I've always been a big fan of eBooks, no matter the platform, so it's always fun to see what's on offer. It also means I can be incredibly critical of an application in terms of how it presents the contents of a book to me. Thankfully, tweaking the presentation is one of Freda's strengths, but this eBook reader for Windows Phone has a few more advantages.
Cloud storage is an integral part of Windows Phone 7, and in Microsoft's vision of the third ecosystem, SkyDrive plays a large part in your online life. However, what if you're already using a different cloud service? What, if like many people, you're already using Dropbox? Well you’re not as stuck as you might think you are. Windows Phone 7 has several Dropbox clients, and BoxShot is one of them. Here you can browse and open your files, and even automatically sync your camera roll.
When Lode Runner Classic showed up in the Xbox Live titles last week, I made sure I was at the top of the AAWP list to review the classic platform game. First released back in 1983, this is a title that found success throughout the years and I couldn't wait to get this on Windows Phone. I wish I had resisted.
Your Windows Phone can help you exercise. We've seen that with apps like Sports Tracker and Endomondo, but now there is an alternative. A rather horrific alternative called 'Zombies, Run!' Designed to help you get out the house and exercising, this piece of interactive fiction has a lot of promise, but in parts it's a little bit shambolic.
While Email is increasingly replacing paper mail, the Internet age means that we're receiving more parcels as we order items online rather than bringing purchases home from retail stores. Correspondingly, courier and postal firms have implemented tracking services (with varying degrees of success) so that we can track our parcels in real time. Parcel Tracker is a Windows Phone 7 application which takes advantage of these services, giving you push updates and live tiles for all of your deliveries.
It promises a lot, and in time Gun Bros could turn out to be a nice arcade hit for Xbox Live. Unfortunately many people won't find the true strength of the game because they'll avoid the title because of the freemium system, and those that do stick around around are going to find a game that needed another pass at it by the coders instead of being rushed out door onto Windows Phone.
In this busy hectic world, many people find it hard to get to sleep at nights, and many solutions have been proposed. A touch of distraction at night time is one common solution, and that's where Sleep Bug comes in. An ambient sound producer, the app should allow you to create the perfect background music to help you relax and get to sleep.
Video content consumption on Windows Phone 7 has always been a bone of contention for power users who object to the delay incurred by Zune Desktop transcoding their content. The lack of built-in support for DLNA streaming has only added to the woes of such users. That could be set to change thanks to an official application from an independent media centre company. Plex is a media streaming system similar to XBMC. For a price, unusually, your Windows Phone 7 devices can both stream content from your home server, and act as a remote control for your Plex media centre.
For some reason, getting podcasts onto a Windows Phone without using the Zune desktop has never been an easy ride. While the Mango update did bring the ability to have the synchronisation of the podcast on the handset, it still needed to be set up in the Zune PC suite in the first place. A number of applications have stepped up to try and fill the deficiency of podcasting in Windows Phone, now it's the turn of Podcast Picker.
Having become something of a phone pool game afficianado, I approached the freeware Premium Pool with trepidation, not expecting too much. It turns out to have a pretty and practical interface but is ultimately let down by the lack of challenge and lack of ball control.
