LinkedIn alongside Facebook and Twitter were all neatly integrated into Windows Phone 7.5 with the Mango update late last year. Unfortunately contrary to the last two social platforms, LinkedIn still wasn’t present in the Windows Phone Marketplace with an official application. This is now a thing of the past thanks to the release of the official LinkedIn application today. The app features most of the features you can expect to find in a AAA piece of software and is described as follows:

Get on-the-go access to your professional network with LinkedIn for Windows Phone. Find and connect with more than 150M members worldwide, read the latest industry news, keep up-to-date with your groups, explore jobs you might be interested in, and share content with your network from anywhere.

You can download directly from here.

In case you have missed it; Most of the latest Nokia Tango ROMs for the Nokia Lumia 610, Lumia 710, Nokia Lumia 800 and Lumia 900 have traded the regular Makretplace Tile with a new Nokia branded one. This may come as a surprise to most people but those of you who have been following me know that Nokia and Microsoft have been working on a Nokia Branded Marketplace ever since the partnership was put in place more than a year ago. I actually made a post about it when I found out some interesting words in the partnership press release and several job offerings which described the existence to two unified application stores.

The Icon change is probably only the begging so it remains to be seen if others items or section of the Marketplace will offer Nokia specific features exclusive to the Lumia handset. It should also be noted that the Nokia Collection section has strangely vanished from by Nokia Lumia 800 (running Mango) just yesterday so there must be something going on in the background right about now.

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Nokia is all in with Windows Phone and today’s software partnership announcement is one more proof of this. The company has announced several partnership that will net Nokia Lumia owners with exclusive applications in the coming weeks and months plus the birth of a new development team at Rovio in Finland (makers of Angry Birds) to develop and port all of theirs games to Nokia Lumia handsets and even other Windows Phone devices. Nice isn’t it? Here’s a  list of what coming:

PGA TOUR – The PGA TOUR app will be available exclusively to Nokia Lumia owners from June 2012. Developed in partnership with Nokia, the app provides scores and player information and also interactive, augmented coverage of the action from the events on a hole-by-hole basis.

ESPN – The exclusive ESPN Sports Hub will receive a number of updates over current months, bringing greater personalisation options, such as panoramas dedicated to your favourite teams. A Windows Phone version of the ESPN Fantasy Football app will launch exclusively on Lumia this autumn.

EA Mobile: FIFA, Madden, NBA Jam, Tiger Woods, Mirror’s Edge and Yahtzee coming to the Windows Phone platform (not exclusive to Lumias apparently)

Rovio – The company is building a dedicated development team to create titles for Nokia Lumia and the wider Windows Phone ecosystem, with the goal of publishing all future Rovio titles – including Angry Birds Space – on the platform as quickly as possible.

“Nokia is one of our longest-standing partners, and Windows Phone and Lumia are of strategic importance to Rovio. We are very committed to bring our games to Lumia devices, and are looking forward to delighting our fans on the Windows Phone platform,” said Mikael Hed, CEO of Rovio.

Groupon – Groupon is working on an extensive upgrade of its Windows Phone app, bringing a new augmented reality deal-finder function. It will be exclusive to Lumia owners for six months following its launch in Summer 2012.

TripDots – This is a an app that helps motorists optimise their fuel efficiency, awarding achievements as well as cost-savings in a wider social game while maintaining people’s privacy.

PayPal – Nokia and PayPal are working together to create a Windows Phone app to allow secure, fast and easy payments through PayPal wherever you may be.

AOL Entertainment Hub – Exclusive to Nokia Lumia owners for six months from launch, this AOL app brings the cream of AOL’s content to Nokia Lumia owners. That includes the ability to play any of its 55,000 SHOUTcast radio stations, streaming albums with Listening Party. movie trailers and more.

TIME – the world’s largest weekly circulation magazine comes to Windows Phone. The app will deliver content from Time.com to mobile making full use of the UI’s possibilities, such as alerts for breaking news, the ability to share news items with your contacts in the People Hub and Live Tiles.

NewsWeek – NewsWeek is creating a Windows Phone version of The Daily Beast, its digital content partner. Designed for consuming the latest news while you’re on the move, the app allows you to access the latest stories in seconds. It also includes access to The Cheat Sheet – a one-stop shop for leading stories across the globe.

