13 must have free apps for Nokia Lumia

After a few months of using Windows Phone I thought of compiling a list of apps that I can't live without on my Lumia 800. Since Microsoft doesn't support apps purchase in Romania, I had to live with free apps. Here are a few that I use on daily basis.

Evernote


Cross platform note taking is a must have for pretty much everyone. You want your notes at home on your computer, you want them on you table, and you want them on your phone. Evernote does it on all platforms. It has clients for all mobile platforms, for desktop computers and a web version in case you need to access you notes from a web browser. It supports rich text notes with images and everything.

Fastnote


Unlike Evernote, Fastnote offers you simple text notes, a very easy and beautiful user interface and the ability to backup your notes to SkyDrive. The icing on the cake is the ability to add reminders for your notes, and that makes it a must have for your Lumia phone.

Nimbuzz


We all know how well supported messaging is on Windows Phone, but for those of you who use Google Talk and Yahoo Messenger, Windows Phone can't serve your needs by default. If chatting on multiple platforms is your thing, then Nimbuzz is the app for you. Nimbuzz supports Google Talk, Yahoo, Facebook and many more networks under one roof, and it does it really well. It even has a background agent so you can receive notifications even when the app is closed. Only downside is that you need a Nimbuzz account. But there's a bright side too. Once you've set up your Nimbuzz account you never have to manually login to your networks again.

Seesmic


Windows Phone has brilliant support for Twitter and Facebook built in, but if you're a social networks freak with multiple Twitter and Facebook accounts, then Windows Phone can't help you there. That's where Seesmic comes in handy. You can add as many Twitter and Facebook accounts as you like, as well as Sales force accounts. For each account you can pin a plenitude of tiles to your start screen. These tiles include Mentions, Messages, Retweets, and the live tile will show you how many new items you have for each of the aforementioned categories. It doesn't have toast notifications yet, but the app is evolving at a fast pace and it's only a matter of time before they add toasts too.

SophieCam


If you like to mess around with photos and create some really unique ones, then you need to know that SophieCam has a lot of great effects you can add to your photos. You can make your photo look old or dirty or anyway you want it. It also has options to share you photos to Facebook and Flickr. It's a must have if you like to play with your photos.

Creative studio


Sticking to imaging, I couldn't leave out Creative Studio. Developed by Nokia you can't even imagine how many things you can do with your photos. Besides the adjustments you can apply to your photos, you can also add various effects. Another cool thing Creative Studio can do is face warps. Just point your camera at your friend and you'll get a photo that you'll laugh at for a long while.

Aviary photo editor


With SophieCam and Creative Studio can have a lot of fun, but when it comes down to business you have Aviary. It's not an official Aviary client, but one built on top of the Aviary API, so you get the same quality adjustments and effects you get from the original thing. This is the app to have for serious photo editing on your Lumia.

Metrotube


I love watching YouTube on my phone, but for Windows Phone there is no official app yet aside from the website shortcut you get in the Marketplace. Metrotube is the best you can get for Windows Phone and even if YouTube would launch an official app, I doubt it would have all the features built into Metrotube. Metrotube was also recommended by the Nokia official blog as the app to have for watching YouTube.

VEVO


If you need music videos, then VEVO is the app to get. The app streams videos for a huge base of artists with great quality. It's basically all you need to music videos. You may ask yourselves "why do I need VEVO when I have Metrotube?". The answer is simple: VEVO only shows you music video, so yo get no distractions when you search for an artist unlike YouTube's search that can bring up a lot of not interesting results. And the advantages don't stop there. Some music videos have advertising on YouTube which means you can't watch them on mobile. With VEVO that problem does not exist.

Crackle


Full length movies are hard to come by on YouTube. You search for them and can't find a decent quality one even after a deep search. Crackle comes in to save the day. Full length movies and TV shows are now at your fingertips. The only downside is that you have to manually search for them because there's no search function in Crackle. That's a small downside considering that you can watch good quality full movies on your phone.

Google


The Bing search integrated in Windows Phone is good, but no search on the planet is as good as Google's. The official Google search app makes searching easy. If you're wondering why you should use an app instead of searching on the website, then the answer is voice search. The Google app voice search is much better than the Windows Phone voice search. It recognizes words even if you don't pronounce them correctly. With Bing is mostly hit and miss, but Google is spot on.

