There's more than one online bookstore in the world, and if you search the Windows Marketplace then you'll find something that's... not Amazon. UK book retailer Waterstones has a strong online presence, and its Windows Phone application puts its full catalogue at your fingertips, assuming you know exactly what you are looking for.
For all the shiny Metro squares, flowing graphics and sleek presentation, your Windows Phone still needs to get on the Internet and find the information you want. If that's browsing websites to get the latest news, you'll be wanting an RSS reader that fits in with the UI, but still gets you all the text you need. Have you considered Weave?
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.
What is it about the London Underground that's so attractive? Admittedly this attraction is mostly from people outside of London, but why do they have this romantic notion of the mass transit system? I've no idea either, but it's wonderful territory for a mobile application to explore. MX Data have the licence from London Transport to work with the data from the Underground, so how useful have they made this app for the commuter?
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!
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.
Metro Wall does one thing, and does it very well. If you're looking to create very personal wallpapers for your Windows Phone that use the tiling metaphor, then Metro Wall is going to scratch that itch in a simple and friendly way.
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.
For various reasons, the YouTube client built into Windows Phone by Microsoft is not the greatest of clients. Being little more than a wrapper for the mobile website version of YouTube, there's a lot of functionality missing from it. And when you have an opportunity like this on a mobile device, the developers are going to step up to the plate and have a swing. If you're looking, you'll have already found MetroTube. For everyone else, read on.