Continue reading: Nokia announces Exclusive applications and games for Lumia handsets and other Windows Phones: Angry Birds Space, EA Mobile games, Groupon, Paypal,

Nokia has just release the beta version of the Nokia City Lens Augmented Reality browser exclusively for the Lumia line of Windows Phones (the app is already available on the Symbian). If you don’t know what City Lens is then the simple answer would be to say that it’s Nokia’s own versions of Wikitude or Layar (or even ScanSeach on the LG Optimus 7 / Quantum Windows Phones). Nothing really groundbreaking here but the upside here is the software polish that we have come to expect from Nokia’s latest software and services. It simply works (even though it’s still in Beta) and nicely integrates with Nokia Maps to give you walking, driving or transport directions to the places you are looking at (similar to Nokia Transport / Transit). You can download directly to you Lumia handset by scanning the QR Code after the break and also checking out the video introduction of the app below:

Photo courtesy of MJ Foley

Quick word of advise to all the Nokia Lumia 800 users out there who are eagerly waiting for the Tango update to reach their handset and finally bring Internet Sharing and improved camera settings: please be patient. The Chinese variant 1750.805.8773.12140 firmware has finally reached Nokia Care’s servers a few ours ago but shouldn’t be of any use to most users outside of China given that it lacks Facebook and Twitter integration in the People Hub and includes several features and customization specifically aimed at the Asian market. This update does indeed enabled internet sharing and also include the new camera settings that have been missing from the previous updates (panorama, smart group shot etc video quality settings and improved still shot quality..) and a Nokia Branded Marketplace Icon/tile.

The international / European variant of the 1750.805.8773.12140 update shouldn’t be to far off so don’t rush waste our time flashing you perfectly functional handset right now ans simply wait a little for the real deal. If you are really bothered by the Audio Volume bug simply flash the 12072 FW for now.

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Still trying to figure out if there’s any logic behind Microsoft’s Windows Phone endeavor? Well, today’s launch of the Samsung Focus 2 isn’t going to make things clearer to the masses. The Samsung Focus 2 Windows Phone handset is launching on AT&T’s network in the US later this month on May 20th for the relatively interesting price of $49.99 with the 2year contract. Nice, right? Unfortunately not very much given that the Focus 2 is nothing more than a Samsung Focus / Omnia 7 with 1.4GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon APQ8055 + MDM9200 LTE modem instead of the older QSD8250. That’s right folks…nothing interesting to see here especially when you take into account that the Nokia Lumia 900 with its better hardware is priced exactly the same on the same network and with double the amount of on-board storage (16Gb on Lumia 900 vs 8Gb on the Focus 2).

Once again this doesn’t make much sense at all in this day and age when Windows Phone 8 is getting close to release and may or probably may not be offered as an update to the current Windows Phone 7 handsets on the market. The only good thing to come out if this announcement is the fact that it squashes the ridiculous rumors that have been flying around about a the Samsung Focus 2 being the Windows Phone variant of the Samsung Galaxy S III. Nothing to see here folks….

Quick! Everybody abandon ship! The Windows Phone ship is sinking…or maybe not. LG (Windows Phone’s premiere OEM partner..)has simply announced during its latest earnings conferences call that it has no immediate plans to manufacture or ship a new Windows Phone based smartphone. Nothing really shocking here given that the south Korean manufacturer was totally absent from the Windows Phone 7.5 Mango launch last year and hasn’t done anything meaningful to the Windows Phone ecosystem since the initial platform launch in 2010.

LG isn’t totally abandoning Windows Phone and will continue research and development efforts in hopes of a brighter future. The company’s mobile division has been in the crapper for a little while now even with the launch of several high-end Android smartphones plagued by atrocious firmware issues (everything isn’t to blame on Windows Phone..). The LG Fantasy E740 with it’s NFC chipset will remain a prototype for ever.

The latest major Firmware update for the Nokia Lumia 800 may have fixed the most important issue; namely the buggy power management, but it unfortunately also introduced an annoying audio volume bug than made playing games in particular a real pain alongside other oddities like a super loud ringer volume the first second when a call arrives. Anyway, Nokia has finally put an end to all of this via a new Firmware update: 1600.2487.8107.12072 which has already started to roll out in some regions and that you can manually apply to your handset by following the instructions below (at your own risk):

Skype for Windows Phone 7 is finally out of beta and publicly available in the Marketplace for everybody to download. This new V1.0 version now includes the ability to search and add contacts, call landlines, ,video calling in portrait mode, friend management capabilities including invite, accept invitations, block, unblock contacts and several other improvements on top of what was already possible in the beta. Only major downside is the fact that application still doesn’t support background notifications so user simply can’t receive a call unless the application is open (unlike all the other Skype version on other platforms or even Tango on Windows Phone) but Skype as already announced that “This is the first of many releases to come for Windows Phone, so stay tuned for even more capabilities in the future“. You can download the Skype app directly from the marketplace here or by simply scanning the tags after the break:

Windows Phone 8 will be available as an update to current Windows Phone 7 handsets….or not. Nobody, I repeat, nobody really knows the answer for certain. So everything you have been reading in the past few days, hours should be filed under the rumor tag. At the day of the day the question is: Does it really matter? Well, in terms of PR, Marketing and overall user trust, not releasing a Windows Phone 8 update (or a subset of it) for, at the very least, the second generation of Windows Phone 7 handsets (especially Nokia’s) would be one of the dumbest move Microsoft will have ever done. Remember, we are talking about the same company that launched the horrendous Kin handsets. Sadly, anything is possible with the boys and girls in Redmond so don’t get your hopes up.

