With another update for mid-August 2017, and with six new entries, here's our directory of the very best of the Windows Phone and Windows 10 Mobile world, now split into two for logistics reasons. On this page are general, news, productivity, travel, time, and more. See this page for anything related to imaging or consuming media of any kind.
For logistics reasons, we've split our applications directory for Windows Phone and Windows 10 Mobile into two, with a natural spin-off section being anything to do with imaging, camera, media and music/voice. This is the mid-August 2017 update, with half a dozen additions, plus other tweaks. The original applications directory excludes these categories.
Following on from AAWP's rather handy guide to the very best general applications and best camera/media apps for Windows Phone 8.1 and Windows 10 Mobile, here's an updated (mid August 2017, four new entries) version of our similar crowd-sourced guide the very best games on the platform. Enjoy!
This may be one of the most basic tutorials ever featured on AAWP - I'm writing this mini-feature after seeing several real world users with their lockscreens still set to a single, unchanging default image. Did you know (or remember) that using the 'Bing image of the day' is one of the built-in options in Windows Phone and Windows 10 Mobile?
One of the niggling complaints with Windows 10 Mobile has been that text entry is almost imperceptibly slower and laggy compared to Windows Phone 8.1 - especially evident on devices which started on the latter. However, there's a hidden setting that lets you revert Word Flow to its previous (8.1) speed, removing a layer of 'intelligence' which was slowing it down.
What's this? An application last updated in 2014 that's still better than the first party solution from Microsoft? Well, yes, somewhat interestingly, for anyone else who has been frustrated by the limited real time traffic routing in Windows 10 Maps, I was determined to find out how well the old Waze solution worked on the latest W10M Creators Update. Turns out rather well, with only a few caveats.
The tech media has been falling over itself in the last week to talk about the ten year anniversary of the Apple iPhone, that moment when Steve Jobs revealed the shape of smartphones to come. All singing, all dancing? It really wasn't. Revisionist history says that the iPhone introduced all the features we see in today's smartphones, but that's not accurate...
"Microsoft abandons Windows 10 Mobile" is a news headline that we've heard a lot over the last year, fuelled by the tragic termination of first party hardware. And by a third party scene that's almost non-existent. But what's interesting is how the OS updates have continued. Anniversary Update (Redstone), Creators Update (Redstone 2) and beyond, with a thriving Insiders test build scene. So has Microsoft really abandoned the OS?
My series 'Anatomy of a Lumia photo' (here's #1) has proved popular, even though I cheated with the HP Elite x3 instead for #2. #3 had a lovely clock, #4 was all about framing, in #5, I got down and dirty with nature, and in #6 I had a rosy dilemma to solve... Here in #7 I take an astonishly satisfying low light snap, learning to 'trust my Lumia'...
With more and more of the 'old' Windows Phone 7.x/8.0/8.1 Silverlight-based applications starting to be no longer officially supported (by the company or developer), a common scenario now is that you try to reinstall a favourite app on a new Windows 10 Mobile phone (or one that's been newly reset) and you see that it's no longer in the Store. Don't panic though, as in most cases you can still get this app 'back'...
