Category: Microsoft

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 OneDrive for Windows Phone app has just had a big update drop in the Windows Phone Store that brings significant changes to the user experience along with several other key updates.  The new version 4.5 build is out now and you can get it free in the Store.

OneDrive for Windows Phone – Free – Download Now

Microsoft has updated their Office Lens app for Windows Phone today, adding an experimental Business Card mode to the whiteboard and documents capture app even more powerful.  If you are not familiar with Office Lens, it allows you to snap a photo of a whiteboard, blackboard or document and it will scan them and save them to your Windows Phone and/or OneDrive.  The app is very powerful and is able to handle taking photos from side angles to give you a front facing view. It is a free app and one I recommend.

Office Lens for Windows Phone – Free – Download Now

The already budget friendly Lumia 520 is now even more so at the Microsoft store.  Today you can get the phone without any contract requirements from AT&T for only $29.  Normally it is $59 so you are getting about a 50% discount on it.  Kind of a no-brainer really if you want to have a inexpensive phone for a family member or as a backup phone for yourself.

Lumia 520 for $29 at Microsoft Store

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.

If you are like me, one think you get use to in Windows 8.1 is how your Start screen is configured on your PC.  With a swipe to the left or right, I know exactly where certain apps are located that I access, making my user experience certainly more personal but equally faster for me day-to-day.

As I posted earlier in the week, I picked up a Toshiba Encore 2 tablet on Black Friday.  You can read my first impressions of the Encore 2 here on the site but now that I have two Windows 8.1 devices, the ability to sync my settings across my devices has finally come to age for me.  The settings have always been there as a part of OneDrive but they are a bit buried and if you aren’t using multiple devices, there isn’t much of a point (although you can sync your theme colors to your Windows Phone).  This is a small but powerful feature as it immediately allows you to have the same computing experience with the Start screen on any of your devices.  In this How To I will show you how to sync your PC settings across your Windows devices using this small but powerful feature in your OneDrive settings.