Hasta La Gadget!

This week the folks at Microsoft have made it clear that they’re aiming for Google’s throat with a loving dose of all-out Valentine’s Day coverage straight from Bing – full of love, of course! This coverage comes in the form of not just Windows Phone-centered functionality for all your Valentine’s Day needs, but both the Bing mobile site and the Bing app as well. Once you’ve gone to m.bing.com or downloaded Bing from your smartphone or tablet’s own app store, you’ll be well on your way!

Bing is out to take on the masses of Valentine’s Day lovers with Local Scout on your Windows Phone 8 device first and foremost. Local Scout makes it simple to find all the best nearby food and drink locations right from the palm of your hand while m.bing.com does instant searches near you for similar results. Bing offers up their “snapshot” results for restaurant reviews from Yelp as well as restaurant booking straight from Open Table.

Bing Maps is ready and willing at this point in history to take you wherever you need to go with the GPS on your smartphone or through any mobile web browser with point to point directions that include traffic conditions on-the-go. Bing Shopping has you covered for gifts with millions of listings of products from every single corner of the consumer universe. Bing’s social sidebar also provides you help with gifts with expert reviews from all over the web – and your Facebook friends if they’re also connected to the network.

Let us know if you’re ready to use Bing this holiday or if you’re planning on using a competing search engine to make sure you’re stacked up and ready for the big love-bound day of heart-throbbing goodness. The heart you’re seeing above is not a direct result of Bing’s search engine results as the search bar implies – not directly, anyway – instead it’s a poll conducted by Bing that shows Trustworthiness as the most important quality a partner can have in general. Microsoft is showing that it’s not afraid to say that Google isn’t a partner they’d choose to go home with.

[via Bing]

Bing makes it’s case for your one-stop Valentine’s Day resource is written by Chris Burns & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

Yup, Intel is set to make a splash at Mobile World Congress later this month with a slew of smartphones, tablets and Ultrabooks, and we have also seen how LinkedIn was used to help recruit folks to help out with the upcoming Motorola X phone. Well, LinkedIn is in the spotlight again now, as we have word that Intel has published a job opportunity on LinkedIn which is looking out for Windows Phone engineers. One can read into that however one wants to, but how about this – could Intel be looking into a mobile platform as part of their future investment?

The job listed at LinkedIn specifically requested for those who are experts in the Windows Phone environment, and it would be interesting to see what else the future will bring. At this point in time, Windows Phone devices are powered mostly by ARM with Qualcomm as the exclusive chip provider, but two is definitely company from our perspective, and neither do I think that three’s a crowd. The job description’s opening pitch reads as such, “Windows Phone Engineers: Intel would like to talk to you. If you have Windows phone expertise, the Intel site in Redmond would like to talk to you.”

By Ubergizmo. Related articles: Samsung Galaxy Exhibit Heads For T-Mobile USA, Nokia PureView Phase 1 Sensor To Hit Lumia Range?,

Nokia has announced via its Conversations blog that the long-awaited Windows Phone 7.8 update, which brings a few of the features from Windows Phone 8 to older hardware, has begun rolling out as promised to owners of Nokia 510, 610, 710, 800 and 900 owners and will continue to do so over the next few weeks through February, pending operator approval.

Features included in the update include the ability to resize Live (and inert) tiles on the home screen, new options for configuring the lock screen like fetching a changing daily background image from Bing and child lock features, and additional theme colors, as well as new languages. It’s not a huge step up, but it is a way to breathe new life into older devices left out in the cold in the wake of Windows Phone 8′s arrival, and that might bring some comfort to buyers of devices who were looking for something new.

Owners of one of the devices listed above should get notified via their smartphones once their carrier has approved the update and it’s available to install. Notifications must be on for this to happen, Nokia points out, which is managed via “Settings > Phone Update > Notify me when updates are found.”

Nokia is the first confirmed manufacturer to announce the rollout, but other OEM partners including HTC are said to be getting the update by month’s end as well, so keep an eye out if you’re running these older devices.

If you own a Nokia Lumia Windows Phone device and you were looking forward to playing more games on your phone, you might be pleased to learn that it looks like Real Racing 2 will be available for download pretty soon! The game was spotted recently on Xbox360Achievements which supposedly is an indication that the game should be close to being released. Real Racing 2 is also one of the 11 exclusive Electronic Arts games that Nokia has managed to secure, and at this point in time it is unclear how long non-Nokia Windows Phone devices will have to wait before the game is available for them. This is pretty cool because we have to admit that Real Racing has to be one of the better looking games available for mobile devices these days and after being available on both iOS and Android, we guess it’s about time that Windows Phone (Nokia devices at least) got some love. In any case if you can’t wait to get your hands on the game, keep an eye out for it because presumably it shouldn’t be too long before it is available!

By Ubergizmo. Related articles: Angry Birds Star Wars Available For Blackberry 10, Doom & Destiny Hitting The Nokia Lumia Platform,

The Amazon Kindle app for Windows Phone 8 got an update today. It’s a good one, too, fixing the awful three-sided letterboxing and giving the app a more Metro-y tile. But it’s massively late, and tripped over itself coming out the gate, too. In a way, it’s a perfect encapsulation of everything wrong with Windows Phone 8 so far. More »