GDocs


Many people have documents stored in their Google Drive, and while MS Office is a better suite for such purposes, it's a really tedious job to move all your stuff to SkyDrive. GDocs is an app that accesses your Google Drive docs easily and you can even edit them in plain text mode. All in all a must have app if you rely a lot on Google Drive.

RapDialer


One big missing feature from Windows Phone since it's early days has been smart dial. RapDialer does exactly that: smart dial and fast T9 contact search. The only thing missing from RapDialer is the ability to show missed calls on the live tile. This is a must have app if you talk to a lot of people all the time and don't want to have all their contacts pinned as a live tile.

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eBuddy XMS for Windows Phone review

eBuddy is well known to Symbian users as a instant messenger that could connect to lots of instant messaging services, but the XMS version reviewed here is different.

If you're into chatting a lot and you don't want to pay a lot on text messages, or you don't want to chat on social networks then here's a service for you. The eBuddy XMS messenger works like an SMS service, but uses your data connection instead of your precious and expensive SMSs.


eBuddy is available for all platforms, WP, Symbian, iOS, Android and BlackBerry, so you don't have to worry if a version is available for your friends. Everyone can join the party and text for free(if you have a data plan that is).

First of all you need to enter your phone number and you'll receive an activation SMS. After entering the code in the application you can start using the application. eBuddy can scan your phonebook and your Facebook account and show you in your list of contacts all your friends that are registered with eBuddy.

Basically, if you have a data connection you don't have to pay for text messages anymore. eBuddy XMS is available for all platforms invoicing Symbian, but it looks like the feature set is not the same on all platforms. I'll explain what that means in a sec.

eBuddy supports groups, which means you can add your friends in a group and text to ask of them at once. It seems though that some versions of eBuddy XMS do not support the group feature but I'm not sure which one do and which don't. The WP version and the Symbian version do support it as you're about to see in the video at the end of this post.

Update:I've been informed by the developers of eBuddy XMS that the latest versions supports groups on all platforms. At the time when this part of the review was written, the persons I was trying to add to a group may have used an older version which did not support groups.

Even if the app is not started you will still receive toast notifications thanks to the background agent that eBuddy implements. However, you have to keep in mind that on WP the background agents stop working if you enter battery saving mode, so if you're low on battery you may not be able to receive messages unless you've got the app open. This is a WP restriction, not a bug in eBuddy.

Check out the video below for a demo of eBuddy XMS.

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Nokia Lumia 920 and 820 - First Windows Phone 8 devices from Nokia

Yesterday Nokia kicked off Nokia World with a joint conference alongside Microsoft. It was Jo Harlow with the first big announcement, the Lumia 920. Then it was Kevin Shields that announced the Lumia 820.


The Lumia 920 is, as Nokia calls it, a PureView device, but not the PureView you were expecting. It has no pixel oversampling, it has no 40+MP camera, but instead it is the first device to sport significant improvements in low-light and stabilization technology. Nokia developed a 8.7MP camera for the Lumia 920 that has hardware optical stabilization called OIS(Optical Image Stabilization) and an f/2.0 lens aperture. The large aperture allows more light to be capture by the backside illuminated camera sensor, about 10 times more light than any other competing smartphone. The Lumia 920 uses a floating lens guided by a gyroscope and moves the camera lens assembly to compensate for hand movements during snapping shots or filming video. The 920 uses a stunning 2000mAh battery, that should allow it to have an average battery life way above any other competing smartphone.

The 920 has a 4.5 inch display IPS LCD, with HD+ resolution (1280x768). The display is curved, like the Lumia 800's, and uses Nokia's PureMotion technology which renders everything on the screen at 60 frames per second. Another novelty for the Lumia line is the wireless charging. Nokia presented a variety of charging pads where you can just put your Lumia and it will start charging.

Another first for Nokia and the Lumia line was the super sensitive touchscreen of the Lumia 920. As Kevin Shields demoed on stage, the Lumia 920 can be operated with gloves on. It's a first for Nokia and it's capacitive touchscreens.

The storage capacity of the Lumia 920 is 1GB of ROM and 32GB of storage, with no expansion micro-SD slot.

Additional colors have been added to the Lumia line adding up to a total of 7 colors. The new colors are Yellow, Lipstick Red and Slate Grey.

The 920 can record video FullHD(1920x1080) and has a secondary camera that can record HD vide0 (1280x720).


Both devices use a 1.5GHz dual core Krait Snapdragon S4 CPU aided by an Adreno 225 GPU.