Microsoft’s Windows Phone Translator application has just received a MAJOR update today with the introduction of the following new features:

- Point, Scan and Translate: This is a beefed up augmented reality version of the Bing vision translate feature already found in Windows Phone 7.5. Users can now use the device’s camera to translate text in real-time on the go. Works fairly good from what I have seen so far.

- Offline Translation: Users can download languages packs to use the app in offline mode.

- Type and Translate: Instant translation using keyboard input

- Speak and translate: Speak in any of the supported languages and the device will then speak back what you just said in the desired language.

There are also several other UI changes and tweaks (the ability to pin the aforementioned methods of translation directly on the start screen for speedy access). All in all this is a really amazing update so make sure to get it right now from here and check out the announcement video after the break:

Pigs are flying in Redmond today following the announcement that Windows 8 will only have three SKUS: Windows 8, Windows 8 Pro and Windows RT (known as Windows on ARM). That’s right, Microsoft has finally decided to streamline it’s previously stupid offering and go straight to the point after many years of complains from users, OEMs and various other actors in the tech industry.
Windows 8 will be the basic version will include most of the essential features that 90% of the users will need while Windows 8 Pro will include all the features in Windows 8 plus features for encryption, virtualization, PC management and domain connectivity. Surprisingly Windows Media Center will apparently only be available as an economical “media pack” add-on to Windows 8 Pro.

Windows RT formerly known as Windows On ARM will only be come per-installed on devices/tablets equipped with ARM based SoC but will be the only Windows 8 SKU to have the Office suite included. This version will only be able to run applications build using the recently introduced WinRT runtime. Hit the break for the full list of features supported by each versions:

Several Nokia Lumia 900 users have reported that the much awaited firmware update, which was said to start rolling gout on April 16th, is now being pushed out through the Zune desktop software. Update: The roll out is now official according to Nokia. According to early reports the update fixes the following issues :

- Improved touchscreen sensitivity
- Improved WiFi auto-connection
- Fixed Camera launch bug: The camera now starts every time when the shutter button is long press when the phone is of.
- Overall performance improvements and stability (battery too it seems)
- Fixed lost data connection bug

Fell free to post you experience and findings in the comments below.

People simply love to hate on anything lately. Nokia decided to lower its Devices & Services Q1 2012 outlook today in the midst of its gigantic structural and economical transition following the arrival of Stephen Elop more than a year ago and the Microsoft partnership. Tucked inside the press release was this important piece of info:

In the first quarter 2012, Nokia sold more than 2 million Lumia devices at an average selling price of approximately EUR 220 (reported within the Smart Devices business unit). Furthermore, Nokia has seen sequential growth in Lumia device activations every month since starting sales of Lumia devices in November 2011.

Add this to the 1 Million Lumia devices already sold between November and December 2011 and we now have a grand total of 3 Million Nokia Lumia Windows Phones out there (the vast majority being Lumia 800s) and sold in less than 4 months. That’s huge in the small world of Windows Phone and further cement the fact that Nokia became the OS’s number one OEM nearly overnight. Although 3 Million obviously isn’t much when compared to other platforms (yes even Nokia’s own S40 and Symbian..as the company sold 10 Million non WP7 “smartphones” in the same quarter) this shouldn’t prevent Nokia from celebrating this small success. The vast majority of the web commentators simply chose to note that Nokia is lowering its forecast and that the company is going the way of the dodo. Sure..the number one mobile phone manufacturer in the orld with billions of $ in cash reserves is going to go bankrupt this year..okay. These people are probably the same ones who thought that Android was going to be a failure 3 years ago or thought that Nokia’s transition will be a matter of weeks instead of years.

Nokia has officially announced the first NFC enabled Windows Phone handset today; the Nokia Lumia 610 NFC. This may sound surprising given that even the company’s high end Windows Phone model, the Lumia 900, which just launched a few days ago doesn’t have an NFC chip in there. Nokia has apparently added its own software stack on top of Windows Phone 7.5 Tango to get this whole NFC thing going. Remember that LG has apparently done something similar with, the yet to be announced, LG Fantasy handset. The Nokia Lumia 610 NFC will be available in Q3 2012 on Orange. Check out the full press release after the break and a video demo of the handset in action: