A variety of pretty good games have dropped today that hopefully fits your tastes. One thing is certain; Windows Phone app situation is doing pretty darn well and getting better.

Mass Effect, Infiltrator
YOU’RE A CERBERUS AGENT – GONE ROGUE! As Commander Shepard battles Reapers across the galaxy, veteran Cerberus agent Randall Ezno procures aliens for illicit experiments at a secret facility. But when the Director of the facility goes too far – Randall fights back and vows to bring Cerberus down! $6.99
WP Store Link: Mass Effect: Infiltrator

Real Racing
Test your racing prowess on a 16 car grid against highly skilled AI drivers – or battle it out against other racers over WiFi! • Select from 30 officially licensed cars including the 2010 Ford Shelby Mustang GT500, 2010 Nissan GT-R (R35), 2012 McLaren MP4-12C, and more! • Work your way from rookie to pro in a robust Career Mode, offering 10 hours of exhilarating gameplay. Jump into a Quick Race for instant fun – or try to beat the clock in Time Trial Mode. • Race in 15 beautiful locations, with 40 miles of highly detailed race tracks, speedways, and city circuits – including twilight and night races. Exclusively for Nokia Lumia $4.99
WP Store Link: Real Racing 2

Tiger Woods PGA Tour
Play through world famous PGA TOUR courses with Tiger Woods PGA TOUR 12 and see how you stack up with real PGA TOUR pros, including Tiger Woods himself! Now, you can earn XBOX LIVE® Achievements for great golfing – like scoring birdies, sinking a hole-in-one, winning the PGA TOUR, and more!Play as, or alongside, Tiger Woods and other PGA TOUR greats. Create your own male or female golfer, too! Tee off from the Championship tees of 8 stellar courses, including Pebble Beach, St. Andrews, TPC Sawgrass, Hazeltine, Doral, Greenbrier, TPC Boston – plus the fan favorite, the PREDATOR. Exclusively for Nokia Lumia $2.99
WP Store link: Tiger Woods PGA Tour 12

NBA Jam
BOOMSHAKALAKA!!!! Jam with your favorite stars from all 30 NBA teams in over-the-top, high-flying, 2-on-2 arcade basketball just like you remember it – and like you’ve never seen before! PLAY NOW! PLAY CLASSIC! PLAY HEAD-TO-HEAD AGAINST A FRIEND! 3 modes of play let you ball the way you want: • Play Now – Select a team and jump right into the ballgame. • Classic Campaign – Defeat all other teams to win the championship and unlock legends, hidden players, and outrageous cheats. • Local Multiplayer – Go big head 2 big head against a friend via local WiFi.Exclusively for Nokia $2.99
WP Store Link: NBA Jam

Other games released today: Parking Mania $2.99, The Game of Life $2.99, SPY Mouse $2.99, Trivial Pursuit $2.99. Again, the app and game situation continues to improve on the Windows Phone platform. Word is that a couple more major and heavily requested apps will be arriving in June and July.

Get psyched suckas!

Another week, another shot in the arm for the Windows Phone 8 app story. Reddit user zyphaz just posted that Citrix Receiver was just announced for WP8. The popular and important app allows users to access their enterprise applications, files and desktops on the go. Basically you’ll be able to remote desktop into your office in addition to other features.

Source: WMPoweruser via Reddit

If you have a Lumia then you likely already have a Qi wireless charger to go with. Now to add the watch. There’s a new Kickstarter for Agent. It’s a new smart watch that can charge using a Qi wireless charger but it has a 7 day battery life when connected anyway.  Style is also at the heart of this and add a potential large app system with a real set of development tools. Check it out:

If you back it you can get the watch for as low as $129 (without the charger). Being that I’m still using a Lumia 900 I’m likely holding back for now but this looks like a nice project. 

Verizon (VZW) showed up big time and is clearly putting its money and creative agencies to good use with its new Nokia Lumia 928 ad. The ad checks all the desirable boxes for me and I suspect most others. Taking on the heavyweights directly shows you’re confident in your product. Naming a specific feature that is heavily used and weighted by smartphone users and producing side-by-side superiority shots is taking it to another level. Showing the camera in fun situations that most of us really encounter makes the commercial golden. Lastly, getting the geek speak out of the way and letting the phone’s capabilities sell itself makes this commercial priceless. In short, way to go Verizon. You’re the long lost carrier partner Windows Phone needed to show off such a great phone to the roughly 50% of smartphone users in the U.S. that don’t belong to AT&T.

