Human Interest

The Interactive Design Association (IxDA) just announced the winners of its first annual Interaction Award—and we’re thrilled that Windows Phone 7.5 has picked one up. Here’s the official award citation.

You love Windows Phone. The critics love Windows Phone. We love Windows Phone.

The question now is: How can we convince everybody else?

A few months ago we created the Suggestion Box for your feature suggestions for future versions of Windows Phone. Your passion and creativity has floored us. So now we’ve made a new place for your advertising and promotion suggestions. In other words, How would you get the word out about Windows Phone?

Windows Phone had a fantastic week last week at CES. 2 new 4G LTE-enabled Windows Phones were announced for AT&T: the HTC Titan II and Nokia Lumia 900.

The challenge is in full swing!  Today we’ve had challengers coming at us with iPhones, Blackberries, and a whole host of Android phones.  Almost all of the challenges (nearly 30 of them!) we won hands down, like this one where we showed how easy it is to find a great place to eat nearby with Local Scout:

But in a few cases – 3 to be exact – we lost by a hair:

It was a busy, busy first day on the show floor at CES, and the $100 challenge saw over 25 competitors step up against Windows Phone.  The result?  A pretty impressive record of:

Happy 2012, everybody. If you unwrapped a new Windows Phone for the holiday, we’ve just published a big fat list of great tips and time-savers on the official Windows Phone website you might want to checkout.

I have a love/hate relationship with New Year’s Eve that I think a lot of other people share. On the one hand I like an excuse for a fresh start. On the other, I hate to give up old habits. The problem is that giving up old habits isn’t incredibly difficult, but it’s hard, tiresome and exhausting to create new habits. A habit, to be a habit (obviously), requires a lot of repetition, time, and learning.. In particular, I know it can often seem time consuming to learn (and remember!) new technology habits.

With the holidays fully upon us, we wanted to give you Tumblr enthusiasts a little gift. We’ve created a holiday template as part of our Picture Perfect Holiday campaign taking place in malls across America. You should take a moment to check it out here. It features behind the scenes shots from our holiday photo shoot with the Santas as they play around in the Dallas Fort Worth airport.

Courtesy of my friends at Microsoft Hardware, I was able to get my hands on a never-before-seen prototype Arc Touch Mouse to show you.

Last week I told you how to conjure up a bunch of cool emoticons in Windows Phone 7.5. Here’s a bunch more to start playing with when you’re texting friends. (Miss last week's list?)