When we think of streaming music services, a few spring to mind. As well as the likes of Grooveshark and Spotify, Pandora is seen as one of the go-to services for personalized radio, and although popular apps are hard to come by on Windows Phone 8, the official Pandora app for Microsoft's recently-updated mobile platform is now upon us. Pandora for Windows Phone 8 has been a long time coming, but it would appear as though it has been worth the wait: it runs better than even the iOS and Android versions, and offers ad-free streaming until the end of the year.
Redmond-based Microsoft may only recently have pushed out Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8 to the end user, but it has long since been the public knowledge that the company is looking at moving towards more regular release cycles. The days of completely revamped offerings arriving every five years or so will soon be a thing of the past, and incremental, annual improvements will then ensue. It shouldn’t come as much of a surprise, then, that the software maker should be working on Windows 9 and Windows Phone 9, and as a recent job posting infers, the company is on the hunt for a few more specialist engineers to add to its team.
Microsoft's Windows Phone 8 has only been around for six months, but a job posting over at the Redmond company's listings page suggests its successor will be hitting devices later this year. With most competitive operating systems churning out annual revisions, it was always presumed Microsoft would indeed offer a significant update to its smartphone firmware, but now, the job posting all-but confirms those suspicions.
Windows Phone 8 is still a fledgling mobile ecosystem, and Microsoft has been working hard to try and establish a solid underpinning of apps for users to download. The number of basic apps missing, such as Instagram and banking utilities, is certainly a cause for alarm, but at least the native Twitter app is starting finally to look the part. When I had my first interaction WP8 via the Nokia Lumia 820, I found the native Twitter simply paled in comparison to its iOS and Android counterparts, but today, the social network has released a significant update. More details after the break.
Anyone who’s ever purchased a stock device – computer, notebook or cell phone – from any OEM, is bound to have come across bloatware. Essentially, this is bundled software that the manufacturer chooses to incorporate within the device for certain purposes; sometimes, the software may be useful in some cases. Either way, bloatware isn’t something that’s usually welcomed by end users, because they’d, for the most part, make the device slower, underperform, and take up unnecessary resources on your device.
Nokia has just announced the release of Windows Phone 7.8, which begins rolling out to supported devices immediately. The software, which offers those on Windows Phone 7.x a taster of the new features enjoyed by those on Windows Phone 8, has been quite a long time in waiting, and starting today and running through the next couple of weeks, users will receive a notification prompt regarding the update being ready for their handset.
There is no doubt that smartphones are becoming everyone’s favorite digital cameras, capable of taking pictures more easily and quickly while still maintaining an acceptable level of quality. According to a new report, Nokia is taking this to a whole new level by introducing a new Nokia Lumia smartphone, running Windows Phone 8, which sports a 41-megapixel camera on the back.
Back in the late 90s, Nokia was the first mainstream phone company to allow customers to snap out their default phone cases and snap their own cases on, creating a custom look: this was back with the Nokia 5110. Adapting to passing times (in quite a huge way, we must say), Nokia is now allowing customers (at least those with 3D printers lying around, or able to afford a one-off print-off) to print their own cases for the Lumia 820.
The gaming industry is one of the largest ones out there, and no, I am not talking about the casino one. The one I’m referring to are the computer games that you and I have grown up with and developed a liking for, so strong that it, at times, borders on obsession. Computer games have redefined what powerful hardware and graphics could be used for and can achieve, and rightly so, because the level of detail that today’s popular titles deliver is as close to motion picture as you might imagine. Couple that with immersive storylines and realistic gameplay, and you may find yourself hooked to the screen for hours upon hours.
A few months back, Microsoft announced the Surface, an ultra-mobile laptop/tablet hybrid running Windows, taking advantage of Windows 8 and Windows RT’s new touch-screen user-interface. Since then, many have been hoping for a Surface smartphone: while no announcements have been made, several artists have created concepts depicting what they expect a Surface Phone to look like.
