Windows Phone, Smartphone | featured news

The coming months will be very important for Lumia since Nokia will have to work hard to ensure that the demand doesn’t fizzle out post the initial euphoria in order to stage a turnaround in its smartphone business.

Microsoft is working with Asian suppliers to test its own smartphone design, suggesting the computer-software giant is increasingly adopting a similar business model to that of rival Apple.

Google has said that it does not want the ruling in the Apple-Samsung patent lawsuit to "limit" consumers' access to Android devices... There has been speculation that the news could encourage handset makers to install the rival Windows Phone system.

The price of Nokia's flagship Lumia 900 Windows phone has been cut in half in the critical U.S. market, a little more than three months after the launch of the smartphone at AT&T stores.

Far from throwing their existing users under a truck marked Windows Phone 8, Microsoft have promised an update that will keep their handsets up to date, and add functionality to their smartphones. It's just a shame they didn't do very well in telling the world that bit of the Windows Phone story.

On Wednesday, Microsoft announced features of its upcoming Windows Phone 8 mobile OS, including built-in turn-by-turn navigation, a secure "wallet" system, a new, faster browser and live tiles that can be custom sized to better fit the Start screen. Perhaps most importantly, the company revealed that the next wave of Windows Phones will really be Windows Phones, because when Windows Phone 8 comes out, it will share a "common core" of software with Windows 8.

Nokia says that a bug is causing its latest smartphone to occasionally lose its data connection and is offering customers $100 (£63) in call credits. The Finnish manufacturer said a fix for the Lumia 900's "memory management issue" would be issued on 16 April.

Microsoft, struggling to dent the dominance of Apple and Google in the smartphone market, is aggressively courting app developers for its Windows Phone.

The Windows Phone Marketplace continues to grow at a steady rate. In little over a year, the Marketplace now has over 40,000 published apps according to an estimate from All About Windows Phone. This number is not the total available to consumers, but the total number that has been submitted to the online store. An estimated 5,500 apps are no longer available to consumers because they were removed by Microsoft or the developer.