The Lumia 820 has an 8MP camera and an OLED 4.3 inch display. The secondary camera of the 820 can only record VGA resolution video. The 820 has only 8GB of mass memory, but it also offers and expansion micro-SD slot capable of up to 32GB cards. The battery capacity is 1650mAh but considering the smaller display, it shouldn't be a problem.

Both devices use LED flash light, but as Damian Dinning say last week, there have been major improvements in the LED flash department in the past months and the new generation of LED flash from Nokia closes the gap with the Xenon flash.

I for one can't wait to get my hands on one of these babies and see what it can do.

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Nokia Belle Refresh - What happens after the dust settles

The first impression Belle Refresh left me was a big disappointment. And in some aspects it is. This is supposed to be the last big update for the N8 generation so I was expecting more. And by more I mean more FP2 features. But it didn't happen. Now that I got over that initial WTF moment it's time to take a look under the hood to see what are the performance improvements that arrives with this new update.


First of all let's tackle the browser. Updated to version 8.3 the browser brings some subtle but worth noting user interface updates. Besides the back and forward buttons we have the windows and a favorites buttons that make your life a bit easier when navigating the web. The favorites button opens up a three tabs panel with most visited, bookmarks and history. It's good thing that all bookmarks and favorites are in the same place. The usual web browser menu, a reminiscence of S60v5, is now gone and you can do basically the same operations as before from the context menu.
Another improvement, and this is a big one, is the browser rendering speed. It's a big improvement over the old version with zooming in and out being now way smoother than before. You can even zoom in and out as the page loads and it works pretty well. Unlike before when you used to get lots of lag even after the page was fully loaded, now you won't see anymore if those lags. So, the updated browser gets a big thumbs up. If you compare this version to the S60v5, you can't tell the current one is an evolution of that old version.


Between all the clock widgets that were included in this update, there are others that were really needed and welcomed by us all. The first is the Data Counter widget that comes with a small app too and tells you how much mobile data you've consumed. You just need to set your monthly limit and the day your limit gets reset. You can also choose to disable the mobile data when the limit is hit to avoid extra costs.

The second much needed widget is Mail,New arrival. This one can replace the big old half homescreen mail widget with a shortcut that shows you a badge notification when you have new mail. I would have liked to see the new mail notification in the system pull-down area and on the lockscreen, just like the notifications for new messages and missed calls. It's not very ergonomic to unlock you phone whenever you want to check if you have new mail.

The third widget that is worth mentioning is the Contacts widget that can now show a group on the homescreen and not just your favorite contacts. In the old Belle if you would have added the Contacts, favorites to your homescreen three times, you would have got the same contacts in all widgets. Now, if you define 3 different groups you can have three different widgets, one for each group. A big improvement over the old approach.

Also, worth mentioning are the toggle widgets fro 3G, Mobile Data, Offline mode and Silent mode.

Belle Refresh also includes the latest QT version, 4.8. The new version seems to have boosted the speed of the apps written in this language. Apps seem to scroll smoother and the touch input has been optimized for swiping gestures. Without needing to update the existing apps they run smoother and accidental scrolling when you intended to swipe happens a lot less now.

But the Belle Refresh update didn't just improve things, it also broke some apps. That was expected from third party apps that had compatibility issues, but I wasn't expecting that to happen to the Microsoft Office suite. The new update rendered OneNote useless. Synchronization was gone and I wasn't able to login to my account again for one simple reason: I could not type in my username and password. When I touched the input fields the keyboard did not pop up. Maybe a hard reset will fix it, but at the moment I am don't want to lose all my user data because of this issue. Maybe Microsoft will issue an update, but it's unbelievable that Nokia's new best buddy didn't do it's homework to properly test the office suite with the latest Belle update.

Even though not all expectations were met with this new update, it's clearly an improvement over the original Belle, but I hope this is not the end of the line as far as updates are concerned for the first generation of Symbian^3 devices.

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Switching from Symbian to Windows Phone

My journey with Windows Phone began a little over a month ago. Used to be a big Symbian user and fan at the time but was very curious to see what would change in the way I use my smartphone everyday after the big switch. So here are the questions I was asking myself at the time:

1. Would I find all the apps I needed and used daily in the WP Marketplace?

2. Would I be able to live without multitasking?

3. Could Lumia's 8MP snapper take the place of the 12MP monster of the N8?


All these questions got answered and then some. So let's take it step by step.

