windows phone

LG has informed CNET the company has no immediate plans to support Windows Phone 8 with new hardware. While the company remains open to using Microsoft's platform in the future, it doesn't see high enough demand for another smartphone to be released. This sounds odd since Samsung (also arguably a rather conservative OEM partner) is pushing its ATIV S and Odyssey Windows Phones.

It's contest time again! With the seasons changing -- soon, we hope, as it's been a cold winter -- and spring fast approaching, we're teaming up with NVIDIA to award two Tegra-powered Windows 8 RT Tablets (1 Surface RT with keyboard and 1 ASUS VivoTab RT with keyboard dock) to a couple of lucky Windows Phone Central members.*

This week Skype has been rolling out a beta of a feature called Video Messages to users. Basically you can send video messages to contacts that are up to three minutes in length. The internet has had hints of this feature since early December, so you’re stoked to try it out on your Windows Phone right? Nope. No love from Skype for any Windows users – desktop or phone.

The International Data Corporation (IDC) has posted its Q4 2012 global results of smartphone trends and it nicely reflects yesterday’s report from Gartner. The data is both a mix of good news and bad news for Windows Phone, showing that year-over-year (YoY) growth has increased by 150% going from 1.5% market share to 2.6% in late 2012. That’s certainly a positive sign but in the context of the rest of the smartphone race, it’s still a drop in the bucket.

Android and iOS accounted for a massive 91.1% of all smartphone sales, which is quite astonishing. BlackBerry, while still ahead of Windows Phone (3.2% versus 2.6% for Q4) took a drastic drop from last year when it had a more comfortable 8.1% market share.  That’s a -43% fall for the Waterloo company, which of course can be ascribed to holding on to BlackBerry 7 for so long.

Confession: I personally started “February Fitness Month” back in mid-January and have been regularly exercising for the last few years, including a more aggressive cardio routine starting last summer. Because of this, I’ve been using the Nike FuelBand ($150) and Fitbit One ($99) for quite some time and I can definitely tell you which one I think is the best.

While I won’t do a complete teardown I will give you the pros and cons of each and as you will see, the decision between the two is very easy.

The cross-platform developer advertising network AdDuplex has released data for the month of February which details some interesting findings and trends for Windows Phone. We've previously looked at data leading up and closing off 2012, but what about the start of this year? We've also recently covered Windows Phone 8 taking over Windows Phone 7 hardware in the US, but how does this reflect worldwide?

We've known for a while that Microsoft will be working on its first set of updates for Windows 8, codenamed "Blue". But now, according to ZDNet, Microsoft is said to be expanding the coverage of said update to reach beyond the realm of Windows. Blue is also referring to Windows Phone, cloud services (SkyDrive, Outlook.com, etc.) and Windows Server. It's a wave of upgrades which are not believed to be arriving on the very same day, but very close to one another.

One big bummer the past few years watching the mobile landscape has been the lack of official Windows Phone numbers from Microsoft. Things like marketshare and the amount of devices sold has been more elusive than Big Foot and the Loch Ness Monster. We’re always having to base conclusions on analytics from firms that are often nothing more than speculation – good speculation, but still not official.

That said, here is a new report stating that Windows Phone has surpassed BlackBerry for 3rd place, at least in the US.

According to Business Insider, Microsoft is interested in buying Appcelerator (www.appcelerator.com). Appcelerator is a mobile app cloud company that powers some 50,208 applications installed on over 111 million devices, which is roughly 10 percent of the world’s smartphone apps.

Appcelerator’s development product, Titanium, provides an impressive amount of tools for developers to create and manage mobile apps operating systems including iOS, Android, Windows Phone, BlackBerry, and HTML5. Compaies like eBay, PayPal and Wall Street Journal are just a few examples of who’s already on board with the program.