With the world's premier cycling race, the Tour de France, just under a month away, MetroTour, a third party companion app that aims to inform on you "everything related" to the race, has received a timely update, with optimisations for Windows Phone 8 and up to date information for this year's route and riders.

The most notable update is the improved Live Tile support. The app's main Live Tile will update to show the stage for the current day (during the race), but you can also add secondary Live Tiles for stages, classifications (results) and riders (competitors). All the tiles support of three sizes of Live Tiles. Other updates include the use of higher resolution images, full 720p support, and speech integration.

We reviewed an earlier incarnation of the app last year, but it has since receieved several updates, addressing a number of areas where we felt the app fell a little short. For example, the app now includes a "News+Video" section, which draws in headlines from a number of media organisations (Cycling News, BBC, Velonews, RoadCycling).

If you want to follow the Tour de France on your Windows Phone then MetroTour is a great option and well worth the £0.79 price of admission.

Windows Phone Store description:

MetroTour is a Tour de France application for Windows Phone, which includes basically everything related to the Tour de France. Not only can you check the latest news and standings on your Windows Phone at any time, but MetroTour also offers a detailed stage overview, including resting days.

Various classifications and elaborated team and rider information pages are also present, which are both powered by the cloud.

Go back in time and look up the winner of the Tour de France in 1903! Try calculating the exact resistance using only the gear values! Or you could find out everything about the Grand Départ 2014 in Yorkshire!

MetroTour can be downloaded from the Windows Phone Store. A free tiral is available with the full app costing £0.79/ $0.99 / €0.99. The latest update is for Windows Phone 8 devices only.