Apps
[+] Lock Screen is a stellar app and a must-have
Looks like it’s a good week in the Windows Phone Marketplace for deals as we just got tipped that Snack Studios have made their pay-apps free for an undisclosed time.
The developers have numerous apps in the Marketplace and in our opinion, all are top notch with an elegant design and useful functionality. Those are apps are the following:
All of those apps are normally $0.99 but dropped to free on July 7th. There are ‘lite’ versions for some of these apps but you can evidently have the full ones for zero—so hop to it as these are some seriously nice programs.
Hit the links above which take you to the Marketplace or just search for ‘Snack Studio’ to find all of their apps. Thanks, Nettwerk, for the tip!
Baseball Pro '12 (formerly known as MLB Pro '12) is a nice Windows Phone app to keep you up to date with all the stats, scores and news from the Major League Baseball season. The app was recently updated to follow along with players Twitter tweets.
Version 1.4 adds a twitter page to the Player Profile pages so you can see what your favorite ball player is tweeting. Additional features include:
You will need to create a Baseball Pro '12 profile (free) to get the most out of the app. Even if you opt out of creating the profile, Baseball Pro '12 still offers a cornucopia of information from the Major League Baseball season.
Baseball Pro '12 is a free, ad-supported app that you can find here at the Windows Phone Marketplace.
Microsoft continues to flesh out their Xbox live app for those of us that have iPads. The latest update brings more of the once exclusive features of the Windows Phone Companion App to iOS users. Unlike Windows Phone, which has a combination of apps to take care of Xbox live business, the iPad rolls all the functions into one. Personally, I like it all integrated into one whole and have been a little confused as to why the Windows Phone has essentially stuck with the Xbox Hub plus the two addition apps called Xbox Companion app and Xbox LIVE Extras App.
The iPad app has the following features:-
Whilst this is not quite SmartGlass just yet, it is certainly designed to bring the core technology closer for when that moment arrives. As an iPad owner myself I certainly appreciate these updates, the Xbox 360 should be accessible to all those in a living room and that means having a good cross platform story.
The only niggling thing for me is, I cannot help but wonder why MS is able to push out updates for iOS devices that in many cases have a better UX than for their operating systems. I will point the finger at Photosynth being available on iOS a long time before Windows Phone and also the excellent Bing app for the iPad having no counterpart application for Windows.
As the Xbox Live Companion app and Xbox Live Extras app are effectively spun out of the core OS in Windows Phone it has allowed them to be updated more effectively than apps such as Maps. Not much is known about Windows Phone 8 yet, one would hope MS have a more reliable way to keep the built in features updated so hopefully Windows Phone users will always have the best experience using Microsoft technologies going forward.
Think MS is doing a good job with cross platform support for Xbox? Do you think they should be showing more love when it comes to their own home-grown app offerings on Windows Phone and Windows? Get in there and let us know!
Source: Apple itunes
If you are looking for a fairly simple, straight forward document scanner for your Windows Phone, HD Scanner should make your short list. It was recently released to the Windows Phone Marketplace and creates .PDF files that can be uploaded to Skydrive, Dropbox or Google Docs. Created documents can also be save to your Pictures Hub or emailed.
HD Scanner can come in handy if you need to scan a receipt, scan research papers, shopping lists, or any other document you may need to archive or copy on the go.
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Pictures Lab is a very nice photo editing app for your Windows Phone. The app offers a wide selection of editing tools that includes filters, borders, exposure adjustments and more. The app is in the top five photography apps on the Marketplace and has recently had it's price cropped. The original $1.99 price tag on Pictures Lab is dropped to $.99 making the app a steal of a deal.
Pictures Lab has Facebook and Twitter integration to make social sharing of your photos easier. Settings allow you to set the image quality on images you share and save. Plus you can add an artist name (e.g. copyright) to the image's EXIF file. plus you can set the image quality in the app's settings.
If you're not sure about Pictures Hub, there is a free trial version available to let you try before you buy. The full version is running $.99 and you can find Pictures Lab here at the Windows Phone Marketplace.
Great news for you instant messaging fans; Nimbuzz is now available to download in the Windows Marketplace. The popular cross platform app was a personal favorite of mine back in the Windows Mobile days and has also been a success on other operating systems. Now it is our turn on Windows Phone and the it will not cost you a penny to download. It is free.
Nimbuzz offers the following features:
More information/Download Nimbuzz for Windows Phone via: WMPoweruser
Earlier this week we mentioned how the app I’m a WP7! was renamed to Outsider and re-released to the Windows Phone Marketplace. The app, made by the team at Liquid Daffodil, is for fans of Windows Phone to come together, discuss software, hangout, setup multiplayer games and just have fun. Filled with numerous Easter Eggs that include hidden functionality, the app is not only fun, it’s free.
