Featured Editorial Content
Recent Editorial Content
Will Windows Phone's killer game be a glance and go affair?
As I look through the games under my Xbox Live title, I can see a variety of styles of games. There are incredibly detailed and complicated titles like Infinite Flight (reviewed here by Steve, our other Flight Sim nut), there are the long and involved strategy games like Plants vs Zombies (my review is here) or Fusion: Sentient (review), or the quirky fun of Katamari (in our App directory). But the games that I keep coming back to on my handset are the casual games. Certainly, for me, the games that are working well on Windows Phone are the same games that follow the design philosophy of the platform. Glance and Go works for Live Tiles, and it appears Glance and Game is also working.
AAWP Insight #15: AAWP app
In episode fifteen of the All About Windows Phone Insight Podcast, we start with news of the updated Facebook app, the availability of the Lumia 800 Entertainment bundle in the USA. Rafe shares some developer links of interest related to Mango APIs and porting from Windows Phone to Windows 8. Our main discussion topic is the new All About Windows Phone app. We finish, as usual, with an app pick from each of the team.
Review: Monster Nokia Purity WH-920 In-Ear Headphones
My first impressions of Monster's headphone style weren't good, with some outlandish cyan over-ear cans shown off by the Monster CEO at last year's Nokia World. Happily, the reviewed in-ear equivalents are a hundred times less garish, especially since they're black. There's plenty of photos and comment below, but in short the audio quality is superlative - depending on the playback device. Balancing this, device compatibility is distinctly spotty and the price is.... rather high.
Review: Nokia Dual USB Car Charger (DC-20)
Power hungry smartphones are always looking for a recharge. So a car charger is going to be high on the priority for a lot of people. But which one should you get? One option is Nokia's DC-20 unit, which initially draws the eye with its twin USB charging ports. And while USB car chargers are never going to generate much excitement, the Nokia DC-20 is a diamond amongst the rough competition.
Review: Blocked In
Sometimes all you need to do to keep people coming back to your Windows Phone game is to implement all the basics really well, add in a touch of consistent design, and let the original concept of the game shine through. That's what Sour Green Plums has done with its puzzle game Blocked In.
Review: Bullet Asylum (Xbox Live)
Another week, another Xbox Live title, and another review. I'm really glad that Microsoft has picked up on the idea of regularity and "appointment apps". I'm less impressed with Bullet Asylum, a modern reworking of Missile Command. It looks wonderful, and I was itching to play it. The truth, unfortunately, is that one big problem gets in the way of making this a title I could recommend.
Free All About Windows Phone app now available in Marketplace
We're pleased to announced that the official AAWP (All About Windows Phone) app is now available to download free from the Windows Phone Marketplace and aims to make it easy to access all of our content directly on your Windows Phone device. You can view our latest content, browse or search for content by section, and stream episodes of the podcast.
Review: Accurate Tuner Pro
Of the two approaches to instrument tuning using phones, Accurate Tuner Pro takes the more technical by far. Never mind generating tones and tuning by 'ear' (the other approach, which this app does too if you pony up for the full version), here we have a chromatic (sampling) tuner on steroids, able to tune just about any instrument in any tuning, in any temperament, in any transposition. Impressive. But is it over the top?
AAWP Insight #14: App Discovery
In episode fourteen of the All About Windows Phone Insight Podcast, we start with news of the shiny white Lumia 800 and Nokia's decision to move its European device assembly operations to Asia. News of the Domino's Pizza and Vimeo apps leads to a more general discussion on how to find apps and the challenges of discovery. If that's still not enough apps, we finish, as usual, with an app pick from each of the team.
Review: Descent
There's a certain delight in going far too fast, even in a simple smartphone game. Descent (no, not that one) brings you that 'past the red line' experience to Windows Phone, asking you to zoom through a never ending tunnel peppered with obstacles, fuel, and power-ups. Stripped down to the basics, this is an impressive little graphical tour de force for Windows Phone. And it's fun as well.
