Using the Metro design language as much as possible, the Sky News application brings you, errr... the latest news from Sky. It joins a number of news centre applications (including The Guardian and The Metro Newspaper), it's great to have a choice of publishers - it's rather like selecting a paper in the newsagent each morning. Sky News matches up in quality to the other apps so let's take a closer look at what you get.
Battlewagon is a frustrating Xbox Live title. It looks fantastic, with clear cartoon graphics, maps and cut-scenes reminiscent of the Amiga and Atari ST days, and it all feels consistent and right. Yet at the same time the game is stunningly simple in terms of complexity and level construction. There is a good game here, but it's not one that you can find without the developers working at another level.
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!
Now this is a pretty modern slice of style in the Xbox Live arcade. Bug Village, from Glu Mobile, is another free game to download, but unlike some of the other titles, I'd be happy to show this one off as a sample of what Windows Phone can do. Neither are there any unsightly adverts on show - Glu Mobile are going to make their money out of you. Yes, Bug Village is one of the first freemium games for our phone platform.
Apict is a great photo manipulation application, letting you take photos and make them look like an old instant camera picture, stick on a caption, and upload them to your social network - quick and easy. But is it value for money? Let's find out.
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.
No, not Metro UI on Windows Phone, but the UK based free newspaper! It's one of the recent success stories of print newspapers, and now a daily commute would not be out of place in the UK capital without a copy of Metro. So does its Windows Phone application revolutionise news-reading on your smartphone? Perhaps not, but it does bring some nice tricks and tools to the table, and that's enough for me to recommend it.
I remember getting into heated debate in 2009 around the pros and cons of resistive vs capacitive touchscreens - one of the biggest pros for 'resistive' was that phones like the Nokia N97 and 5800 could be used with gloves on, out in cold weather. Over the next year, the market swayed decisively towards capacitive technology, and rightly so, but now we have an accessory that brings back gloved, cold weather use to all capacitive-screened smartphones...
In essence, IMDb is something of a must-have for almost every Windows Phone user, in my opinion, even in this early version. Browsing through linked movie and TV info, through bios and trivia databases, designed originally for hypertext World Wide Web, they're a pretty darned good fit for Metro UI on Windows Phone too...
We've enthused about Proporta's mobile chargers ever since day one, with capacities rising from just over 1000mAh to 3400mAh, then to 5000mAh and now this, the Turbocharger 7000, at a whopping 7000mAh. In this review, I look at what you get for your money and assess its performance, its build quality and its worth, in terms of keeping smartphones, games consoles and even tablets charged and working.
