Steve Litchfield
Steve is the editor at All About Windows Phone, which means any typos that slip through in the main stories are his responsibility (although, ultimately, you can still blame Rafe). He’s also one of the main writers, specialising in the camera and multimedia side of things when it comes to reviews and tutorials. When not working on AAWP and All About Symbian, Steve writes, produces and stars in The Phones Show, a fortnightly video show reviewing phones and smartphones in detail.
You can contact him at slitchfield@gmail.com or follow him on Twitter @stevelitchfield or on Google+. You can also contact Steve via the contact page.
Recent Content by Steve
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: 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?
Review: Timelapse Pro
Where there's a camera, there'll be someone wanting to try and take 'time lapse' videos with it, of course. The idea is to take a photo of a scene every few seconds, and then play back the photos as frames in a video at a more traditional frame rate, thereby speeding up the action by a factor of a hundred. Or a thousand. Yes, just like on the TV, except you can do it with your humble smartphone and Timelapse Pro.
The curse of continuous auto-focus?
How's that for a controversial title? What I examine below is that there's more than one way to arrange focussing when shooting video on your smartphone - the rightly popular system of having continuous auto-focus does a good job a lot of the time but also manages to infuriate occasionally too. How bad is the problem, what are the alternatives and can I offer any tips for Symbian or Windows Phone users?
How to: Twelve Tips for taking better photos on your Windows Phone
It's all very well having a camera in your Windows Phone - but you know in your heart that it's not really a match for a standalone, compact camera. However, don't be disheartened, because the times you'll use your phone for snapping away will likely be totally different to the formal occasions when you'll be packing your standalone. With a little care and bearing in mind the top twelve tips listed below, there's no reason why you can't have a lot of fun with, and produce some decent snaps on, your new Windows Phone.
Review: Doodle Pool
I have to confess that I'm something of a connoisseur of pool games on handhelds and smartphones, running firstly on my Palm Tungsten T3 early in the last decade and then on my Symbian smartphones. I've played more frames of virtual pool on handheld devices than you've had hot dinners. Discarding any prejudice about the cartoon 'look' of Doodle Pool, what really matters is whether it's a great pool game or not.
Review: Handyscan
This surely is an application that doesn't really need to exist. Something to photograph documents? What's wrong with the built in Camera function in your Windows Phone? In theory, nothing, and many people will opt to use this low-tech approach. Yet, despite myself, I warmed to Handyscan's all-encompassing system of handholding through the snapping/editing/uploading process. It really does seem as if the developers have thought of everything!
Why the humble phone loudspeaker needs to be just that: LOUD
As I sit at my desk looking at around a dozen smartphones of all shapes and sizes (hey, I'm a journalist, and privileged that way), running four different mobile OS platforms, I find my decision on which to use as my main phone based on a number of hardware factors (screen size, form factor, camera) that you'll probably empathise with, plus one that you might not expect. At the top of my list of characteristics for a perfect smartphone is a loud, high quality loudspeaker. Yes, really.
Review: StrobeTuner
As a somewhat untalented guitarist and the father of a daughter learning the violin, among other stringed instruments, there's no shortage of "Is this in tune?" moments in our household. Which means that I made a beeline for StrobeTuner, a full 'chromatic tuner' for Windows Phone, claiming to have every feature under the sun. What's more, it absolutely lived up to expectations.
Review: Red Bull Racing Challenge
I'm a big fan of car racing games. In fact, I'll be more specific - I'm a big fan of car racing simulations - anything with power ups, cartoon characters, missiles or trucks coming the other way, turns me off completely. I want realism, I want petrol fumes, I want adrenaline, I want to feel like I'm pulling 5G going round a fast corner. Which is a tall order on an electronic device - though Real Racing seems to have got most of the way there on iOS. The closest thing Windows Phone has so far is the Red Bull promotional F1 simulation here - does it compare, is it any fun, is it realistic, is it value for money? Let's find out.