With the update though came a challenge: Three “movers and shakers” of the Windows Phone community had to unlock 7 Easter Eggs in the app within 72 hours—if successful, Liquid Daffodil would make their other apps free for 72 hours.
Those movers and shakers were Microsoft’s Ben Lower (@benlower), Ben Rudolph (@BenthePCGuy) and yours truly (@Daniel_Rubino) and we’re pleased to announce that Lower and myself have completed the challenge with Rudolph almost finishing (he’s a busy man with a new kid, so our sympathy). As the great philosopher Meatloaf once said "Two out of three ain't bad"!
Regardless, Liquid Daffodil are making all their apps free for the next 72 hours. Those apps should be either free already for most of you or shortly becoming so when the Marketplace refreshes. Those apps are:
We regularly use all the above apps and they’re top notch--not only are they well designed but those bottom two are super useful as they fill in gaps in the Windows Phone OS. You would be crazy to not get these apps and save yourself $7.
A big thanks to Liquid Daffodil for offering up their software for free and supporting the Windows Phone community. Remember, this deal is only active for 72 hours so go get them now because once you lock in that “free” license, it’s free forever.
Network speed test apps are always finicky and hard to judge for accuracy but we like what we see with the new app called Speed Test (or my Speed Test).
The app is free and has a companion site (http://www.myspeedtest.mobi) which is very useful for checking on your stats, seeing geolocaiton information and what others are getting for speeds. There’s no way to create an account but the Sign In area near the top suggests that this feature may be coming down the road.
The companion Speed Test website
Speed Test is quite basic—you launch it and start the test, measuring your latency, download and upload speeds. You can either do a “complete” test or “fast” with the latter using smaller file-sizes, resulting in slightly less accurate results. You can then scroll over for “network” info including seeing your location and once more for test history. There are no options for changing between kb/s and Mbps with the former being used in this app.
For free we can’t complain too much about Speed Test and the developer looks to have expansion plans for the app as a service. That’s a big deal since many network test apps often get abandoned by their developers. In comparison tests with our favorite speed test app, Bandwidth (which is sadly no longer available) we found the results to be comparable to Speed Test’s which is a good sign.
Pick up Speed Test here in the Marketplace for free. You can also try Microsoft’s TestMyNet too.
Freda, the free ebook reader for Windows Phone, has been updated to version 2.6, which introduces a number of new features and improvements. We previously looked at the app back in November when the developers were eagerly seeking beta testers for a previous update, so it's good to see Freda continue to receive invested time and effort to further improve the user experience.
So what's new in version two-point-six? The Turnipsoft team have worked hard to translate the UI for French, German, Swedish and Slovak users, further opening up the service for international consumers, but that's not all. Find the full changelog below:
Not a shabby update. In fact it's quite a leap forward. If you're into ebooks and haven't given this app a try, be sure to do so as it supports EPUB (DRM-free), FB2, HTML and TXT formats to keep you busy. Freda sports customisable controls that enable the user to alter fonts and colours, while inserting annotations and bookmarks, as well as the ability to look up dictionary definitions and translations.
The app can render EPUB formatting (eg. bold / italic text, margins and alignment) and can display code, images and diagrams. Book sources supported include Feedbooks, Smashwords and the Gutenberg Project catalogues. SkyDrive, DropBox or Calibre can be used to share existing book collections with the app for on-the-go reading. If that wasn't enough, Freda can also download books from websites using the built-in web browser. Favourite books can then be pinned to the home screen for more convenient access.
You can download Freda and Freda+ ($0.99 / £0.79) from the Marketplace. Difference between the two versions is advertisement removal.
The Hertz Car Rental app has landed in the Windows Phone Marketplace to help manage your car reservations a little easier. The app is laid out nicely in panoramic or metro fashion with pages to view your reservations, find your car, and to find gas stations nearby.
From the My Reservations page you can create or modify rental car reservations. Just tap the blue "reserve or modify your reservation" bar or the plus sign at the bottom of the page. You will then be prompted to the reservation forms from Hertz. You can log into your Hertz Member account from the reservation pages as well.
The "Where is my car?" page is a nice touch and lets you mark where you parked your car using your Windows Phone location services. Just tap the plus sign to mark your location, add a description and then tap save. A map thumbnail and description will appear on the page to help you get back to your car. You can even pull up Bing Maps to get directions back to your car.
The Gas Stations page is somewhat self explanatory. The page will tap into your location services and pull up a listing of all the gas stations in your area. Tap on a location to generate driving directions (through Bing) to the gas station and pull up the map view of the location.
All in all, the Hertz Car Rental app is a nice tool for your Windows Phone. In navigating around the app, managing car rentals is about as easy as calling an agent or going on-line. Hertz did a good job of making things simple and straight forward. If you find yourself renting cars with regularity, this app may be a must have app for your Windows Phone.
Hertz Car Rental app is a free Windows Phone app that you can find here at the Marketplace.
Thanks, Evan, for the tip!
