Our 5 favourite new Windows Phone apps of the week

We maybe celebrating Midsummer here at Nokia Conversations, but that doesn’t stop us highlighting the best Windows Phone apps that have been released (or overhauled) in the last week. We’re sure you’d rather be making the most of the daylight hours than digging through the Windows Store for new releases. Lo and behold! We’ve done the deed for you. Scroll on down to find our top five new apps and games of the past seven days.

 App title: Blink

What is it? A funky camera app

Why we love it? A major update to one of our favourite photo-taking apps, version 2.0 of Blink not only lets you take a rapid-fire selection of shots so that you’re guaranteed not to miss that vital pose, but it also now boats a whole range of handy other features. With a range of new preset modes for white balance, exposure and ISO, Blink is now a lot better at actually taking photos. You can also upload an animation of your ‘BLINKS’ (your series of rapid shots) and share it, which makes the whole experience much more social.   

Who it’s perfect for: Photographers

 

App title: Talk.to

What is it? A free messaging service

Why we love it? This integrates Google Talk, Facebook Chat and Pingpong, and lets you send free SMS messages to other users. While there are other excellent message and SMS apps out there, the all-in-one interface here is handy. What we particularly like, though, is that you can send a ‘doodle’ message—that is, you can draw a picture on your screen and send that to your friends. Cuteand convenient.

Who it’s perfect for: Chatty folk

App title: Where’s My Mickey?

What is it? A Disney game

Why we love it? A promo app for Disney’s new Mickey Mouse cartoon, this is a decent little puzzle game with clean, colourful animation, starring—you guessed it—Mickey and the gang. It’s a lovely addition to the Kid’s Corner of our phones, and although there’s no free trial (boo), there’s a Windows desktop version to go alongside the mobile app, and if you buy that one, too, you’ll get extra levels.

Who it’s perfect for: Kids and Disney fans

App title: Fuelboard

What is it? The un-official Nike+ FuelBand app.

Why we love it? Nike haven’t yet produced a Windows version of their FeulBand app, but it doesn’t manner—Fuelboard will keep us happy for now. You’ll need the actual Nike+ Fuelband (a special wrist-band) to get any use out of this, of course. Sync the band to your computer with Nike software, and then use Fuelboard to access the data on the go. You can see records of calories burned, steps taken, time spend on the move and more. The downside of the unofficial app is that it won’t sync directly with the band, but that’s not a deal-breaker. The graphs and data-anaylsis are detailed and pretty enough to please us. (Bear in mind, this is for Windows 8 users only.)

Who it’s perfect for: Calorie-counters and fitness fanatics

App title: Wordament

What is it? A Boggle-style word-finding game

Why we love it? We like word puzzles, no doubt about that, and Wordament is already a favourite in the Windows Store because of its mixture of simplicity (make as many words as you can) and trickiness (there’s always more words then you thought there were). The latest update brings it to version 2.5, and introduces a Facebook login option. Seeing as playing for points on a worldwide leaderboard is one of the selling points of Wordament, making it more social-media-friendly seems like a spot-on move by Microsoft. Plus it’s now got added support for more languages.

Who it’s perfect for: Word geeks

These are our fab Midsummer five, but what about yours? As ever we’d love to hear about them in the comments down below.