Apps

While the big news today was definitely the official launch of Windows Phone 8, Nokia was able to slide in an update to their ESPN app over the weekend.  The update mainly deals with increasing how you can be notified on scoring and news updates through the Live tile and toast notifications.

The update adds the ability to save and pin your favorite teams and sports to your Windows Phone Start Screen, customize the Live Tile score updates and you can now receive toast notifications for news and score updates.

One of the new features with Windows Phone 8 is the Wallet app. Microsoft has added a digital wallet that you can use to keep your debit, credit, loyalty and membership card information handy on your Windows Phone.

The Wallet app also has the ability to find other apps to link with that can provide additional information on that card or account such as balance and transaction history. Wallet can also be used to find and share local shopping deals.

Microsoft has announced that an official Pandora app will be available with Windows Phone 8 devices.  The popular streaming music app will be offered for free for the first year and add free.  This is exciting news and we should see the Pandora app available early 2013.  More details as things develop.

You can count on Nokia to keep on fine tuning their own apps, each version brings us a step closer to perfection. Today an update is heading out for Nokia Music, their free to listen music service.

The release notes for version 3.5 are scant but we suspect this is version isn’t serving up any new features as the release app notes still show the same features as in version 3.0 which we reported on back in July.

Lost in the fuss over the launch of Windows 8 news we overlooked this the other day. Angry Birds in space is now available in the Microsoft Store.

Can you be an “app store” without at least on version of Angry Birds being present? If that’s the yard stick then many will breathe a sigh of relief to see the game pop into the store right from launch day!

Microsoft unveiled Windows 8 yesterday and shops opened at midnight to serve up those sleek Surface tablets to hoards of people. From today you can also grab an inexpensive upgrade to Windows 8, no need to feel left out of the festivities.

We have been using and monitoring the Windows 8 store since it first became available, we thought it would be good to give you some pointers to get you up and running.

MetroTalk for Windows Phone v2.5

If you use Google Voice because like us, you have multiple phone numbers or you just like the free data-driven SMS feature, then you should check out MetroTalk for Windows Phone.

The app started off decent enough when it was first launched months ago but it has quickly ramped up to be one of the best, most fully featured Google Talk clients for Windows Phone—that’s specially good since Google doesn’t seem interested in supporting their own services.

RIP Parcel Tracker: 2010-2012

We have to paint yet another bleak picture for one of our favorite apps on Windows Phone: Parcel Tracker. The package tracker app was featured numerous times on this site and we always gave it a thumbs up, but evidently that wasn’t enough as the app has been removed from the Store.

The developers have evidently sent a news-update thru the app to current customers letting them know that development has stopped and the app has been withdrawn. While current users can still use the app when it comes to Windows Phone 8, you’ll be out of luck.

The developers cite that most users never bought the app and therefore it wasn’t financially lucrative enough to support it anymore. As we’ve heard from some devs before you have to be in Windows Phone dev as a hobby right now.