It has taken a long time, but text messaging has finally become popular in the United States. Unfortunately, the mobile carriers still want to charge ridiculously high prices for text messaging plans, and with more people now using smartphones, Internet-based messaging apps are becoming popular. Messaging apps like WhatsApp Messenger and Apple’s iMessage provide text messaging like services but use the Internet and therefore eliminate the cost of text messaging plans.
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If you have an iPhone running iOS 4 (or newer) or an Android phone running Android OS 2.1 (or newer), accessing Google+ is a matter of downloading and installing the appropriate free app. However, there is no app for an iPhone running an older version of iOS, an Android phone running an older version of Android or some other phone (Nokia with Symbian, Windows Mobile or Windows Phone). If your phone is in this last category, Google has a support page to help you out.
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Because Windows Phone 7.5 is integrated with Facebook, you could get away with not having the Facebook app installed, but a new version of it adds some features that I think will be really attractive to heavy Facebook users.
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Microsoft’s Ben Rudolph provided a teaser preview of the upcoming Xbox Companion App for Windows Phone at Nokia World in London this week. The app will be free when it becomes available. The app is more than just a remote control. The app can, for example, search for a movie, provide detailed information about the movie on the phone (synopsis, cast and crew, etc.) and then start playing the movie on the Xbox 360 and its connected large screen TV. At this point, the Windows Phone can be used as a remote control for the movie playing on the TV through the Xbox.
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Tango for Android, iOS & tablets.
Frank McPherson summarized the Windows Phone based Nokia smartphones that will be available in some parts of the world (but not the U.S.) soon yesterday. While you might think that Microsoft would try to build mobile momentun for Windows Phone by releasing a Skype app for the platform (Microsoft now owns Skype), this is not the case. The first video calling service for Windows Phone will be from Tango (not to be confused by Microsoft’s code name “Tango” for what may be a lower cost phone platform). Tango by TangoMe, Inc., already provides free video calling apps for iPhone, Android and desktops running Microsoft Windows. Like Skype, the computer-to-computer communications services are free.
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Earlier this year Nokia and Microsoft announced a partnership through which Nokia would be develop and sell phones running Windows Phone. The partnership is seen as important to increasing Windows Phone market share as well as Nokia’s smartphone market share. In June we began to see leaks of the first Nokia Windows Phone with a code name of Sea Ray and this week we finally have seen first two Nokia Windows Phones, the Nokia Lumia 710 and the Lumia 800.
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Google is not the only company trying to move its services from mobile native apps to mobile web apps. GigaOm’s Kevin C. Tofel used Nokia’s updated web-based mapping service and gave it a thumbs up for features while noting its limitations in saving offline maps due to the large size of the data involved.
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I’ve been using Windows Phone 7.5 (Mango) on my primary voice phone for about 2 weeks now. Both small and large changes to the platform continue to impress me. The integrated Bing app was one that received a major update. Microsoft’s Bing Community blog explains what wsa added in this blog item.
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If you have an Xbox 360 and a Windows Phone, you will have an app that brings the two products a lot closer together in the future. The Xbox Companion App will be available for free for Windows Phone. It will let Windows Phone users control content on an Xbox 360.
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Burn the Rope has made its way from the iOS universe to Windows Phone. The $2.99 takes a relatively simple premise – burn all the rope by making sure the flame(s) always burn upwards – and creates increasingly complex scenarios to solve. Manipulating the phone to keep that flame moving upward is a lot tricker than it sounds after the first one or two simple scenarios.
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