Late last year Nokia announced that it will be closing unauthorized access to Navifirm, the online repository of firmwares for Nokia phones. And that time has finally come. Navifirm was often a source of firmware for Symbian and later Windows Phone handsets before it was rolled out over the air, some times before it was even official.

From now on, you’ll need a Nokia Online login to download firmware. Read more »

Microsoft turned in its report card for the first quarter of the year (which is the third quarter on the company’s financial calendar). The total revenue for the quarter was $20.49 billion with net income growing to $6.06 billion, 19% up from the same quarter the previous year. That was a bit better than analysts predicted.

The company’s CFO, Peter Klein, mentioned that Windows 8 will be coming to smaller devices (presumably with the 8.1 Blue update), but said nothing about Microsoft branding one of them as a Surface device (the rumor mill thinks has it that there is a 7” Surface in the pipeline). Read more »

We’ve heard about this before but it doesn’t hurt to mention it yet again – Instagram is coming to Windows Phone. So says the official Nokia Sweden account on Facebook in response to one user. The response reads roughly like this – “Instagram is on the way but can’t give an exact date right now”. The comment has been taken down, which does add an air of legitimacy to the information (or just the opposite, depending how you look at it).

Last month, a Nokia Sweden account tweeted that an app for WP is under development, which fueled the users expectations. The question is – do Windows Phone users really care if Instagram is coming? Read more »

The Nokia Lumia 520 is the cheapest smartphone of the Lumia range in existence and Nokia dubs it as the “The more fun smartphone”. But for how long can the “fun” last? Our extensive battery test comes into play to answer this very question.

For the money, the Lumia 520 isn’t a badly spec’d phone. It is built around a 4″ display and features a 1GHz dual-core Krait processor with Adreno 305 graphics on Snapdragon S4 Plus platform (MSM8227). Read more »

The prices of the Windows 8 touch devices and laptops will soon see a price drop, according to Intel executives. The upcoming Windows 8 devices will be designed based on the Intel’s quad-core Bay Trial chipset, which will allow for far more attractive pricing.

Intel’s upcoming Bay Trail chipset is a redesign of the company’s Atom micro architecture and the newest chipset in the making is said to be the most powerful Atom processor to date. Read more »

Over at the AllThingsD Dive Into Mobile conference WhatsApp CEO Jan Koum took to the stage to discuss the app’s position, users and drop a bomb that his app is “bigger than Twitter” when looking at the active monthly users.

Although the two platforms differ in the way the work – Twitter being more of a social network where your tweets are public and WhatsApp being a peer-to-peer messaging service – Jan Koum said WhatsApp has more than 200 million active users a month, thus besting Twitter. Read more »

Ever since the Skype app was released on the Windows Phone 8 platform late last year, it has been under the beta tag. With the release of the new 2.5 update, the app has finally shed that tag.

Unfortunately, there is not a whole lot of new stuff here to see. Other than stability and performance updates, the only major change includes the ability to see toast notifications for your friends using Messenger. Read more »

The Lumia PR2.0 update for Windows Phone 8 has been visiting the rumorlands for quite some time now. The update was supposed to bring double-tap to wake the screen feature and an always on display option.

Today a new info joins the previous rumors – the Smart Camera Lens app will be part of the PR2.0 update as well. Read more »

The Nokia Lumia 520 is the Finn’s entry-level Windows Phone designed to win over those on a budget.

It features Nokia’s exclusive apps (like Here Drive, App Highlights, Nokia Music, etc.), costs around $180 sans contract and is equipped with a 4″ WVGA (480 x 800) IPS display, 8 gigs of internal storage with the option of a microSD expansion and not least of all a 5 MP snapper. Read more »

Nokia has taken it upon themselves to provide its WP8-powered Lumia devices with a new Storage Check app, allowing you to see exactly how much space is being taken up by your apps, media and files.

The app extends the functionality of the default storage management app in Windows Phone, allowing you to see exactly what’s taking up all your precious gigabytes, and even remove apps you don’t want. Read more »

The Nokia Lumia 720 is the thinnest Lumia yet at 9mm, but it’s tied with the Lumia 920 for biggest battery in the lineup at 2,000mAh. The Qualcomm MSM8227 chipset is very efficient though as we already saw with the Lumia 620, which only had a 1,300mAh battery.

Will that make the Nokia Lumia 720 is the WP8 battery endurance champ? Read more »

Microsoft’s Windows Phone has been trying hard as of late to stand apart in the smartphone race, and one way it does this is through the use of its Live Tile interface.

If you want an even more unique look, there are a few neat apps out there that let you use custom images to create a collage of all your tiles. This way, you can add some personal flair to your Start screen and make it look cool at the same time. Read more »

Microsoft’s Scroogled campaign has been going on for a while now. For those not in the know, the Scroogled campaign aims to highlight some of the nefarious practices at Google, such as going through your mail to offer you relevant ads in Gmail.

The company has now released two new videos that now take potshots at the Android privacy issues. Through the two videos, Microsoft is highlighting how every time you purchase an app through the Google Play Store, your personal information, such as your full name, email and your address, is passed on through Google to the app developers, who may use it for malicious purposes. Of course, the underlying message here is that you really, really should be using Windows Phone and Bing. Read more »

Nokia’s recent innovation known as High Amplitude Audio Capture (HAAC), allows you to record audio in noisy locations and then reproduce the audio with minimal background noise.

The novelty behind the High Amplitude Audio Capture is a microphone with two different sensitivity levels for recording. Later, the dual channel combines to give a broad dynamic range that sounds clear even if the audio is recorded with lots of distortion. Read more »

Rightware, the developers of performance analysis and performance benchmarking tools have a launched Basemark X, a professional performance tool built on the Unity 4 real world gaming engine.

Basemark X allows you to evaluate cross platform comparisons of game graphics performance across Android, iOS and Windows Phone 8 devices and is specifically designed to test ARM-based mobile processors. Read more »