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Windows Phone 7 Essential Apps, Reviewed

Windows Phone 7 Essential Apps, ReviewedWindows Phone 7 is out, so we're going to review as many awesome and essential apps as we can, live, updating throughout the day. If you're curious about what Windows Phone, this is the place to really check it out.

Flight Control



Windows Phone 7 Essential Apps, ReviewedFeels just like the iPhone version.

Facebook



Windows Phone 7 Essential Apps, ReviewedIt's a fairly full-featured, slick iteration of Facebook, but Windows Phone 7ified.

OMG: Our Manic Game



Windows Phone 7 Essential Apps, ReviewedOoh, this is like Geometry Wars combined with Ikaruga. Fun! And nice looking.

OpenTable


Windows Phone 7 Essential Apps, ReviewedThe Windows Phone 7 version of OpenTable feels classy, almost as classy as the restaurant you're making a reservation at.

FourSquare


Windows Phone 7 Essential Apps, ReviewedIt'll be good once they worked out the bugs—it's probably my favorite FourSquare version in terms of look and feel.

Flixster


Windows Phone 7 Essential Apps, ReviewedThe classic movies app from iOS and Android, but on Windows Phone 7.

IMDB


Windows Phone 7 Essential Apps, ReviewedI don't think IMDB has ever looked this good.

Flickr Manager


Windows Phone 7 Essential Apps, ReviewedA basic Flickr app for uploading photos and checking out your friends' photostream—gets the job done until there's an official Flickr app.

The Harvest



Windows Phone 7 Essential Apps, ReviewedIt may be $7, but it looks like Dungeon Siege (or the lousier Space Siege) on your phone. And that is great times for click-RPG fans.

Netflix


Windows Phone 7 Essential Apps, ReviewedIt's somewhere between barebones and decently featured. It's a lot more thoughtfully designed than say, the iPad Netflix app. You still can't manage your queue. But it works, and it's easyish to use, which is all most people are lookin' for.

Twitter


Windows Phone 7 Essential Apps, ReviewedThe official Twitter app for Windows Phone 7 is one of the slickest Twitters apps you can get on any platform, and it's got all of the standard Twitter features you'd expect. Wish it was a little faster, though.

Avatar



Windows Phone 7 Essential Apps, ReviewedMicrosoft combined those crappy $1 apps—flashlight, ruler, level—into one app. Plus, they Avatarized it, so you can play with yourself.

Seesmic


Windows Phone 7 Essential Apps, Reviewed Diehard Seesmic power users might be a little disappointed in the initial version of the app, which is a little limited in how ridiculous you can get with your social networking, but for most people it's a nice rollup of Twitter and Facebook which'll definitely get more powerful over time.

Shazam


Windows Phone 7 Essential Apps, Reviewed Tells you what songs playing, of course. But it lets you dip into Zune Marketplace, which is handy combined with a ZunePass.

Yelp


Windows Phone 7 Essential Apps, Reviewed Yelp has never been so red.

Newsroom


Windows Phone 7 Essential Apps, Reviewed A nice-looking RSS reader with an even nicer feature: It pulls in full news feeds from pretty much every site you toss at it, even if full feeds aren't the default—like Gizmodo. $2.

The Weather Channel


Windows Phone 7 Essential Apps, ReviewedA little busy, perhaps, but it is all the weather info you could want in a free app.

Pictures Lab


Windows Phone 7 Essential Apps, Reviewed Your phone isn't complete until you can take photos that look like they came out of a $5 camera from 1974. Pictures Lab fortunately offers a ton of other effects for your money. $2.

Google Search


Windows Phone 7 Essential Apps, ReviewedDoesn't do a whole lot right now—just a location-aware search bookmark really.

Wonder Reader


Windows Phone 7 Essential Apps, Reviewed Your best option for a Google Reader, but it could use some polish—if it hooked up with NewsRoom, we'd have a winner. $2.

I Can Has Cheezburger


Windows Phone 7 Essential Apps, Reviewed I Can Has Cheezburger, optimized for Windows Phone. It's better than the website, in some ways.

Shopping List


Windows Phone 7 Essential Apps, Reviewed Skeletal but free shopping list from Microsoft.

AP Mobile


Windows Phone 7 Essential Apps, Reviewed The only non-British major news app for Windows Phone, it's pretty good, like every other AP application. And hey, it's free.

Zagat


Windows Phone 7 Essential Apps, Reviewed Like most cross-platform apps, you know what you're getting with the $10 Zagat app—full, location-aware access to Zagat's listings and ratings—but wrapped up in a Windows Phone bow, which happens to be very pretty here.

Last.fm


Windows Phone 7 Essential Apps, ReviewedLast.FM is your best bet of the major free streaming radio services, since there is no Pandora, and Slacker Radio isn't so hot right now (see below). It's good implementation of last.fm overall, too.

Slacker


Windows Phone 7 Essential Apps, ReviewedI'm sure after an update or two, Slacker radio will be the streaming music app Slacker fans want. Right now, it's seriously buggy and borders on unusable. This was the best I got it to perform.

Hexic



Windows Phone 7 Essential Apps, ReviewedI've been looking forward to a good Hexic implementation on phones for a while, and unsurprisingly, nobody does it as well as Hexic themselves. The twisting takes a bit of time to get used to, but it's solid.

History Here


Windows Phone 7 Essential Apps, ReviewedA neat app by The History Channel for $3, it shows you where historical stuff went down near you, or the address of your choosing.

NYC Subway


Windows Phone 7 Essential Apps, Reviewed While we wait for a better NYC subway app, this one will do. $1.

IloMilo



Windows Phone 7 Essential Apps, ReviewedIlomilo is kind of a platformer, kind of a puzzler, and definitely fun. You try to reunite these two guys by taking control of both, one at a time, and getting around obstacles. It's more exciting than it sounds.

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