Thanks to a prescribed spec for running certain operating systems, your average Windows Phone 7-powered device should be pretty similar to everyone else’s WP7 devices, save for differing screen sizes and a few tweaked specs. Nokia had something special up the Lumia’s drives to give them an edge over the rest of the WP7-running crowd: they come preinstalled with Nokia Drive, which is a free turn-by-turn GPS navigation app designed for drivers. But if you’re already rocking a WP7-based phone and signing up for a Lumia isn’t a feasible alternative, then here’s something that might interest you: Nokia’s nav software has apparently been made available on a number of pirate sites, basically letting people load the Nokia Drive app package (or XAP) onto other non-Nokia WP7 phones.
Here’s a good deal that you might want to look into: Microsoft is giving away free Windows Phones after you spend $499 or more at their stores. The catch? None. Unless you consider getting a relatively old, first-gen WP7-running smartphone for free without a contract a “downside.” Otherwise, the deal sounds awesome if you’re planning on buying a new laptop or desktop PC anyway.
Back in April, Microsoft put out a demo showing Windows Phone Mango’s web performance, running their own Windows Phone (running IE9 mobile) up against the iPhone 4 and Android-based Nexus S in a who-can-run-this-HTML5 demo-the-fastest contest. You can still check out the demo video here, but if you don’t have the time, the Windows Phone pretty much spanked iOS and Android in that demo, running it at 20fps, while the Nexus S finished second with 11 fps and the iPhone 4 dogging it with 2fps. The reason behind the big difference? For starters, we were never shown what version of iOS was running when Microsoft ran that demo. Also, the iPhone 4’s score on that particular test is believed to be hampered by the fact that its screen has more pixels to render. Anyway, it looks like they just lost the lead again: according to a recent test (confirmed by 9to5Mac), the latest beta version of iOS 5 is going to run circles around Windows Phone Mango (at least in terms of web performance), showing a much-improved benchmark score of 31fps. Your move, Microsoft.
Hey look, cheap smartphones! Three smartphones running on Microsoft’s Windows Phone 7 platform, to be exact. And when we say “cheap,” we mean “as cheap as you can get without technically being free.” Microsoft just dropped the price of three WP7 handsets from three US carriers, offering the Verizon HTC Trophy , Sprint’s HTC Arrive, and the HTC HD7 from T-Mobile for just a penny each. The catch? You have to sign up for a new 2-year contract with a smartphone data plan, the same thing you have to do on any other smartphone purchase anyway, but without having to fork over $200.
Before we jump to any conclusions, let’s lay out a few details on the test just so you get a bit of perspective: The benchmark demo was done during Microsoft’s MIX11 developer conference, and Windows Phone program director Joe Belfiore used the HTML5 speed reading demo from Microsoft’s own ietestdrive site. We also don’t know what OS/browser versions the other two phones were running (which is significant since Apple’s latest mobile browser comes with a lot of new optimizations), so the test can’t really be considered unbiased. But still, the demo showed an impressive performance by the HTC-built, Windows phone loaded with the Mango update. The Windows Phone ran the demo at 20 frames per second, the Android-based Samsung Nexus S came in at second place with 11fps, and the iPhone 4 came in last at 2fps. Check out the video of the Windows Phone spanking the iPhone 4 and Nexus S after the break.
