Przedstawiciel PLAY LUBLIN

Hi folks, Rovio here.

Nokia kindly invited us onto Nokia Conversations to share some good news for all those people rocking Windows Phone 7.5 in their Nokia Lumia smartphones. 

Back in November, we announced that Angry Birds Space and Angry Birds Star Wars would be coming to Windows Phone 8 and understandably we received a lot of questions about when both games would become available on Windows Phone 7.5. Well, we promised it wouldn’t be long and we always keep our promises.  So it is with great pleasure that we can confirm Angry Birds Star Wars and Angry Birds Space will appear in the Windows Phone Store for all Windows Phone 7.5 smartphones in the coming days.

And when we say ‘all Windows Phone 7.5 smartphones’, we mean it, because with a little bit of Angry Birds magic and some help from Nokia, we’ve also managed to make both games available to run on the lower memory specification Nokia Lumia 610 and Nokia Lumia 510.

We’re delighted that everyone will now be able to join the galactic adventure and we hope you are too. We’d love to hear what you think of the game when you have time. Until then, may the birds be with you!

If you’re a sports fan then having a mobile phone is just as crucial as having a tennis racquet, some football boots or a cricket bat.

How else are you going to get live scores, fixture lists and the latest news?

My Nokia Asha 311 smartphone is the ideal device for these purposes and there are plenty of apps in the Nokia Store to satisfy the needs of any sports fan.

On your marks, get set, ready? Go!

ESPN FC (free)

This is the app formerly known as ESPNSoccernet, but if you were a fan of it previously then you can be rest assured that the name is all that’s changed.

This app still offers live football scores, fixtures, match stats and tables of all the major leagues around the world. In other words, this has all the vital information that a football fan will need. 

Sticking with football, there are a couple of other apps that you may want to try out. Live Scores (free) does what its name suggests and Goal News Launcher (free) brings all the stories from goal.com to your Asha device.

Cricket Companion 4.0 (free)

The sedate and charming world of cricket… The glorious sound of leather on willow! I love the tradition of clapping the batsman out as they walk to the wicket.

Cricket fans are well catered for in the Nokia Store. Cricket Companion 4.0 provides ball-by-ball coverage of matches, news, results and those all-important statistics.

There’s also Cricket Calling (free), which provides many of the same features and for something a little different I really liked Cricket Wicket (free), which provides the sound of tumbling wickets and the crowd cheering in the background. It’s a tremendous ringtone option.

mScorecard (free)

Keen golfers will really appreciate this mScorecard app. It helps you keep track of your score while you are playing and even uses GPS to help you track your distance to the green?

Armchair fans of the sport may be interested in Golf App (free) which connects to feeds of the latest golf news and also has tips on how you can improve your game – should you ever feel inclined to have a ‘good walk spoiled’.

There also has be a honourable mention for Nokia Golf Tour 3D (free) an engrossing golf simulator where you can play alone (against the conditions, of course) or against an opponent. Lots of fun and great graphics too.

F1 Confidential (free)

Fans of Formula 1 have a great choice of apps in the Nokia Store – and that’s not even including all the racing games.

F1 Confidential promises to offer insider gossip, news and pictures from the pit lanes. If you’re seeking something a bit more conventional then ESPNF1 (free) is probably a better bet.

This has commentary and summaries or faces, latest standings, driver profiles and everything else you could hope for. Along similar lines is F1 Live! Lite (free).

World of Red Bull (free) is not solely devoted to F1, as it also features many of the energy drinks’ other daredevil sports, but you may want to give it a spin nevertheless.

Sports Miscellany

We know it’s impossible to cover every single sport and with any list there’s always a risk that your particular favourite may get left out! But, with a sharp intake of breath, here are some other notable apps for lovers of the following sports:

Rugby devotees may want to download Rugby App (free) for all the latest news in the world of the oval-shaped game.

Talking of oval shapes, gridiron fans, or American Football, if you insist, can stay up-to-date with NFL Scores (free).

If you prefer your motor racing to be done on two wheels rather than four, then you should check out MotoGP Superbikes (free) or World Superbikes (free).