Question 1: Would I find all the apps I needed and used daily in the WP Marketplace?

The Windows Phone Marketplace is full of surprises and hosts a lot more apps than Nokia Store does. You can find official apps for most services and social networks. Unlike Symbian, Windows Phone has an official app for Facebook, Twitter, Evernote, IMDb and so much more. I'm not saying the official apps are the best, but they're there and that means the platform is endorsed and will be supported for a long while. For an average user Windows Phone social networking integration is very well done, and basically removes the need for third party apps as far as social needs are concerned, but if you are a power user and want multiple accounts on Twitter and Facebook, then you need to find yourself a different app. What Windows Phone Marketplace misses compared to Nokia Store is the ton of HD games that made Symbian a gaming "phon-sole". Oh an the pay by SMS option too.

Question 2: Would I be able to live without multitasking?

Symbian is well known for it's brilliant multi-tasking and many think that the in transition to Windows Phone one may me missing that aspect. To be honest, at first you do miss the multi-tasking, but over time you get used to it and the resume app functionality along with the ability to have background agents working even when an app is dormant does make up for the lack of true multi-tasking. The resume-app approach was used my Microsoft to allow a smooth user experience even when multiple apps are started. The background agents work really well. Initially I thought that having no real multi-tasking would get in the way, but if the apps you use are well written, you have nothing to worry about. For example, I had an app that uploaded a large photo to Dropbox. The app had the ability to upload in the background so while I was playing Angry Birds the app took care of the upload neatly. If that's not multi-tasking I don't know what is. Windows Phone 7 is labeled as no-multi-tasking OS, but the matter of fact is that it does have multi-tasking, but not your traditional multi-tasking. Instead of keeping your entire app in memory doing whatever you need it to do, Microsoft used the background agent approach. The background agent is actually a piece of the app that uses no user interface and can do stuff in the background. For example, you may use an app that could eat 400MB of RAM when running in full UI mode, but only 20-30MB when running the user agent. That is called resource friendly app development.

Question 3:Could Lumia's 8MP snapper take the place of the 12MP monster of the N8?

Here is where I really missed my N8. The camera. I snap a lot of photos of my kid and lots of them are in low light conditions. The N8 clearly beats the Lumia 800 in this department, but when it comes to daylight I noticed that the Lumia 800 actually takes better photos, catches more detail. It's fast lens captures more light in broad daylight and it shows. You get less motion blur in your photos. So basically it's a trade-off. You get better photos in daylight and worse in low light. It's up to each and every user to choose. But I have to say that even in low light, the Lumia takes far better photos than other phones with LED flash. And that's, as I said above, because of the fast lens. The Lumia 800 does not claim to be a cameraphone, that's left for the 808, but it does hold it's ground against most smartphones out there.

Bottom line is this: it takes a while for you to get used to it, but once you do, you won't be able to move back to Symbian. The speed of the Lumia cannot be matched by any Symbian device. Windows Phone is missing some features, but it has others(lots of them) that more than make up for what you were missing in the first place.

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Nokia Belle Refresh - What's new

Refresh is the best name Nokia could have named this update. It tells you all about it. Just like when you go on your web browser, hit refresh and nothing happens, just a page reload, the same happens with Belle Refresh: not much. I was a bit sarcastic there but that's only because I think Nokia could have put a bit more effort into this update and bring us some exciting and much awaited features. I think that after almost 8 months of development they simply could have done more.


Let's see what's new. Nokia added a bunch of new widgets with a gazillion clock widgets(important right?), the much awaited Mail,new arrival, toggles for 3G, Mobile Data, Offline mode and Silent mode, contact groups and a weather widget with the associated app.



The new bookmark widget makes a very welcomed addition, along with the data counter widget which most of use were eagerly waiting for.


We also got a new and welcomed Notes widget, a new calendar agenda widget, two music player widgets and the photo wall widget.

The music player was revamped.



The web browser got updated to version 8.3. Not much of a speed improvement, but on paper it's HTML5 compatibility has been improved. The browser also got a small UI overhaul, with a new Favorites button making it's way to the toolbar replacing the old Add bookmark button. The favorites view is now split into three tabs: Most visited, Bookmarks and History.

