Microsoft may be set to shake up the Windows Phone market by entering its own horse into a race that has thus far stalled, with a Surface Phone potentially on the horizon. Should rumors and a supposed benchmark result is to be believed, that is.

It seems that every company in the smartphone and tablet industry is making some kind of announcement or holding an event to present a new product or service to the media at the minute. I'm pretty sure it doesn't have anything to do with the fact that Apple is widely speculated to be introducing the next-generation iPhone in the next nine days, but putting cynicism aside, Nokia and Microsoft is the latest companies to make their own exciting announcement in the next few days.

Of all the features that arrived when iOS 5 reached the end-user back in October of last year, iMessage has been arguably the most significant, and by now allowing messages to be sent and received in a faster, more secure manner across a variety of platforms, it has to go down as one of the best in the business.

Touch is a now the dominant method of input for mobile devices. Although touchscreen based devices have existed for a long time, they were popularized and made user friendly with the introduction of the iPhone in 2007 and iPad in 2010. In his original iPhone keynote, Steve Jobs categorically stated that if the device requires a stylus, you’re doing something wrong

As primarily an iOS user (with quite a bit of time for Android, mind), I have had very little experience with Microsoft's Windows Phone platform. In fact, apart from toying around with a Lumia 800 (which, by the way, I did rather enjoy), I have to confess to being a bit of a noob when it comes to the platform, but nevertheless, I am as excited as any with the prospect of Windows Phone 8. Continue reading this article at RedmondPie.com

Following yesterday's official debut of Office 2013 (and the Customer Preview, which is now available for download as we reported yesterday), Microsoft has today followed up with a post that shares more information about Office 2013's role in the cloud as well as its future on the Windows Phone platform. Continue reading this article at RedmondPie.com

Windows Phone 7.x users were somewhat disappointed to learn that Windows Phone 8 would not be coming to the current batch of WP devices. Instead, Microsoft has laid out a somewhat watered-down iteration in Windows Phone 7.8, so naturally, anybody looking to jump on the Windows Phone 8 background will need to grab themselves a new device, which while a little bit gutting, is still rather exciting at the same time. Continue reading this article at RedmondPie.com

Remember last month's comparison between mobile OSes, where we compared iOS 6 with the existing Android 4.x ICS and Windows Phone 7.5 Mango platforms? Well, in the time that has passed since then, we've since learned some newer official information about iOS 6, along with the upcoming versions of the other two mobile OSes. So now, a new chart has been concocted which compares and contrasts iOS 6 with Android 4.1 Jelly Bean and Windows Phone 8.

YouTube is the most frequented video streaming site on the web, and as such, most smartphone owners require a decent app for viewing the very latest and most entertaining content. Continue reading this article at RedmondPie.com

Having seen just how quickly an app like Instagram can become a billion dollar success story, it figures other developers would want to try their hand at building competitive image-sharing apps. Continue reading this article at RedmondPie.com