Is wrestling a real sport? I would suggest not, but either way there’s aWWE (free) and WWE News for you to choose from.

And, finally, the prize for the most esoteric and exclusive sports app in the Nokia Store has to go to Polo Club (free). For all the latest news from the world of polo!

Top image credit: foxypar4

In my post last week about customising your Nokia Lumia’s dialler, I made the innocent point that it was not the most obvious part of the smartphone that you could produce apps for.

As I asked at the time, how can you improve on a numerical keypad?

My attitude sums up why there are bright young things out there creating apps and changing the world, while I am merely writing about how brilliant they are!

One of those bright young things is Cara Zheng, 25, of Guangzhou, China, who is part of a three-strong team who look after the highly-rated RapDialer app.

Cara, who works full-time as an accountant, has been involved with RapDialer since December 2011, when it was still just an idea inside the head of the chief designer James Yi.

Just a couple of months later it was available to download on the Windows Phone Marketplace, and Cara has been helping out ever since looking after operations, testing, customer service and much more. The third member of the team is designer Joe Zou.

Rapidly approaching its first anniversary, the app now has thousands of users in over 68 countries and is available in 12 languages – with three more to follow shortly.

I was particularly struck by how the team invites suggestions from users and asks volunteers to help them make RapDialer available in their local languages.

In an interview with Conversations, Cara spoke about the importance of user feedback, why Windows Phone 8 is a great opportunity for them and what’s to come in RapDialer v3.0.

How did RapDialer begin?

When James had his first Windows Phone, he found it inconvenient because of the lack of a smart dialler. He was also unsatisfied with well-known dialler apps in iOS and Android.

Then he was inspired by the Windows Phone user interface and tried to make a powerful but simple and clear smart dialler with a new experience. The enthusiastic response from users proves it’s viable.

How important is the feedback from your users? 

At the very beginning, when Windows Phone was still in its early stages, feedback focused on those things that we could not do because of Windows Phone restrictions.

However, with the gradual improvement and development of RapDialer, old users are maintained and new users come in. They start to offer new ideas they hope to have, and tell us how they feel when new features are added.

Three people in the RapDialer team cannot discover all the bugs, but users help us to discover and revise them. So users’ feedback is like a mirror; reflecting our good and bad points. 

Can you give some examples of suggestions from users that you have then added as a new feature on RapDialer?

We summarise suggestions from users and pick up the urgent and valuable ones. For example, users who are used to Blackberry phones, asked to have the 1-99 speed dial feature and some users asked for full-text search, so they could select items to display or be searched. These features were added and had a good response.

Is using volunteers to help with translations a good way of working? 

We have users from 68 countries and many warm-hearted users ask to be allowed to translate RapDialer into their mother language, simply because they use it every day and like it very much.

Most of them are fluent in English and are able to understand our app’s idea. Most importantly, many of them are developers, students, teachers, or have app translation experiences. 

This is an advantage in both costs saving and helping us broaden international markets.

Any disadvantages of working with volunteers?

The first version translation work is usually done with high quality but since our app is always developing and new features are added continually, the first translator may not be able to follow translation work promptly.

We may need to wait for a long time until they give feedback or ask another translator to do it. Overall, volunteers’ help is still a good way of working.

What progress has been made on the Windows Phone 8 version of RapDialer?

We spent lots of time finding a way to compile the same codes to WP7 and WP8 .xap files at the same time and we need to make adjustments on different behaviours in WP7 and WP8 for the same API.

We value intellectual property protection of our app but unfortunately, no free or cheap but reliable WP8 Code Obfuscation Tool is available, which temporarily stops us from publishing the WP8 version.

Also, we are in great need for WP8 devices to test, but currently they are expensive and not so easily obtained in China.

Are you excited by the opportunities that WP8 offers?

Yes, we believe customer growth will boom in the WP8 era, which is the greatest opportunity to us.

What does the future hold for RapDialer?

In v3.0, we will go further, to give RapDialer more the feel of being a toolkit instead of a simple dialler. For example, cool and quick switching between T9 keypad and QWERTY is coming, as well as function expansion in SMS.