What Belle Refresh DIDN'T get? Well, here is the list of commons sense expectations that were not met:

1) New keyboard a-la FP2
2) Notifications split from activities and new email in notification area
3) Minimal overclock
4) New camera UI (for N8 at least)
5) Gallery

Maybe expecting some of these features to make it to Belle Refresh was wishful thinking, but let's hope that maybe they will still arrive along the way.

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Weather26 - The perfect weather app for Windows Phone

This is going to be probably the shortest review I ever wrote. That is a good thing, believe me.


Windows Phone is all about minimal design. Nothing clunky, nothing to "poke" your eyes out. I like it like that and when I need an app that I'm gonna use 10 times a day I want it to be simple, functional and informative. Here's where Weather26 shines. The application has one simple panel that shows you everything you need to know. It shows you the current weather conditions(and they're right on the money), an two days forecast on 3 hours interval and a 6 days forecast. The forecast panels are cleverly designed to be swipe-able so you don't need to switch to a different screen to see any of the things I just told you about. All is done in one screen. Oh, did I tell you that it has a live tile too? Have I mentioned that it's a free app? Maybe I should remind you that it INSTANTLY updates the current weather conditions?

Simple, elegant, useful. All. I. Need.

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Peregrine for Windows Phone review

Windows Phone has got a pretty consistent bunch of Twitter clients in the Marketplace, besides the official Twitter client. Some of them are paid-only, some of them have free versions but most of them make horrible use of the ads component. Or even worse, you won't even know your run an ad-supported version for a few launches. I don't know what the developers of those apps are thinking, but you can't force or annoy your clients into buying your product. Here's where Peregrine is different. Besides being a kick-ass Twitter client, it shows the user ads ONLY there is enough room for them to be displayed. It doesn't occupy half of your Timeline screen with a dog training ad, but it can display it when you're viewing someone's profile. I can guarantee that you'll never accidentally hit an ad like it happens with other apps.


The primary view of Peregrine consists in three panels: Timeline, Mentions and Messages. Each of these panels have pull-down to refresh functionality and on top of all of them there is a status display label that shows you the number of new tweets, mentions and messages for your account. As you can see from the screenshots there is no ad displayed in any of those panels.


The developer of Peregrine cleverly shows ads only where there is space for them, where they're not in your way, like in the profile panel, or in a tweet panel.

Peregrine only supports one Twitter account, but that should be enough for most users. The fact that the app is free and the non intrusive way the ads are displayed make Peregrine my preferred Twitter client.


Peregrine has what Windows Phone devs call a background agent that allows it to check for new tweets, mentions or messages even when the app is not launched. In the app settings you can define this behavior, you can turn on or off the background agent as well as choose which items should get updated when the agent runs. You can also choose which items you want to receive toast notifications for.

Peregrine has the ability to add URLs to an Instapaper account for later reading. I would have liked to have the options to have a Pocket account here too, but I guess that's the only downside of this app.


Trends are also supported by Peregrine and you can choose if you want to see the current, daily, weekly or local trends. You can add your current location to your tweets and you can also add photos from your phone's gallery.

I think Peregrine is one of the best Twitter clients for Windows Phone and definitely the best free one. Worth giving a try.

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Nokia Lumia Amazing Ambassadors report

I am happy to announce that Monday August 6th 2012, Nokia Romania has announced the winners of the Lumia Amazing Ambassadors contest. They decided that all four finalists have shown dedication and amazing involvement in the contest and granted the test phones as final prizes for all four. As you may know, I am one of the four contestants, so since this Monday I am the proud owner of a brand new Nokia Lumia 800.

In the three weeks of contest I have tried to bring you new content featuring the Lumia, in the form of short video reviews of apps I like and use on this phone. From now on, I will have more time to bring you more detailed reviews(since I have no more campaigning to do for the contest).

I want to thank everyone that supported and helped me in this endeavor that lasted three weeks. From this day on, my old phone, the Nokia N8 will get sidetracked, and the new Lumia 800 will be the main subject of my reviews.

Last but not least, I want to thank the wonderful people over at Nokia Romania for giving me the chance to participate in this contest, and for the wonderful surprise they prepared for all four finalists including me. Big round of applause for their effort!

Thank you once again!

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Nimbuzz for Windows Phone - Demo Video

Today we take a look at another chat app for Windows Phone, Nimbuzz. This app is well known by Symbian users, so they should feel right at home. However, the user interface is completely redesigned to integrate with the Metro ui guidelines. Take a look at the video below for more details.

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