News

We've received a tip from a reader that Nokia is conducting a consumer study of a product and is seeking a handful of participants. It's touted as an opportunity to provide feedback to help the company improve its products. Nokia is listening to the cries of consumers. This could well be nothing, but it's worth noting, especially if you're interested and have been contacted.

Samsung has announced that its expanding the ATIV brand to include its Windows based PC products. Originally used for its Windows Phone 8 hardware, Samsung states it will use the brand to represent the convergence of PC and mobile technologies. This will essentially unite all Samsung Windows products under a single umbrella. If you're now looking at Samsung ATIV hardware, it's running a version of Windows.

Huawei's Ascend W1 has been out for a while, and is gaining market presence in more countries at the moment. Today, the OEM quietly rolled out the CDMA version of W1 in China, starting with the city of Chengdu. The CDMA phone is made for China Telecom, the third largest mobile carrier in China, and the only CDMA carrier out there. The Ascend W1 in CDMA reportedly costs CNY 1,290 (US$ 210), about 30% more expensive than the WCDMA version, which is currently priced CNY 998 on popular e-commerce website 360buy.com.

If you’re a Verizon customer and want a new Windows Phone right now you can’t go wrong with the HTC 8X. Forget any upcoming Lumia 928, you want a new phone today. If so, check out this crazy awesome deal for the 8X in black.

Is HTC having a fire sale? Maybe. All we know is their solid and dapper HTC 8X Windows Phone is being offered via Groupon for a very reasonable $349 with free shipping. That’s not for an AT&T version but a fully unlocked one with LTE bands (though those won’t work on AT&T).

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.

A little while ago we mentioned the AT&T Digital Life app that allows you to control various aspects of your home from your Windows Phone. With the service you can control everything from locking/unlocking your front door to turning on the lights to monitoring your security system.  The problem back in March, when the app first appeared, was that the Digital Life service wasn't available.

Today AT&T announced that the Digital Life service has launched in fifteen U.S. Markets including Atlanta, Austin, Texas, Boulder, Colo., Chicago, Dallas, Denver, Houston, Los Angeles, Miami, Philadelphia, Riverside, Calif., San Francisco, Seattle, St. Louis and select areas of the New York and New Jersey metropolitan area. AT&T plans to introduce Digital Life in up to 50 markets by the end of 2013.

Gameloft’s Ice Age Village just launched for Xbox Windows Phone 8 yesterday. If you enjoy the town-building genre or the Ice Age movies, it’s a fun and addictive game. It’s also worlds better than Bug Village, so don’t let that early Windows Phone 7 misfire put you off from trying the game.

All that said, we have some good news and bad news to share with you now. This article covers the bad news. One of Ice Age Village’s advancements over Bug Village, its social integration is just about completely broken at launch. Read on to learn about the kinks in the works and whether we can expect Gameloft to take care of the situation