Since we are also busy in our jobs at the end of the year, v3.0 expects to be published in the first half of 2013.

Image credit: King….

In my post last week about customising your Nokia Lumia’s dialler, I made the innocent point that it was not the most obvious part of the smartphone that you could produce apps for.

As I asked at the time, how can you improve on a numerical keypad?

My attitude sums up why there are bright young things out there creating apps and changing the world, while I am merely writing about how brilliant they are!

One of those bright young things is Cara Zheng, 25, of Guangzhou, China, who is part of a three-strong team who look after the highly-rated RapDialer app.

Cara, who works full-time as an accountant, has been involved with RapDialer since December 2011, when it was still just an idea inside the head of the chief designer James Yi.

Just a couple of months later it was available to download on the Windows Phone Marketplace, and Cara has been helping out ever since looking after operations, testing, customer service and much more. The third member of the team is designer Joe Zou.

Rapidly approaching its first anniversary, the app now has thousands of users in over 68 countries and is available in 12 languages – with three more to follow shortly.

I was particularly struck by how the team invites suggestions from users and asks volunteers to help them make RapDialer available in their local languages.

In an interview with Conversations, Cara spoke about the importance of user feedback, why Windows Phone 8 is a great opportunity for them and what’s to come in RapDialer v3.0.

How did RapDialer begin?

When James had his first Windows Phone, he found it inconvenient because of the lack of a smart dialler. He was also unsatisfied with well-known dialler apps in iOS and Android.

Then he was inspired by the Windows Phone user interface and tried to make a powerful but simple and clear smart dialler with a new experience. The enthusiastic response from users proves it’s viable.

How important is the feedback from your users? 

At the very beginning, when Windows Phone was still in its early stages, feedback focused on those things that we could not do because of Windows Phone restrictions.

However, with the gradual improvement and development of RapDialer, old users are maintained and new users come in. They start to offer new ideas they hope to have, and tell us how they feel when new features are added.

Three people in the RapDialer team cannot discover all the bugs, but users help us to discover and revise them. So users’ feedback is like a mirror; reflecting our good and bad points. 

Can you give some examples of suggestions from users that you have then added as a new feature on RapDialer?

We summarise suggestions from users and pick up the urgent and valuable ones. For example, users who are used to Blackberry phones, asked to have the 1-99 speed dial feature and some users asked for full-text search, so they could select items to display or be searched. These features were added and had a good response.

Is using volunteers to help with translations a good way of working? 

We have users from 68 countries and many warm-hearted users ask to be allowed to translate RapDialer into their mother language, simply because they use it every day and like it very much.

Most of them are fluent in English and are able to understand our app’s idea. Most importantly, many of them are developers, students, teachers, or have app translation experiences. 

This is an advantage in both costs saving and helping us broaden international markets.

Any disadvantages of working with volunteers?

The first version translation work is usually done with high quality but since our app is always developing and new features are added continually, the first translator may not be able to follow translation work promptly.

We may need to wait for a long time until they give feedback or ask another translator to do it. Overall, volunteers’ help is still a good way of working.

What progress has been made on the Windows Phone 8 version of RapDialer?

We spent lots of time finding a way to compile the same codes to WP7 and WP8 .xap files at the same time and we need to make adjustments on different behaviours in WP7 and WP8 for the same API.

We value intellectual property protection of our app but unfortunately, no free or cheap but reliable WP8 Code Obfuscation Tool is available, which temporarily stops us from publishing the WP8 version.

Also, we are in great need for WP8 devices to test, but currently they are expensive and not so easily obtained in China.

Are you excited by the opportunities that WP8 offers?

Yes, we believe customer growth will boom in the WP8 era, which is the greatest opportunity to us.

What does the future hold for RapDialer?

In v3.0, we will go further, to give RapDialer more the feel of being a toolkit instead of a simple dialler. For example, cool and quick switching between T9 keypad and QWERTY is coming, as well as function expansion in SMS.

Since we are also busy in our jobs at the end of the year, v3.0 expects to be published in the first half of 2013.

Image credit: King….

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