Mobile

Microsoft unveiled its first Microsoft branded Lumia phones tonight, the Lumia 535 and a dual SIM equivalent, the Lumia 535 Dual SIM. The phones follow along with Lumia’s attraction to the lower end of the market, offering an affordable phone with an “estimated retail price will be around …

When Microsoft announced it was rebranding its phone hardware as “Microsoft Lumia”, it hinted that there might be a new phone on the way, with the Nokia Conversations blog post quoting Senior VP Tuula Rytilä as saying “we are looking forward to unveiling a Microsoft Lumia device soon”. …

Today’s news cycle flurry centers around Microsoft’s Surface, and whether Microsoft will continue with Surface on ARM, or just give up on the whole idea. As a refresher, ARM refers to a family of RISC (reduced instruction set computing) based computer processor architectures, ones that require fewer transistors, …

Just now I wrote about the hoops I jumped through to get a fully working and fully updated Windows Phone, which is now running Nokia’s Cyan update and the Windows Phone 8.1.1 update. In short, there has been an issue with updating directly from Windows Phone 8.1 …

Last week in China, Joe Belfiore announced that Windows Phone 8.1 Update 1 would be available to “developers” soon, and indeed today, it’s here. The update includes significant updates to IE 11 for Windows Phone, a new take on “Live Folders”, additions to SMS and VPN …

Late last night (Pacific Daylight time – mid-Wednesday morning in China), Microsoft announced the expansion of Cortana to two new markets in beta, China and the UK, as well as the alpha release of the personal digital assistant for Windows Phone in India, Australia, and Canada. In addition, …

This has been an interesting year so far for Windows Phone. In some ways, it’s been quite disappointing, as Microsoft’s mobile ecosystem has failed to gain ground in the marketplace (enough so that Microsoft executives are now talking about “making the market” for Windows Phone), and no new …

A post over at the Boy Genius Report this week has stirred up a bit of a tempest in a teapot, as according to BGR, Windows Phone has “failed spectacularly” to gain market share, and a “death knell” has been sounded on the “entire Windows Phone project”. That …

Today I noticed some changes to Cortana on Windows Phone 8.1. Microsoft has quietly pushed China specific features and contents to Chinese users, though Cortana is still only available when the phone is set to US(region, speech and language).

Chinese users, with Cortana enabled WP8.1 phones, don’t need …

Today, two new phone makers K-Touch and Blu join Windows Phone OEMs camp. Microsoft announced these two OEM partners at the Qualcomm Reference Design and Wireless Innovation Summit in China.…

Earlier today Nokia “weibo’d” that the Nokia X had received over a million pre-orders for the first Android powered Nokia phone, and indeed it had, but that doesn’t mean that Nokia will sell anywhere near that many of the new devices. The pre-orders, all coming to Chinese retailer …

Today Nokia and JD.com jointly announced the pre-order of Nokia X phones begins today in China. The Nokia X phones, Nokia’s newly announced Android family, will exclusively be selling through JD.com JDPhone program and be available on March 24th.…

Last week at the Mobile World Congress, Microsoft Corporate Vice President Joe Belfiore announced that Facebook Messenger for Windows Phone would be available soon, and sure enough, it’s available now through the Windows Phone Store.  Facebook Messenger has been available on iOS and Android for some time, and …

We may be confused as to the logic behind Nokia’s push into Android, especially just as the phones business is about to be acquired by Microsoft, but according to Nokia Vice President for Mobile Phone Marketing Jussi Nevanlinna, it all makes perfect sense. In an interview posted on …

This week, Nokia officially announced the “X” series of entry level smartphones powered by an open source version of Android.  The three phones: the Nokia X, the X+, and coming later this year, the Nokia XL, not only introduce “popular Microsoft services” to Android, but apparently also introduce …

Ever since the Windows Phone 8.1 SDK, provided early to developers, leaked last week, we’ve been learning more and more about what’s upcoming for Windows Phone’s next OS update.  So far, the SDK has revealed a long list of new features, but thanks to some sleuthing by our …

When Windows 8.1 was delivered last October, Microsoft released two brand new Bing Apps, Bing Health & Fitness and Bing Food & Drink, to extend already existing Bing Apps family . At the same time, Microsoft Bing AppEx team has been actively “porting” Windows 8 Bing apps …

If you had been following the news lately, a preview version of Windows Phone 8.1 SDK were distributed to selected beta testers earlier this week, which were then inevitably leaked to the internet. The SDK included not only development tools, but also the Windows Phone 8.1 emulator and …

The Android on Nokia story, which has been percolating ever since word first leaked out about a Nokia “Normandy” device, boiled over yesterday with a Wall Street Journal post reporting that Nokia is indeed planning to announce a Nokia device running Android at MWC (Bloomberg today says …

Mega-leaker @evleaks has posted what appears to be the first render of a Windows Phone 8.1 device, the Samsung “Huron”, said to be coming to Verizon. The Samsung device, which has been showing up here and there in user agent profiles, reportedly sports a 5″ 1080p screen (although …