One of the key differentiators for Nokia's Windows Phone Devices , the company's navigation app , is now available to all Windows Phone 8 Users in United States , United Kindom and Canada . The app , which is called Nokia Drive+ , is still in Beta and is available for free on the Windows Phone Store .
This essentially means that users who now own Windows Phone 8 devices made by HTC (Samsung 's devices have still not gone on sale) , will be able to experience features like full turn-by-turn voice guided navigation , offline maps , speed limit warnings , and day and night modes , which where till now , only available on Nokia's Windows Phone devices.
It's worth that Nokia announced that it would make Nokia Drive available to other Windows Phone 8 partner in 110 countries , coinciding with the announcement of Windows Phone 8 platform , in june 2012 . Nokia's location assets are one of the richest , with mao data for nearly 200 countries . So Microsoft's location partnership with Nokia which aims at strengthening the Windows Phone ecosystem is finnaly fruit . We are looking forward to Nokia releasing the app in other markets , including India soon .
Finally , there is some bit of good news for smartphone users with Windows Phone 7.5 devices . It seems that Microsoft is to roll out a windows Phone 7.8 update for these smartphones shortly.
Recently , Microsoft Posted an optional Windows SDK Update for windows Phone 7.8 on its develouper's blog . This update offers two new Windows Phone 7.8 emulator images to the existing SD installation .
With the help of these two emulators images the developers will be able to fully test how their Windows \phone 7.5 app's Live Tiles will look and behave they are running on Windows Phone 7.8 devices .
With recent reports have indicated that Microsoft will be launching the Windows Phone 7.8 Update Pretty soon . The British telecom carrier O2 had indicated that the update will rolled out by the end of January while Microsoft's Colombian Facebook Page had posted that this update will arrive on january 31 , 2013 .
From current Scheme of things it appears that it's just a matter of days when Windows Phone 7 and Windows Phone 7.5 Users will get an update notification.
Furthermore , microsoft has also posted in its blog that " new phones with Windows Phone 7.8 are begining to ship " . Not sure of what Microsoft is trying to indicate through this . To us it can mean two things . One , handset maakers might be planning to ship their existing smartphones pre-loaded with Windows Phone 7.8 in near future. Second , it coud mean that the company is planning to launch ne smartphones on the lines of Nokia Lumina 510 and Nokia Lumina 610.
