We’ve got some good news and some bad news to those of you owning or planning to purchase a Windows Phone smartphone without a Nokia logo on it. The good news is that the Finns will be making their Nokia Maps service available to all WP devices, no matter the manufacturer.

The bad news is that the voice-guided navigation will remain an exclusive feature of the Nokia Lumia lineup at least for the time being. The voice-guided navigation is available through a separate app (Nokia Drive) on Windows Phone, instead of being integrated into the Maps and that separate app won’t be making its way to the Windows Marketplace. Read more »

Nokia continues with the aggressive market campaign of its Windows Phone-running Lumia smartphones. The more expensive member of the duo, the Nokia Lumia 800, has just been pronounced the official smartphone of the UK X Factor talent show.

Each of the finalists got a brand new Nokia Lumia 800 and as you can you’ll see from some videos in a minute they really loved it. Given that Nokia is trying really hard to impress the younger audience, where most of the heavy smartphone users belong, you can see where this is coming from. Read more »

The HTC Radar decided to drop by for a visit today and we thought we’d shoot it on video. It’s a sleek aluminum unibody device, running on the latest version of Windows Phone – Mango.

We’ll get started with the Radar to bring you a full review. In the meantime you can check out the video below. Read more »

We conclude our coverage of the second day of Nokia World 2011 with a portion of benchmarks of the newly announced WP smartphones. The Nokia Lumia 800 and Lumia 710 were both present so we could check out how those 1.4Ghz Snapdragon chipsets fare.

To put their performance into perspective we threw in the HTC Radar and an HTC 7 Mozart running the Mango update into the mix. The Radar has a chipset very similar to the two Lumia smartphones, but its Scorpion CPU is clocked at 1GHz. It should show us what kind of an advantage the extra 400MHz of clock speeds actually bring. The 7 Mozart not only has a slower CPU than the two Nokia smartphones, but also a weaker GPU (Adreno 200, instead of Adreno 205) so we’ll see how much of a difference that makes. Read more »

What we have here is something unheard of before. Two phones with the same body, but extremely different personalities. On the left side we have the freshly announced Nokia Lumia 800, the company’s first Windows Phone 7-running smartphone, and on the right, we have the Nokia N9 – the first, and unfortunately, probably the last MeeGo-running device for the Finnish phone manufacturer.

Now, these two are quite alike on the outside with their unique polycarbonate unibodies (which I’m extremely fond of, I admit) but the hardware on the inside couldn’t be more different. Read more »

Stephen Elop announced today the new family of Nokia Lumia Windows Phone 7.5 Mango-running devices, the Lumia 800 and Lumia 710.

And now we are going to briefly answer the question you all are asking right now: which one should I go for? And here is the answer. Read more »

During our hands-on time with the Nokia Lumia 800 at the Nokia World event we managed to put its camera to a test, as well. We returned with a bunch of photos, which we are now about to present for your viewing pleasure.

The image quality is a story of two parts here with the Lumia 800. At pixel level they might not be the most impressive around as the amount of detail and the noise levels are only average. However when downsized for viewing on a computer screen or the phone itself they are really impressive. Read more »

We just found out that the Nokia Sea Ray, the first Windows Phone handset from the Finnish manufacturer, will supposedly be called ‘Sun’. There are at least a couple of other WP7 Nokia phones in the rumor mill and one of them might be called ‘Lumia’.

Occasional Gamer, who develop games for Windows Phone, have a stats page with a long list of phones. One of them is the Sea Ray, but there’s also the Nokia Lumia 800. Read more »

With the holiday season fast approaching every carrier is trying to get their lineup in the best shape possible. When the big spending starts, it’s best that you have the hottest devices for people to splash their cash on right?

We just got hold of a leaked T-Mobile US roadmap and the we can confirm that the carrier has a couple of buys months ahead of it. There will be two hot new droids on the T-Mobile shelves as soon as this month with the Galaxy Tab 10.1 keeping them company. Read more »

Nokia bet the house on the Microsoft deal, so they’re trying to make sure all goes well once their first Windows Phone 7 handset launches. They are reportedly talking to app developers, trying to lure them in and expand the app catalogue of the Windows Phone 7 Marketplace.

Microsoft is also trying to grow the developer base for WP7 through promotions of their own, so devs can cash in on the incentives from both companies. Read more »

Following the introduction of Windows Phone 7.5 Mango, Microsoft have dubbed the next iteration of their mobile platform ‘Apollo’ and they’ve taken to asking their users as to what features they would like to see as the OS develops.

For starters, it’s great to see Microsoft taking this approach, if you’re in camp Android but have used iOS or WP7, you might have found that restrictive elements of both OS’s intrude on your general phone usage from time to time. Read more »

We have an LG Optimus 7 that’s been lying aimlessly around the office ever since we finished off its review back in last November. It was still stuck on the original WP7 build since it always refused to update. We were really starting to think there was something wrong with it but honestly, we didn’t really care enough to research it.

Until yesterday that is, when the Windows Phone Mango update finally went live and we all turned our heads to the forgotten Optimus 7 up there on the shelf. And being the lucky boy that I am (I’m the rookie around here), I got the nasty job of finding a way to update it no matter what.

Well, I’m telling you, I was at loose ends with this task. I spent several hours of my time reading forums and trying what not.. until… the solution just popped up in my RSS reader. Thanks to this great tip, I managed to get our Optimus 7 go through two separate updates before I finally got to the coveted Mango as well (and saved my job along the way). Read on to see how. Read more »

Every major smartphone OS has its own go-to place for apps and the biggest among them – Android and iOS have enjoyed online appstores for a long time. Finally, Windows Phone has joined the ranks of those with online access with its own WP Web Marketplace.

The web Marketplace is now up and running and offers purchasable and free apps at the same time. Users can buy apps with the credit cards they’ve listed in their Windows Live IDs after which the Marketplace will send SMS or email to the device itself with download links. Read more »

The much anticipated WP 7.5 update – Mango is scheduled to start rolling out in a week or two says Eric Hautala (General Manager, Customer Experience Engineering at Microsoft).

When the update is released users will also get some model-specific software from the manufacturers of their smartphones. That is required as Mango is tuned to work with each phone and its apps perfectly. The update is said to arrive in the next couple of weeks . Read more »