Tips

Google and Windows Phone haven’t always had the rosiest of relationships. Head to the Marketplace and you’ll find a whopping single app from the Mountain View tech giant. Whatever, we can do without them and their 1st party support when we have developers picking up the slack. However, a lot of you still rely on Gmail as your web email and have no plans to switch to Outlook anytime soon. So here is a super simple trick to make your experience a bit better on your new Lumia 920 or 8X.

If there is one area we hope to see Windows Phone grow in 2013 it's in third party accessories. Nokia's Lumia phones have the best chance of that since they're quite pervasive and well known as far as branding.

Redditor l1v32r1d3BmX (catchy name, dear sir!) has serendipitously discovered that those iPhone lens attachments (which work by magnetic adhesion) also happen to work on his Lumia 920. The attachments are made by a few companies--a lot coming from China as cheap knock offs--allow wide-angle and macro enhancements to the built in camera. As it happens to be, the Lumia 920's camera housing is magnetic, which is either due to design or perhaps the optical image stabilization (OIS) setup. 

Update: To clarify, the Touchstone charger doesn't actually charge the Lumia 920. It just actives the charging protocol but due to a mismatch in frequencies, it does not actually do anything. In fact, as webOSNation's Derek Kessler tells us, it could even damage your phone were you to leave it on there for an extended period of time. In other words, don't do this!

The Nokia Lumia 920 (and 820 with backplate) uses the Qi standard for wireless charging. In simplest terms that means universal charging plates (as opposed to some proprietary system) can be mass produced and the 920 will work with future products. It also means that past wireless charging systems, like Palm's Touchstone charging dock also work with the Lumia 920 as demonstrated in the video above.

Backing up personal data, including SMS conversations, has always been absent from Windows Phone. We’ve previously looked at how the Windows Phone Connector for Mac enables such functionality to a degree as well as a Homebrew Windows backup manager, but it’s always best to have such a feature built into Windows Phone.

In Windows Phone 8 Microsoft has implemented a backup facility that automatically stores SMS conversations and app list (including settings) information, as well as options to control how Windows Phone deals with uploading photos and videos captured using the handset. Using Microsoft’s cloud services, conversations and app settings are all automatically stored.

Do you have Windows Phone 8 (see review)? Okay, well probably not quite yet but if you are about to get one and you have some Bing points sitting by (you know, those things you get for every time you do a search using Bing on your computer), you can use 'em for the Windows Phone Store.

Yup, Bing Rewards has two special Windows Phone 8 offers on hand--one for 170 credits ($1.25) and one for 525 credits ($5). Redeeming them will turn into credits/voucher for the Store, which you can then use to buy Windows Phone apps...

The Kid's Corner is a new feature in Windows Phone 8 where Microsoft has added controls for parents and guardians to effectively manage what functionality, apps and games children (or other people) have access to when using the mobile device. It's activated by swiping left on the lock screen.

As Windows Phone users, we are blessed with a handsome, dare we say it, world class cloud storage service slotted right in, SkyDrive.

SkyDrive is baked into Windows Phone, allowing all sorts of wonderful uses, uploading the camera roll automatically, storing your OneNote files or just storing good old Office documents. The team at SkyDrive have been opeing up the service and encouraging developers to take advantage of the space with new applications and services. IFTTT is just such an application and it might well be exactly what you’re looking for.

Backing up Windows Phones on Macs is a breeze

We've already established that backing up your Windows Phone can prevent any unnecessary headache due to the loss of personal data. There's no guarantee you'll always remember to take the Windows Phone out the pockets before bundling clothes into the washing machine. We recently took a look at how to back up Windows Phone using a third-party Windows tool since Microsoft doesn't offer said functionality in Zune.

In that article we incorrectly believed that the Windows Phone 7 Connector for Mac doesn't feature any backup facility. Turns out, it certainly does (officially too) and shares the exact same functionality as the tool we used in our previous how to, except we're now on a Mac. It's odd that Microsoft would provide Apple Mac users the means to successfully carry out backing up their Windows Phones without using third-party software, yet Windows consumers are left in the dark for now.