Nokia's first batch of Lumia devices - in particular the 800 and 900 - yielded much positive press coverage, most notably including Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, who is a big fan of the Lumia range and Windows Phone in general. As tech fans eagerly await the new Windows Phone 8 handsets, most of the attention will be focusing on what the Finnish company plans to bring to the table, and according to a report over at Chinese website WPDang, Nokia is to showcase the first two Windows Phone 8 handsets at Nokia World - which falls on September 5th.
Microsoft next big developer conference, BUILD, will take place at the company's Redmond campus this year, with the fun set to kick off on October 30th. Developers from around the globe will be invited to take part in Microsoft's big annual developer conference, and this time it will be held at Microsoft's own office complex. It's not quite Apple's spaceship campus, but we can't have everything in life now, can we? I guess not.
Touch is a now the dominant method of input for mobile devices. Although touchscreen based devices have existed for a long time, they were popularized and made user friendly with the introduction of the iPhone in 2007 and iPad in 2010. In his original iPhone keynote, Steve Jobs categorically stated that if the device requires a stylus, you’re doing something wrong. And we tend to agree with him to some extent, emphasis on extent.
As primarily an iOS user (with quite a bit of time for Android, mind), I have had very little experience with Microsoft's Windows Phone platform. In fact, apart from toying around with a Lumia 800 (which, by the way, I did rather enjoy), I have to confess to being a bit of a noob when it comes to the platform, but nevertheless, I am as excited as any with the prospect of Windows Phone 8.
Windows Phone 7.x users were somewhat disappointed to learn that Windows Phone 8 would not be coming to the current batch of WP devices. Instead, Microsoft has laid out a somewhat watered-down iteration in Windows Phone 7.8, so naturally, anybody looking to jump on the Windows Phone 8 background will need to grab themselves a new device, which while a little bit gutting, is still rather exciting at the same time.
Remember last month's comparison between mobile OSes, where we compared iOS 6 with the existing Android 4.x ICS and Windows Phone 7.5 Mango platforms? Well, in the time that has passed since then, we've since learned some newer official information about iOS 6, along with the upcoming versions of the other two mobile OSes. So now, a new chart has been concocted which compares and contrasts iOS 6 with Android 4.1 Jelly Bean and Windows Phone 8.
The always popular Encyclopedia Britannica is now available to keep in the palm of your hand, with the news that a Windows Phone version of the app is available for download and fully updated for the year 2012. Primarily living online so as to avoid filling your phone's internal storage, the app also features an offline viewing mode for those occasions when Wi-Fi or a 3G data connection just isn't as forthcoming as we would like.
In an interview on Finnish TV, a Nokia executive has claimed that the phone maker has a fallback plan should Windows Phone 8 not meet the company's expectations. That fallback plan? Google's open source Android operating system.
Microsoft recently announced Windows Phone 8 with a bunch of important new features that put it but in the three-horse mobile OS race. Features included support for multiple cores, HD displays, Near Field Communication (NFC), a shared core with Windows 8, use of Nokia’s mapping technology for turn-by-turn navigation, Skype integration and a much more customizable start-screen. We’ve discussed these features in detail here.
The Windows Phone "sneak peek" keynote conference gave the technology world a real glimpse of what it can expect from Microsoft's future mobile endeavors, and as well as the promised Camera Extensions app, which landed yesterday, the Redmond company also noted the Nokia Play to DLNA app would surface.
