Nokia have continued to show strong support for the Xbox Live brand, and it was nice to see Microsoft follow that with today's release of the classic Angry Birds Seasons. The Nokia-released Bejeweled Live Plus is another classic, and I've been drawn into the gem matching game once more over the last twenty four hours.
Rarely have I reviewed such a flawed application that I've had to give such a relatively decent score. CloudMuzik exasperates and delights in utterly equal measure, but has to be given props for existing in the first place. You see, it's a client for Google Play Music, which means it's a way into your entire music collection in the cloud, hosted by Google for free and, thanks to CloudMuzik, playable for free as well on any Windows Phone 8 device.
Jump Wheel is not a brand new game genre. While it mixes in a bit of a platform game, it still has most of its roots in the single key jumping game where the lead character cannot stop running. But with some smart level design and industrial graphics, Jump Wheel is a great time-waster of a game.
Let's be honest, there are a huge number of games out there that are inspired by Tetris. Some of them only tangentially so, others sail the 'tribute' line very close to the wind. I'm not sure where I would place Blugri's Boxes. It's obviously the game of disappearing lines, but it has power-ups, stronger blocks, and enough of a difference to be noticed. What I am sure about is that it's pretty addictive, and a little quirky.
Yes, your Windows Phone has OneNote, but it is rather overpowered in some circumstances. For me, I want a notebook that is there when you just need to get an idea or two down as quickly as possible, so it's easy to find that thought a few hours later. That's where third party notebooks come in, and I'm pleased with how useful the Moleskine Journal application is.
Last week's release of Koozac followed up the critically acclaimed Skulls of the Shogun on Xbox, and started to bring back some momentum to the release schedule of Xbox titles on Windows Phone. Unfortunately, the game itself is a bit of a damp squib.
If your smartphone has replaced the newspaper, you're probably looking for the best app to catch all information you can get. There are plenty of apps for Windows Phone for specific sources of news, such as BBC News Mobile and our own AAWP app, although there are not so many that collect news from numerous sources. Other platforms, for example, have Flipboard and Google Currents. Fuse is an app for Windows Phone that provides curated news feeds and presents them in an attractive, dare I say glossy, format for your reading pleasure.
As the huge South by Southwest conference approaches on the horizon (I'm flying out for the eighth time on March 6th), the growing influence of the 'off-schedule' unofficial parties and meetings cannot be avoided. Countless invitations and tickets to organise, and many of them using the web 2.0 ticketing service Eventbrite. Which is where Metrobrite comes in.
It seems to be the norm, at least for me, that the flagship Windows Phone 8 device from a manufacturer is just a little bit too big for me, a little unwieldy, and while it has the best specifications, that's not what I'm looking for in my smartphone. Just as everyone else on the All About team went for the Lumia 920 while I had my eye on the Lumia 820, the same is true of the HTC Windows Phone 8S. The smaller brother of the 'signature' Windows Phone 8 device from HTC (the popular in the office 8X), the HTC 8S was the one I wanted to get my hands on.
I've been a huge pinball fan in real life, which hopefully helps me appreciated the sterling job the developers have done with simulating a pinball table in Dr Pickaxe. The physics are downright perfect, the gameplay always interesting, plus mini-game/mini-tables extend the gameplay even further. Add in a generous 'trial' version and you've got a title that every Windows Phone gamer should have installed and (hopefully) bought.
