With one eye on Asian phablet-loving markets and the other on business markets in Europe, Microsoft has very carefully tailored the new Lumia 640 XL to appeal to both sets of users while keeping cost as low as possible. In the process, with remarkably few compromises and impressing at almost every turn, the 640 XL just became the de facto phablet for anyone wanting to spend £200 rather than £600.
So there I was, responding to a reader request to do a round-up of Flickr apps for Windows Phone. And then it dawned on me that a) there are really only two (thus making it not so much a round-up as a comparison!) and b) we'd never covered Flickr Central on AAWP before. So, in advance of an upcoming head to head comparison, let's start with a full review of this free application. The summary? It works well on the whole, trailing the better known Flickr Booth only by virtue of a few quirks and a little lack of 2015 development.
I know, I know, yet another podcatcher for Windows Phone. How is it that this app genre is getting so crowded when other genres remain sparse and barren? Must be something to do with the Lumia hardware being pretty good for playing back media, I think. In any case, by virtue of being developed after other solutions, CastCenter manages to be fully formed at launch, with every feature I normally demand and a few others besides. It's an easy recommend, with a trial version handling 3 podcasts and only £1.50 or so to unlock CastCenter fully.
The world of Twitter clients is a strange one on any platform - after all, there are free clients for this social service from Twitter itself, there's the good mobile web version, and so on. And still developers keep popping up clients, not even deterred by the knowledge that they'll get blocked if they get too successful (100,000 users). The reason is that a Twitter timeline needs extremely efficient curation and presentation if it's not to overwhelm the user - in a crowded app genre, Aeries pulls out all the stops and ends up at the top of the pile.
The new bottom of the Lumia range is upon us, a low price but does it all represent a compromise too far, as on the ill-fated Lumia 530? Surprisingly, no, the compromise is very modest, as long as you're happy with a slightly smaller screen and don't need to shoot macro photos...
Back in July last year - so about eight months ago, I reviewed the Lumia 930, fresh out of the box, with a few glitches, with Lumia Cyan and in - ahem - bright orange. Quite a bit has changed since that time, both on the device and in the industry as a whole. Plus it's a whole lot cheaper. With all that in mind, using a few bits from the original review where appropriate plus 80% that's brand new, I wanted to re-review the Lumia 930 in March 2015. Yes, it's not perhaps the flagship that Windows Phone needs as a 'hero' device, but it's currently incredible value at just over £300 SIM-free in the UK (for example), around £150 less than when it launched.
The idea of overlaying text and graphics onto what your camera sees and then sharing the result isn't new, of course. Only recently, I reviewed InstaWeather Pro, for example. Momento+ is a commercial ($1) application that aims to provide templates for all occasions and certainly has its attractions, even if it's ultimately not as flexible as most users would like.
Having already reviewed the Billy 4's big bother device, the Billy 4.7, the smaller, cheaper, more lowly specified device is always going to seem like an anti-climax. And, in truth, much of what was said about the 4.7 is also true here, but in miniature. What of the Billy 5S LTE? We're working on getting that one in, too....
Let down by stability issues galore on anything less than a 2GB RAM flagship, PhotoLab is nevertheless an interesting application that goes beyond the usual image filtering to provide combinations and controls that will genuinely fire the imagination. Now if only the developer had programmed in a 'save' function before any final export... Gah!
You've got to feel sorry for utility developers on any platform. An OS comes out, has a few holes, third party developers plug them and then the OS itself starts to fill out and the holes are mainly gone, along with the developer's potential market. Anyone making a file manager is particularly vulnerable, as evidenced by Microsoft's own 'Files', released for free (and then built-in) for all Windows Phone 8.1 devices. So... can Folders Pro here do anything to convince me that it's worth a quid? Actually, yes.
