Apps

There’s nothing quite like waking up to some screenshots of the new beta version of WhatsApp, the popular mulit-platform messaging client. We’ve already detailed some of the changes coming for the future Windows Phone 8 branch, an update that looks to be quite massive. But for those on 7.8, we’re told that version is getting updated as well.

Though the 7.8 branch of WhatsApp evidently won’t ditch the background audio API for connections (more on that below), it does bring some other new features and at least shows that the WhatsApp and Nokia teams aren’t forgetting 7.x users with the planned update.

Microsoft has unleashed this weeks Windows Phone Red Stripe Deals. Pricing has been slashed on the Xbox game Super Monkey Ball 2, glƏƏk!, and Hockey Nations PP.

For those not familiar, every week Microsoft discounts the pricing on a Windows Phone Xbox title as well as a app and game from independent developers. You easily identify them by the red stripe that surrounds the app/games Store icon tile.

Ain’t competition grand? In the race to have the most full featured Instagram client for Windows Phone, we now have a few developers working on various projects. While we told you Instagraph was updated today with Windows Phone 7.x support, Itsdagram is doing quite a few maneuvers too.

Daniel Gary, the developer behind the app, expects the paid version to go live this Friday. For those who paid for the early beta version, no worries as that carries over to this release so there will be no need to repurchase.

The latest Star Trek movie, Into Darkness,  is about to hit theaters and while we have the official Star Trek app, we also have the Star Trek Almanac. The Star Trek Almanac is from the same developers of the Star Wars Almanac and contains enough Star Trek knowledge to satisfy a horde of tribbles in heat.

The Star Trek Almanac is spread out just like it's Star Wars counterpart. You have pages covering a featured subject, videos, a sections page with links to people, vehicles, races and planets, as well as pages highlighting updated, popular and seldom seen Star Trek subjects.

We knew that Camera360 was a popular Windows Phone photography app but apparently it has become the first mobile photography app to pass 100 million global users.

Granted Windows Phone can't take claim to all these users with Camera360 being available over on iOS and Android devices. But still, 100 million is impressive.  

Creative Studio is a very nice photo editing app exclusive to the Nokia Lumia Windows Phone 8 devices. Creative Studio was updated today to version 5.0 and adds four new editing tools to the mix.

You have two new features to blur images, Focus Object and Radial/Tilt Shift. These features allow you to select areas of your photos to keep in focus and the areas you want to blur.

Nokia has updated their filter list on #2InstaWithLove app with the "Pureview" filter.  Likely in honor of all the news coming out of London.

The app, exclusive to the Lumia Windows Phone lineup, allows you to take photos, apply one of a handful of creative filters and then automatically adds the hashtag #2InstaWithLove to the photo, for sharing on your favorite social network.

Skype seems to get mixed responses from a lot of you. Microsoft bought the communication giant back in 2011. Since then Windows Phone users have dreamed of a seamless Skype experience on their devices. That hasn’t exactly happened, but it’s still nice to see the app get updates, like it did today.

Microsoft has been busy polishing up Skydrive. Starting today Skydrive will offer a timeline view of your photos to help you navigate through all your images a little more efficiently.

Skydrive users will also see improvements with respect to upload performance (twice as fast) with the Skydrive desktop app and full resolution uploads from your Windows Phone has become available to all markets.