Category: Windows Phone

Foursquare has released an update to their Swarm for Windows Phone app with a wide range of updates and improvements to the app.  The headline improvement is that Swarm now has a Emoji keyboard which can be used for shouts, plans and check-in along with plan comments. The update is listed as version 1.3 and is available now in the Windows Phone store.

If by chance you are not familiar with Swarm, this is the new check-in app from Foursquare that was released back in the early summer.  Foursquare the app has turned into more of a location discovery app (which is quite good by-the-way) while Swarm has taken over as the check-in app.

Swarm for Windows Phone – Free – Download Now

Microsoft has released Windows Phone Build 14219 for those who participate in the Preview for Developers program.  The update is either ready for you in your Phone Update in Settings on your device or can be downloaded by tapping the Check for Update button on the same screen.  While the Preview for Developers program is a free app and service, I’ll remind everyone that it is beta software and sometimes behaves as such.

The biggest news with this update is support for Cortana in France, Germany, Italy and Spain as part of an update posted on the Microsoft blog this morning.  Now Windows Phone users can enjoy the personal assistant feature that has been available to those in the United States and other countries for a few months.

With the rollout of Lumia Denim expected to start literally in days, I thought it would be a good idea to post a guide of what you can expect in the next major release of the Lumia OS that runs on Windows Phone.   Lumia Denim is a firmware update that will eventually make its way to every Windows Phone running 8.1.  This update is sometimes referred to as Update 1 although it is unclear if Microsoft will actually call it that when the time comes to release it.  Regardless of the naming, Lumia Denim is a big update for Windows Phone users and brings forth a significant number of improvements to your Windows Phone experience.

Microsoft has released a sizable update to the Mail, Calendar and People app for Windows, bringing a whole host of improvements and update to each of the apps.  The update is available now in the Window Store now on your Windows 8.1 PC.  Mail by far received the biggest update, bringing such features as a Sweep feature to clean up your Outlook.com inbox and the ability to drag-and-drop messages into folders.

With little fanfare on the By-The-Numbers page, Microsoft has announced that as of September 30, 2014, the combined app total of the Windows Store and the Windows Phone Store has reached 525,000 apps.  This represents a 75% growth since the end of August of this year when the stores had a combined 300,000 apps.  It is an important milestone for Microsoft but the growth rate is the even more impressive number to take away from this news.

One of the last remaining Nokia branded elements of Windows Phone is quickly disappearing.  The Nokia Collection in the Windows Phone store is being renamed to the Lumia Collection and the rollout of this update is already happening for many Lumia users.  It all-but eliminates the Nokia name from Windows Phone as Microsoft pushes forth with the Lumia name on their Windows powered phones.