Category: How To

Over the course of the past couple of days I’ve gotten a lot of questions about my reviews here the site and from Tweets I’ve posted regarding screenshots.  Usually they are along the lines of, “How did you take your screenshots?”

Natively, Windows Phone does not have a way to take screenshots.  It is a huge (underline, underline, bold, bold) problem, especially for those of us who blog.  After all, I’d like to provide you screenshots, not device shots of a particular screen.  They look better!  Fortunately there is an easy way to do this and I’ll show you in this How To.

Here is what you will need:

• A Windows PC running Windows 7 (32 or 64-bit is fine)
• The Windows Phone 7.1 SDK (Free)
• .NET Framework 4.0
• A Windows Live ID
• $9 to get an unlock token from ChevronWP7
• Screen Capture v3 from XDA Developers

One of the great features of Windows Phone is the level of personalization you can do to your Start screen.  Not only can you pin any app to the Start screen (and in Mango, even some specific parts of an application), you can customize the look and feel of it quite easily.  One of these personalizations is the ability to change the wallpaper in the Picture Hub.  This features has been there since the original release of Windows Phone and it is easy to change it to suit your style a little better.

Admittedly this is a easy How To so if you are an advanced Windows Phone user, you may want to stop reading here and go to the next post. 🙂  For those that are new however, let me show you how easy it is to make this change.

One of the big advantages of the Windows Phone 7.5 (popularly known as “Mango”) is the new multitasking function the update brings to devices.  Windows Phone has always done multitasking but it was never clear how it was done and worse, it was difficult for users to figure out what applications where running in the background.  To be fair, this really wasn’t that big of a deal.  Windows Phone does a fantastic job of managing memory so performance issues rarely came up.  Nevertheless, with Mango, Microsoft added a way for you to quickly and easily see all of the apps running on your Windows Phone and select those apps.

In this How To I’m going to show you how to access the multitasking and switch between the apps running on your Windows Phone.