It's that time of year again, and I presume many of you are already preparing yourselves for the annual consumer frenzy that is Black Friday. Companies in most product fields will be lowering their prices this weekend, but it's the tech we're most interested in, and Microsoft has today joined Apple and others in revealing some of the deals it'll be offering as of tomorrow.
According to a report over at WMPowerUser, the long-awaited release of Windows Phone 7.8 is almost upon us, so those rocking one of the older WP7.X devices will be able to get something of a taster of Windows Phone 8.
Apple should make iTunes available across the Android and Windows Phone platforms, according to the man affectionately known as Woz.
If you are a smartphone fan who prefers to step away from the likes of iOS and Android then this last week will have been an extremely exciting time with Windows Phone 8 hitting the market on some pretty powerful devices, and immediately starting to gain some traction in the smartphone industry. While it's going to take Microsoft a long time in current mobile market to compete on numbers with iOS and Android, the initial reaction to WP8 are generally positive. The Redmond company themselves are now trying to add to the Windows Phone 8 experience with the official preview release of their Skype app for the platform.
Windows Phone 7.x was never considered to be a slow operating system. In fact, considering it only supported single-core SoCs, it was very smooth indeed, but one nagging problem was always the speed of app launching. That issue is never more evident than when compared with the much newer Windows Phone 8, and a video test complied by Winsource shows just how much of an improvement Microsoft has made to its smartphone OS.
Twitter for Windows Phone has just been updated with support for Windows Phone 8, and although it appears only to be bug fixes at best, it's good to see Twitter attempting to keep on top of its official application for the new platform. Twitter - like Facebook - has struggled to deliver the goods on both Android and iOS in recent times, with performance levels looking sketchy at the best of times, but with Windows Phone 8 comes a new start, so don't be surprised to see many more meager updates at frequent intervals from the social networking site.
Despite having seen a deluge of new smartphones arrive to market in the past couple of months alone, we're always on the lookout for a new gadget to drool over, and if you thought the Galaxy Note II - with its 5.5-inch display - offered an incredible amount of real-estate to play around with, wait until you get a load of what Chinese company ZTE is cooking up.
BlackBerry has, for the past seven or eight years, been one of the foremost mobile brands utilized by businesses thanks to its reputation as offering a secure experience, but with Research In Motion - the company behind BlackBerry, struggling to come to terms with the changing face of the mobile industry, many small companies will be looking elsewhere for their primary mode of communication.
Angry Birds is already preparing to take over the world thanks to its many iterations and multi-platform support, but the upcoming Star Wars version of the game is set to take things to a whole new level.
We’ve heard it multiple times over the past few months and we’re hearing it again today: Microsoft is working on their own smartphone.
