Reviews

PhotoFunia is a very nice Windows Phone app for editing and customizing your Windows Phone photos. PhotoFunia won't let you crop, adjust color balance or sharpen your photos. Instead it offers over three hundred effects that can be applied to your photos.

From adding a vintage photo filter to slapping your photo on a magazine cover, PhotoFunia offers a tremendous resource for being creative with your photos. And it all happens from the cloud in that the effects are downloaded to your Windows Phone and applied to your images. While this keeps the app on the light side (only 3MB) it does make a WiFi or data connection a must.

PhotoFunia is a great option for applying effects to your photos and dare we say it is a must have app for your Windows Phone photography app library.

If opted for the black Nokia Lumia 920 and are looking for a way to add a little color to your Windows Phone, take a look at the Incipio Ultralight Hard Shell. Even if your Lumia 920 is already bright and colorful, the Incipio Hard Shell can give your phone a little variety.

Along with adding color to the Lumia 920, the Incipio Ultralight also offers a little protection to your phone from scratches and minor dings. Not sure how well it would protect the Lumia 920 from drops though.

Just over a year ago, Nokia and Electronic Arts announced an agreement to publish over 20 EA games exclusively for Nokia Lumia Windows Phones. Shortly thereafter, they revealed the full list of planned titles. The list contained some compelling brands like Dead Space, Madden, and FIFA. It also included more casual and less exciting titles such as The Game of Life and Connect 4.

We didn’t know whether they would all be Xbox-branded titles or not, but as it turns out, each game released so far has indeed been Xbox Live-enabled. I’d have loved to review The Game of Life and Connect 4 together, but the latter unfortunately doesn’t work on Windows Phone 8 right now and I won’t have a WP7 Lumia phone. So let’s look at LIFE (as I’ll shorten it) on its own merits.

Panel Panic! is a puzzle game for your Windows Phone that has a little bit of a Bejeweled flavor to it with a touch of Tetris. You have colored squares that you are trying to shuffle about to create a combo of three or more of the same color. As you play the game, the columns rise from the bottom adding more squares to the mix.

As you create the combos, the squares dissolve and you earn points. Panel Panic! has four game modes and it's a very enjoyable, challenging game for your Windows Phone.

Windows Phone Lockscreen apps seem to be appearing out of nowhere these days.  You have Befriend, Paper Shuffle, Lock Themes and now you can add Flickr to the growing number of wallpaper sources. Flickr Live Wallpaper is a lockscreen wallpaper app that pulls images from the popular online photography source.

The nice thing about Flickr Live Wallpaper is that you can name your photo source, use multiple sources and if need be, crop the photos so they fit a little better on the screen.

New Zealish developer Marker Metro hopped onboard the WP7 bandwagon prior to that platform’s launch; their indie project AlphaJax followed the platform’s debut a few months later. We’ve long considered it one of the most polished crossword games available, despite the lack of cross-platform support. Perhaps that polish and Windows Phone exclusivity are what caused Microsoft to pick up full publishing rights from the developer this year.

AlphaJax is now a free ad-supported Xbox title, with the previous free and paid versions set to go defunct at the end of the year. We’ve spent ample time with the new version in order to give you this extremely thorough review.

Soviet Kam is a Windows Phone 8 app that turns your Windows Phone camera into an classic film camera from the days of the Soviet Union. You swap out lens, flash and film types to add effects to the images you capture to give them a behind the Iron Curtain feel.  Soviet Kam adds faded colors, imperfect color balance, and weathered film effects that film pictures these cameras so fondly produced.

The interface takes a little time to get use to but Soviet Kam does a good job of giving your Windows Phone a look and feel of cameras from days of old.  You may get the urge for vodka shooters but Soviet Kam is a nice addition the the Windows Phone photography app lineup.

Smart Shoot is a Windows Phone 8 photography app, exclusive to the Nokia Lumia phones such as the Lumia 920.  Smart Shoot is a stand alone app much like the smart group shot feature in Nokia's Camera Extras for Windows Phone 7.5 and is designed to help you take better people or group pictures by correcting those distracting facial expressions.

Ever take a picture of your friends and someone has their eyes closed or they are looking away? If you catch it, you can always re-shoot the picture but then everyone gets impatient and they threaten to revolt. If you miss it, then you're stuck with a bad photo. Smart Shoot is designed to avoid these type situations.

Photo Maps is a Windows Phone 8 photography app that mixes your images with a map detailing the location of the photo. Photo Maps isn't like Image Map where your photos are mapped out based on where they were taken. Instead, Photo Maps lets you take a photo and adds small Bing map of your location to the image.

Maps choices can be set from within Photo Maps' settings and you can choose between road, aerial, hybrid and terrain map views. Camera controls are rather limited in that you can only turn on/off the flash and toggle between the rear/front cameras from within the app.

Star Chart is not only an educational app for Windows 8 it's also a neat one. Star Chart will help you explore the solar system by not only providing you a detailed map of the sky but it will also pull up information on the planets, stars, and travel forwards and backwards in time to see how things have changed or will change.

While Star Chart is available for Windows 8, it really shines on tablets such as the Surface RT.  Star Chart is a very nice app for those curious about astronomy as well as for those who are seasoned explorers.

The Xbox Windows Phone lineup has a spotty track record with time management games. Sally’s Salon was fantastic, but then it was followed up by the less impressive (and more bug-filled) Sally’s Spa. Both titles wore their feminine themes on their sleeves, making them less appealing to certain insecure male gamers. The only male-targeted genre entry, Star Wars Cantina got itself delisted last year, depriving WP gamers of the precious Star Wars license and lots of grinding.

Thankfully Nokia, along with developer Big Stack Studios and publisher Chillingo have come along with a more gender neutral time management title: Jet Set Go (not to be confused with SEGA’s Jet Set Radio). Not only can both guys and gals appreciate the game’s travel industry theme, but it even outdoes all the previously mentioned games in variety.

Jet Set Go is a timed Nokia exclusive though, so only Lumia owners can enjoy it at present. If that includes you, read on to see whether it’s worth a buy. Everyone else can come along too and find out what you’re missing!

Pirate's Plunder is Flight Control styled game where you direct trade ships to the appropriate port, avoid high seas collisions, pirates, sea monsters and other dangers along the way.

Along with the main objective of docking your ships, there are a handful of side games with Pirate's Plunder that crop up to keep things interesting. Animations are nice, game play challenging, but the game has a cluttered feel to it. Still Pirate's Plunder has a bit of appeal to it and is worth a try.