Nokia Collection for Windows Phone

City Lens just keeps on getting better

Nokia appears to be in an update mood lately as this weekend we’ve noticed two of their big apps get some small updates.

Update: City Lens update was just a re-submission to fix an error with the Chinese Windows Phone Store

First up is City Lens, which is being bumped to version 1.10.1632. That’s a fairly low number change, so we’re going to assume that these are minor bug fixes and code optimizations to make it all run buttery smooth. In fact it does feel faster for us to load and calibrate but that could be placebo too.

We don’t think this is the ‘big’ new update that Nokia talked about last week—that one includes 3D icons and the ability filter items out of the line of site.

Viber with voice support coming to Nokia Lumia phones

This morning, Viber, the company behind the popular and free VOIP communication software announced the soon-to-be available Viber app for Windows Phone, adding to Viber Messenger. The new version of the app, developed with assistance from Nokia themselves, now supports HD voice calls, bringing the app up to full Viber standards.

Viber has had a long route to get to Windows Phone, especially since their service required deeper integration with the OS, which was not available for early iterations of the software. Now, in conjunction with Nokia, the new Viber app has full voice-over-IP protocol support, allowing users to make and receive free calls over their data connection. In addition, users can of course continue to use the free messenger aspect of the app.

During last week’s Nokia presser, the company unveiled a new list of exclusive apps coming to the Lumia line. While some details were given, today the company has taken to the blogs to go into even more information.

Most of the apps seem to feature NFC--the ability to wirelessly share information and data with other NFC-enabled devices. NFC for many is the future as there is no pairing and it's relatively low-power to use. Although it is still growing for commerce transactions, the ability to tap someone else's phone and instantly send them over info is tempting...

The latest version of App Highlights from Nokia

It sure has been a busy lately for Nokia and their various Lumia apps and that trend continues today with App Highlights v2.0.

As far as we can tell, this has been in beta over at the Nokia Beta Labs for a few weeks but it has now gone to the masses, judging by our update notification. So what are the changes?

Nokia has released its Counters app on the Marketplace for Lumia owners to utilise in keeping track of data, calls and messages used in a contracted month. The app was in beta, which we took a look at late July, and is a Windows Phone 7.x version of the DataSense app in Windows Phone 8 aka Apollo.

It may have take a while but Nokia Music is now available in the U.S. Windows Phone Marketplace. The music app is an exclusive to the Nokia Lumia Windows Phone and allows users to stream music from a collection of over 150 exclusive playlists.

In addition to the playlists, users can tap into a library of millions of songs and generate their own playlists.

It looks like Nokia still has a few more exclusive apps for their Lumia Windows Phones to release.

Entrance by AOL, the app appears to be an all-around media/pop-culture/movie/music app that even features augmented reality for finding movie theaters around you. In addition, you can watch movie trailers, listen to music (including full-length albums), stream more than 60K radio stations and you can evidently pin just about everything to your Start screen.

Nokia City Lens - from beta to official

It was just over two weeks ago that Nokia’s City Lens app, which allows users to find “things to do” using their compass, camera phone and accelerometer, received an update and now the official release is out. The augmented reality app has proven to be quite popular with users, so it's nice to see it finally go official.

Billed as version 1.1, the app is neither listed in the Nokia Collection nor available by search—but we managed to get the link for you folks to use now (as soon as the app propagates to your Marketplace servers).

NFL season is just around the corner and in just the nick of time, the ESPN Fantasy Football app has passed Marketplace certification and is headed to the Nokia Collection. The fantasy football app will be an exclusive for the Nokia Lumia Windows Phone lineup and should be live on the Marketplace in the next day or two.

ESPN Fantasy Football allows you to manage your fantasy teams and monitor player performance from multiple teams and leagues. You have the capability of following teams on game day with real-time FantasyCast scores and news.

Nokia's releasing a Lumia-edition of the Nimbuzz messaging app

Although we already have an official Nimbuzz app on the Windows Phone Marketplace, a service that seemingly was more popular years ago rather than in 2012, Nokia is evidently crafting their own take on the service.

In a recent article on Mashable, Nokia revealed that the new Nimbuzz app will launch “this Thursday” for their Lumia phones. The new version of the app was developed in conjunction with Nokia and it is expected to have some design differences with perhaps even more features than the current non-Lumia version.