display has been DOA.

Asus, HTC, MSI and Sony among others have all experimented with these devices, either as full-blown tablets or e-book readers, but there’s no sign any of them are coming to your Best Buy anytime soon. The Microsoft Courier project generated a lot of excitement, but never made it out of the incubator. One Laptop Per Child scrapped its XO-2 dual-screen tablet, and instead plans to release updates to its standard XO netbook. OLPC will eventually offer a standard low-cost tablet, the XO-3.

Then there are the dual-display e-readers. Start-up Kno demonstrated its device at the D8 conference, but its unwieldy tablet, which consists of two 14-inch displays, has puzzled reviewers. The Entourage Edge is a hybrid device-the company calls it a “dualbook”–with a 9.7-inch E-Ink display on one side and a 10.1-inch LCD tablet running Android on the other. It’s a novel concept, but the device is much thicker than an e-book reader or tablet, and doesn’t really excel at either.

Aside from Apple, no company has yet figured out how to deliver a great experience on a standard tablet, let alone one with two displays-sometime using different technologies and input mechanisms. Google is still working on versions of Android and Chrome OS tailored for tablets. And Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer recently admitted that the company has a lot of work to do on Windows 7 tablets to catch up with the iPad.

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