Apps

Remember Indigo, the personal assistant for Windows Phone we've looked at a handful of times? Well, we're rather excited to announce that the app has finally been certified and is available on the Windows Phone Store. Consumers are able to create an account over on the Indigo website (where the web client is housed) for a more personal experience.

Audible, the popular audiobook service, has bumped its Windows Phone offering and has launched an exclusive offer for consumers. Should you download and use the apps available for either Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8, create a new account and reside in the US, you'll be eligible for a free audiobook for trying out the service. Pretty neat, eh?

It seems like in the past few months we’ve had official apps hitting the Windows Phone Store left and right. Today is no exception, we’ve got an official Tumblr app for everyone who loves the microblogging platform and social networking site. Tumblr powers over 102 million blogs. So we are stoked to see it join the lineup of apps available to us. Let’s check it out.

Phone Search is a Windows Phone 8 and 7.x app that lets you search your calendar and contacts from a central location.

You can search by keyword, address, phone book, date and all the details of your calendar and contacts will be scoured. If your search yields no results, you will be given the option to search the web via Bing.  Your last ten searches can be saved and search terms can be memorized so that it can be shown when the app restarts.

The official National Rail Enquiries app for Windows 8 has been updated. The app was previously bumped to include numerous new features that consumers could take advantage of. The change log remains the same on the store listing, so we can only speculate that this latest release is a minor update to fix some bugs and implement improvements.

Remember the location-based social interaction game Torchbear? The creators of Torchbear, Lighthouse Games Studio, are back within another location-based game – this time exclusively for Windows Phone 8. Their new title Greed City combines the property and wealth acquisition elements of Monopoly with the real-world location and GPS elements of Four Square. It’s much more game-like than Torchbear and costs nothing to download, so Windows Phone 8 users should definitely give it a look.

We've got a quick-start guide and more impressons to share, so read on!

Nokia has pushed out a number of updates for Windows Phone. The apps affected are Nokia Music, Access Point and Network+. Unfortunately we don't have a change log for any of the three apps, but we imagine each release contains minor improvements. It's been a while since we've looked at both Access Point and Network+, but the Nokia Music+ service has been rolling out in multiple markets. 

There are a few criticisms levied against Instagraph, the third party “work around” for Instagram on Windows Phones, including price, upload limits and feature set. That last one is a bit interesting because as of right now, users can only upload photos to Instagram but they would need another app to view their friends’ feed, comment, share photos, etc.

That’s coming to an end though as Metrogram and Instagraph are air-high-fiving to bring a single use system. We’ve actually been privy to the info for awhile (shocked?) but it wasn’t our place to announce the news. But now the developer behind Metrogram, a highly stylized Instagram viewer that we recently covered, has posted a pic teasing the pseudo-merger (see above).

It looks like a busy day for app updates again as Facebook for Windows Phone has pushed out yet-another patch. This time the version for Windows Phone 8 gets raised to v4.2.1 and the Windows Phone 7.x one heads to 2.9.1. That makes this a teeny 0.0.1 update.

Hooray for more Windows Phone 8 apps! That’s our feeling every time we report on an official app getting bumped to take advantage of the latest features in our OS. Today’s app is OpenTable (www.opentable.com) the must-have service for those in big cities who want to easily reserve a table at their favorite (but busy) restaurant.

The previous Windows Phone 7.x version wasn’t too bad, but it was a bit slow and lacked any ‘wow’ factors on board. Version 2.0 though is now live in the Store for Windows Phone 8 devices and it’s certainly much better, in our opinion.