Lumia Denim, the next major version of Windows Phone, is starting to roll out to Lumia devices in some European countries. The news of the rollout is welcome as Microsoft had stated they would begin pushing out the release before the end of 2014 and come on the back of their release of an update video on their YouTube channel yesterday.
With the release expected any day now, Microsoft has released a video on their YouTube channel on how the updating process for your Windows Phone to Lumia Denim. The video is about 3 minutes long and covers all of the new features of the next firmware update which is pretty extensive. You can read my guide on Lumia Denim to get the full briefing of what is coming.
One of the newer games in the Angry Birds franchise has hit Windows Phone and it is free. Angry Birds Stella for Windows Phone allows you to join Stella (the pink bird) and her comrades as she battles the bad princess and her piggies in over 120 levels of fun. Now if you know me, you know I have a serious Angry Birds addiction and Angry Birds Stella presents a whole new set of challenges even for seasoned players.
Angry Birds Stella for Windows Phone – Free (In-App Purchases) – Download Now
Like many of you, I use USB key drives all the time to move data around from device-to-device or to share data with a colleague. I also use Bit Locker to Go on those drives, especially if they are going to be out of my hands (think UPS or FedEx) to that colleague. As you may know, BitLocker is a file encryption system which allow you to protect your files by encrypting the drive those files reside on. That can be your entire hard disk in your PC, an external disk or a USB drive. So long as you have a Windows 7 or 8 Pro or Enterprise, it can be opened and read just like any other drive.
Paul Thurrott has an excellent overview of Bit Locker on WinSuperSite that I highly recommend reading.
Until today I just assumed that Windows 8.1 with Bing, the low cost version of Windows 8.1 for budget friendly tablets and laptops, could not deal with BitLocker encrypted drives. I figured out however that actually BitLocker and Windows 8.1 with Bing can indeed work together.
For the sake of this article I’m not going to distinguish between BitLocker and BitLocker to Go. The later is fundamentally the same thing as the former, only for portable drives like USB keys.
The Lumia Storyteller app for Windows Phone has had a major update released today, bringing a completely new user experience to the photo viewing app. The new 4.0 version is available now in the Windows Phone store and brings a more Photos hub-like experience to users. If you aren’t familiar with the Lumia Storyteller app, it automatically groups your photos on your Lumia Windows Phone into stories where you can then share them online, add captions to photos and rearrange the groupings as you see fit. It is an app exclusively for Lumia users and it is free to download.
Lumia Storyteller – Free (Lumia devices only) – Windows Phone Store
The news and information aggregation app Flipboard has just been updated for Windows Phone and it brings many improvements along with it. Flipboard for Windows Phone has already been a big hit, just as it has been on Android and iOS, and with this update the app becomes more widely available to Windows Phone users as it now is supported on 512MB memory devices. Many of the budget friendly devices such as the Lumia 530 and Lumia 635 have 512MB of memory. Flipboard is now optimized so it can run on these lower memory devices. Flipboard for Windows Phone – Free – Download Now
Today Microsoft released a new Gestures beta for Windows Phone. The app allows you to control phone calls – both incoming and those in progress – without ever touching the screen of your Windows Phone. Sounds cool eh? It actually is very cool and is something that was actually around back in the Windows Mobile 6 days.
The Netflix for Windows Phone app has been updated to version 4.0 today and it brings a whole new user experience including integration with Cortana. The update is available now and requires that you have a Netflix account to use the app for the movie and television show streaming service. The new user experience is a much more modern and fresh look to the app and the video quality has also been improved so playback looks much better, especially on low bandwidth networks.
Netflix for Windows Phone – Free (Account Required) – Download Now