Tips

Tesco’s in the past were perhaps a little confused about Windows Phone. That is all set to change as they are now kindly offering the Nokia Lumia 710 and the Lumia 800 for use on their pay monthly tariffs. The Lumia 800 is being offered free of charge provided you are willing to commit to a two-year contract at £22.50 per month, available here.

The Lumia 800 is not alone in its fight for the hearts and minds of the UK’s grocery buying punters, the 710 is here too. The Lumia 710 sports the same internals as the Lumia 800 but is a little more budget friendly due to its construction techniques. Tesco are offering that on a similar 24 month contract for £20.00 a month.

If you are someone that prefers to have his or her phone without the contract shackles, Tesco offer the Lumia 800 to purchase on Pay as you go for a hefty £359.97. I will note that you can buy the device cheaper on sites such as Expansys.

Tesco mobile stocking Windows Phones is great news for the platform. Lumia handsets have proven to be popular with the phone buying public. From a recent article, it would seem that the Lumia brand has in fact overtaken Windows Phone in terms of brand awareness.

An interesting theme is emerging in that retailers are not stocking HTC, Samsung or ZTE devices. I think this has to do with the scale of advertising the Lumia devices have received. Nokia have solid relations with retailers and they seem to be capable of leveraging that advantage to push Windows Phone to places it has not been before. I wonder if Microsoft’s other partners had been more active in pushing Windows Phone earlier, instead of their Android offerings would we have seen more traction today?

Tesco as a company have a good relationship with Microsoft, so one has to wonder why it’s taken them so long to get to Windows Phone. After all, they have been offering a Tescos shopping app in the marketplace almost from the start.

So, will any of you be popping in to your local Tesco’s to buy some milk and a Lumia in the near future? Do you think the recent Hollyoaks tie up is getting retailers excited about taking on Windows Phones? Why do you think Tesco are offering this now with Windows Phone 8 around the proverbial corner? I am always keen to hear your thoughts in the comments!

Source : Tesco

By now Nokia’s commitment to the Windows Phone OS should be well established. What has made their role so vital to Microsoft is not just the hardware they’ve created (4 phones in 12 months) but the support they’re providing to the platform from all directions.

Whether it’s original OEM apps, exclusive titles, developer support tools, mapping data, dispersing thousands of free Lumias to devs or their promotions, Nokia has gone beyond their competitors in many ways.

One of those is one that may not be too familiar with Windows Phone Central readers but is just as impressive: Nokia’s SmartStart program.

What’s SmartStart? We get a behind the scenes glimpse of Nokia’s growing support system for new Lumia owners and share what’s coming next…

Yesterday, Microsoft released a new app for Windows 7 PCs called Bing Desktop (it was in beta for the last few weeks). It's an interesting move as Google as had their Desktop app for years (it's also a little creepy as it can search your hard disk).

Luckily, Bing Desktop does no such thing and darn it all, it's awesome to boot.

For one, it can download the Bing wallpaper daily to your PC and makes it your desktop background. Next, there's a nifty Bing Search bar that sits on your desktop and allows super quick access to Microsoft's increasingly awesome search service. Pro tip: pin it to the top of your screen and you can tap to bring it down anywhere for quick lookups-- Microsoft really nailed the interaction here in our opinion.

Enough chit chat though, go and download it here and read the Bing Team's description of it here. We think it's awesome though. You?

We always like to spice things up around here with some kitsch and rock it like it was the early 80's (we are that old after all). So it's with pleasure to find these wallpapers created by Go Windows Go for your Windows Phone lock screen.

You get three colors to choose from: black, white and navy blue, which should suit most of your needs. If they sound like something you'd like, head over to Go Windows Go to grab 'em.

Last week the Windows Phone Blog made a nice little cheat sheet for those emoticons in Text messaging--you know, when you type a ':-)' and it turns automatically into a smiley. From that post we learned from Microsoft's Michael Stroh that while comprehensive, that list was still only partial of all the ones our phones could recognize (and you added some of your own in comments).

Now, Michael is back with a second list of more obscure emoji and boy are they unique. We've barely memorized more than a handful from last week and now we need to find room for "cat", "gift" and "the moon". Kudos to anyone who can do these on the fly and we'll still put out a soft-call for an app to store all of these for quick access, should anyone want to take the challenge.

Source: Windows Phone Blog

Storage is an important aspect of your Windows Phone. Whether you're just downloading a few apps and games, taking pictures & video, or (like me) loading a whole load of music onto your device ready for your commutes into work, you need to have the gigabytes to hold that information on your phone.  However, how much storage memory is needed can vary from individual to individual.

So when you're making the decision on which phone to spend your hard earned money on, and particularly when you are committing to a long term contract, you should be considering the advertised storage on the device. Remember that storage on a Windows Phone cannot be supplemented with a micro SD card.

It's fairly common knowledge that the advertised '16GB' or '8GB' of storage is not the amount you actually end up with, the amount varies based on the filesystem, type of storage, and system files. But what you may not realise is just how much of a difference there is between some of the new 2nd generation phones out there on the market right now.

Luckily, here at WPCentral we've got you covered, and have put together the list below which shows the reported "Total Storage" for each of our review devices.  "Total Storage" is essentially the storage space your Windows Phone can see or be used for file storage.

 

HTC Titan 16GB 12.89GB HTC Radar 8GB 6.54GB Samsung Focus S 16GB 14.07GB Samsung Focus Flash 8GB 6.67GB Nokia Lumia 800 16GB 13.8GB

As you can see, certainly with devices claiming '16GB' of storage there's quite a divide, and if every single bit counts to you, it would definitely be worth considering these figures when you're picking up a new Windows Phone.

Is your device showing a different figure?  Check the 'about' screen in your phone's settings and then sound off in the comments!

By now, if you have ever sent a text message on Windows Phone, you would have noticed that a simple :-) gets turned into a full on smiley face on the phone. It's not groundbreaking but shows that Microsoft is paying attention to detail and it certainly enhances the experience.

Every once in awhile we get a "tip" on someone finding a new "emoji" (we still call 'em emoticons) while texting. Well, Microsoft has thrown together a whole sheet of the most commonly used ones. Yes, there are even more to be found, which is crazy.

While these are super awesome, we're hard pressed to imagine we're going to memorize them, let alone be able to bang 'em out quickly in a text message from memory. But we like a challenge! (Side note: we have conjured up "vampire bat" on occasion, which was...odd).

Source: Windows Phone Blog

Here's a neat little trick. If you have Windows 7 and Internet Explorer 9 installed, you can browse over to WindowsPhone.com and pin that site to your Taskbar for quick access. Simply drag-n-drop the icon in the address field to your Task Bar and you'll have a quick shortcut right to the new Web Marketplace. What's even cooler though is the built in jump-list that you get by right-clicking that shortcut. In short, it'll bring up the site's various sub-sections, like Marketplace, My Phone, How To, etc. for super quick access.

Neat-o.

via: Windows Phone Daily

If you're like us, we're getting ready for that big ol' hurricane Irene (we're in Manhattan now, Long Island tomorrow--yikes). Since we're pretty positive we're going to lose electricity for some amount of time, even up to days, getting all the power out of our Windows Phone is key.

One easy method "Mango" users can enable now is the Battery Saver feature by going to Settings --> Battery Saver --> "Turn on Battery Saver now, until my next charge". The phone will of course still work, but background services and push email will be disabled--which is a great way to squeeze out a few more hours from your phone while you pray for the lights to come back on.

It also wouldn't hurt to bump your backlight to "Low" under Settings as well. Good luck everyone.