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Ice Age Village from Gameloft is a free Xbox city building game for Windows Phone 8. As far as we know, any Windows Phone 8 device can run it and the game only takes up 79 MB of storage, so it should have a sizable player base already.

The city building genre is a time consuming one since many tasks involve returning to the game at a later time or date to reap their rewards.  Wouldn’t it be nice to speed up the process a bit and get your village making money faster right off the bat? Darn right it would.

Windows Phone Central has a bunch of codes for free Coins, animals, and items, plus a handy Achievement guide. Don’t spend a single Acorn until you’ve read it!

There's more than what's usually visible in the Windows Phone universe. When we talk about Windows Phones these days, we always talk about Samsung, HTC, Nokia, and sometimes Huawei. But if you remember, there was another name briefly manifested in our sight, only to disappear quietly later: Alcatel.

Back in last December we reported a low cost Windows Phone called Alcatel One. Since then there hasn't been much update about this very device. Until today, as it's suddenly available in China, through locally popular e-commerce website 360buy.com, and under the brand "TCL" (Alcatel's joint-venture partner in China).

The Samsung ATIV S Windows Phone is currently available at mobile electronics retailer Expansys UK for just £269. That's just over £250 for a high-end smartphone. We've previously reviewed the ATIV S - it's a superb price for anyone who's looking at picking up a Windows Phone 8 handset.

Back a few weeks ago, we brought you the news on Chronos Calendar, a powerful and sharp looking Windows Phone calendar replacement that actually hooked into your Outlook.com account. While we rather enjoy that app a lot, many of you shrieked at the design noting it wasn’t “Metro” enough.

Well, we think we have something for you vocal bunch: True Calendar 8. Yes, it’s a rather powerful calendar replacement that also hooks into your Outlook/Hotmail account so that you can directly add appointments and sync your other imported calendars.

Sometimes official apps slip under the radar, especially if it’s only an update. Photo sharing website The Fancy updated their app to support Windows Phone 8 a handful of weeks back. It’s a fairly awesome app if you’re one of the 3 million active members on Fancy. Let’s check it out.

The Home Shopping Network (or HSN - www.hsn.com) has released an official app for Windows Phone. It's a home shopping network in the US, if you haven't quite guessed from the name. Consumers will be able to check out products and watch the HSN live while on the go. If you're into the whole interactive shopping experience, you'll want to check out the official HSN app.

The developer of popular jumping game for Windows Phone, MonsterUp has released another title. MonsterUp Colors is a colour-matching puzzle game with the same theme as MonsterUp (hence the brand use). Featuring local multiplayer support, online scoreboards and more, MonsterUp Colors is a title worth checking out.

If you missed the ‘Red Stripe’ deal a few weeks ago for Runtastic Pro (it was on sale for $.99, down from its normal $4.99), well, you missed a great offer for an impressive service for fitness buffs. The app recently went full Windows Phone 8 on us, bringing a host of new features and a slight redesign. Personally, we’ve been using it with the physical heart rate monitor and have been having a blast.

Even if you don’t run, it has general fitness features too, including weights, skiing, swimming and more. If you use Fitbit and or MyFitnessPal, it can easily link up to both services, giving you a comprehensive overview of your activity level and calories expended.

Pic Stitch is a new Windows Phone 8 photography app that has seen a bit of success over on iOS. It is part photo editor, part collage maker, and part photo sharing app. It caught the eye of Microsoft's Joe Belfiore and we have to admit, it does make a nice first impression.

Latest figures released by Kantar Worldpanel shows that Microsoft is actually starting to perform rather well in the US, one of the more important markets for the company. So much so that the platform is growing at a slightly faster rate than Google's Android. Microsoft still has a tough mountain to climb to tackle both Android and iOS, but it would seem as though the third position is firmly in its grasp.

We've been informed that Liquid Daffodil has finally managed to get its Unification app listed on the Windows 8 Store, enabling consumers to download and utilise the notification centre across the Windows ecosystem. So what's Unification all about? If you're not familiar with the name, or have somehow missed our previous coverage, it's a notification centre that pulls in and stores alerts and notifications from third-party apps.