Like many high schools, Taylor High School in Kokomo Indiana, where I teach, has completely changed the way we deliver instructions to our students to meet a rapidly changing technological world.  Fortunately, we are a forward thinking school and have enjoyed a one to one student to computer ratio for the past three years.  We have used heavily rubberized netbooks, and next year we will be using a slightly larger laptop.  After next year, however, we are looking at our options, which include moving to a tablet.  Of course in the world of education, tablets are synonymous with IPad.  In fact, in a world where a student can choose any school to attend, IPads are a huge lure.  Many schools have chosen IPads simply because they know it looks good from PR perspective, even if they have no idea how to implement it in a meaningful way.

In a recent article, I wrote about my switch from the Iphone to the Lumia 920, windows phone. My love for Windows 8 and Live Tiles has led me to think about a switch to a Windows 8 tablet such as the Surface or Dell Latitude.  Surely, if the windows phone offered such a satisfying experience, the tablet would do the same, right?  If true, why would schools only look to the IPad when there are android and windows tablets available?  I suppose the answer lies somewhere in the clever marketing by Apple, the fact that it was first, and people simply love the entertainment value of the IPad.  Indeed, when the IPad made its appearance, it was for all intents and purposes an oversized phone that allowed the users to play games and view material on a larger screen.  While it is a fine device in its own right, is it the best choice for education?  Does it offer the tools necessary for students to investigate, create, and learn in a way that the other tablets don’t?

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The latest results from 701 apps using SDK v.2 on AdDuplex shows quite a few things about the current Windows Phone market as reflected in their cross-promotional network’s data.  Primarily the results show that most Windows Phones are Nokia,  that Verizon and AT&T in the US are the co-dominant operators, and that Windows Phone 8 is growing along with the more mature and lower-cost phone models running  the OS. So in the US, new customers will typically have a newer Nokia Windows Phone 8 model with about half on Verizon and about half  on AT&T.

Yet as we have seen in various other stories, T-Mobile has the Nokia 521 and has rolled out a $50 flat rate plan and has a $30 one for less frequent talkers,  a prepaid plan exists at Wal-Mart with Straight Talk and the Huawei W1 WP.   Also as we discussed here, Windows Phone as a share of smartphones  is expected to keep growing, largely due to the numbers of new customers and somewhat from the decline of iOS.   What else is there within and without the report, or just in store in general.

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Nokia’s stock surged up 11% one point when Huawei consumer group chairman Richard Yu’s commented

“We are considering these sorts of acquisitions; maybe the combination has some synergies but depends on the willingness of Nokia. We are open-minded”

However, despite the imminent launch of the Ascend W2, he also delivered a less than ringing endorsement of the Windows Phone platform, when describing the market share as “weak” and bemoaning that Windows Phone requires a license fee while Android is free, some have interpreted this as an indication that Huawei would switch Nokia over to Android if such a purchase was made

Should we be worried?

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In a blog post today, the Bing team announced that voice search and voice-to-text—two popular Bing-powered phone features—are now up to twice as fast and 15 percent more accurate, a feat accomplished by exploiting some recent biology-inspired artificial intelligence breakthroughs from Microsoft Research scientists.

The video below shows Bing’s Stefan Weitz and MSR’s Michael Tjalve demonstrating some of these improvements on Windows Phone 8. If you are lucky enough to be in the U.S, you can just try them yourself by tapping the Search button, then the little microphone icon, and then tell Bing to find something by saying “Show me movies in …” and the results should pop-up. You can also try dictating a text message or email.

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The Speculation

Last week we saw all sorts of new photos showing off what is supposedly an aluminum 41 megapixel Nokia branded phone. Well, now we have some evidence for further speculation using the same photos. Among further inspection of the pictures everyone has noticed how big that guys hand is making it look. There is reason to believe it besides that man’s now small looking hands!

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When in comes to re-inventing smartphone features and functionality, there’s only one company that’s perfected the fine art of serving users regurgitated ideas as if they were its own. Yes folks, we are talking about Cupertino’s finest. Apple is an expert at pretending to have invented the portable mp3 player (iPod), video calling (FaceTime), voice recognition (Siri), etc. You have to give it Apple though, they know how to advertise. Nokia claims to have re-invented zoom and plans to show us how on the 11th of July. But how? We try to explain.

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It’s an open secret that Microsoft has a system that rewards developers from writing Windows Phone 8 applications.

At present, the Redmond giant pays $100 for any app that gets published in the Windows store before the end of the month, with a cap of $2,000 per developer. However, Business Insider reports that Microsoft is offering some developers as much $100,000 to bring their apps to the Windows Phone platform.

While this may rile some developer who will wonder what the have to do to get the $100,000, it makes a lot of sense if some of these happen to be “big name” applications that the platform lacks. While most of us Windows Phone users know that there isn’t a lot in the way of applications that makes Windows Phone a lesser OS to its rivals, admittedly, Windows Phone doesn’t have strong app selection like Apple’s iPhone and Google’s Android phones do.

It’s a big challenge for Microsoft to convince developers to bring their application and games to Windows Phone, so paying them seems reasonable.

Koobra who? Yes we know, we’ve never heard of the either… What’s important here is that they managed to shoot an entire music video with the Nokia Lumia 925, thus earning themselves a spot on WPSuperfanboy.

While we cannot particularly vouch for the music itself, the video is quite good. If anything, the quality of the video is too good and exposes the young lady’s pimply face to the world. The Lumia 925′s 8.7 megapixel Pureview shooter is the obvious suspect for this hideous crime.

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Another day, another leak. Thats the way it’s been for Windows Phone and Nokia for the last few weeks at least. The latest leaked image shows an aluminium shell of what we assume is the Nokia EOS 41MP Windows Phone. We’ve obviously seen this before and suspected it might just be a prototype variant of the polycarbonate version.

What’s more interesting is that this time the leakster managed to get a shot of a stack of the aluminium shells, meaning the device has likely reached mass production stage. Does it mean Nokia is readying the device for the July unveiling? Your guess is as good as ours but going on the evidence we’ve seen so far, chances are an aluminium variant will line up alongside the polycarbonate version at the unveiling.

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We hope there will still be plenty for Nokia to show at the official reveal of the rumoured Nokia EOS, but given the rate of the leaks, we aren’t too confident. We’ve seen loads of what’s supposed to be the EOS leaked by various sources.  We’ve even seen what looked to be a metal version of the lens cap for the device, which had 41MP listed on it instead of the XX placeholder we had seen before

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