Having used Palm Pilots and Pocket PCs for nearly a decade, you can call me a styli junkie. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t miss them. But when I see one I become a bit curious. I tried a capacitive stylus a couple years ago and found it to be very unresponsive. Figured it was time to give it another shot.

The Targus Slim Stylus is a tiny thing, measuring 4.375” long and about 0.25” across, not including the handy pocket clip (to store in your geeky pocket protector). Being a capacitive stylus, the target area is not as precise as a resistive stylus or one of those Wacom digitizer thingies. As a result, its use is somewhat limited, but I knew that before laying down my cash.

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I’ve never been a fan of the Surface ads. If you want to sell a product that consumers aren’t familiar with then I don’t see how a bunch of dancing works. Well the critics have been heard and finally there’s a new Surface ad that talks about capabilities and actually describes the product…and it works. Check it out:

Here’s their description of the video:

Surface Imagine shows you a device that can finally do it all.  It has the power of  a laptop with the portability of a tablet.  It has a USB port and a click-in keyboard and the power to run Office.  Check out why Microsoft Surface lets you do so much more.

David K: Does Google really think that its Android lead is so effing precarious that a decent Youtube app on Windows Phone could jeopardize it? If only MS used the YouTube API that Google was so nice in supplying so that the ads would display…wait what? Oh Microsoft had to do a work around because Google won’t let Microsoft use the API and that’s why there’s no ads? Oh evil evil Microsoft – for shame. If Google blocks an API that means you can’t play in the sandbox and shame on you for trying.  Simmons, any thoughts?

Ram:  David, LOL — Simmons, the PAL of Eric Schmidt, won’t care and in fact says its Microsoft’s fault. Damn effing fawnbuys. They buy into their divas and in fact they are ready to Lend their Personal Ass. Simmons, if you are still wondering what is a PAL, I just gave you the definition. :)

Doug Simmons: I don’t know or care whose fault it is, what I want is their stuff on more platforms. Likewise, I’d like to see Microsoft’s stuff on other platforms — EG Office on iOS and Android. Google’s claimed repeatedly that what they want to be platform-independent. This isn’t WebOS, WP is a viable platform, why try go out of their way to shaft it. Shooting everybody in the feet. Perhaps you’d likewise be “pals” with Ballmer if he, I don’t know, didn’t sweat as much, and other little things like not letting the company go sideways on his watch. The thing I’m pals with is progress. Don’t break my balls just because one particular company incidentally tends to have more overlap in that industry than another.

What a weird rumor – that a Twitter account held any credibility about the pending release of a Windows Phone Instagram app (especially on the heels of Instagram not appearing at the Nokia release event yesterday as they other nonsense rumors said would happen). Anyway Nokia’ media chimed in: Spoiler alert: @InstagramWP is fake. A good reminder to check our auto follow on Tweetsender. Resume normal programming

Spoiler alert: @instagramwp is fake. A good reminder to check our auto follow on Tweetsender. Resume normal programming

— Doug Dawson (@DougatNokia) May 15, 2013

The HTC ChaCha flopped, the phone with the Facebook button from 2011. The Kin flopped, a social-centric device. Facebook Home, the hated Android skin, in terms of most people intensely disliking it, flopped spectacularly. Phones with specs that would only turn heads in previous years tend not to do so well either. One might see an axiom here and act accordingly. Instead, AT&T, HTC and Facebook launched the HTC First.

I have the benefit of hindsight, however Todd Haselton did not when he called the flop before details of the phone were available. His conclusions were that this phone, which would surely have underwhelming specs (it did), would flop (it did), as will any subsequent attempt to make some sort of Facebook phone. Given that this had to have been obvious to the suits as the probable outcome, I wonder why they continue to bother.

Business Insider got their hands on the Lumia 928 in advance and they don’t have nice things to say about it. “…the Lumia 928 is still noticeably thicker and heavier than other top-tier phones like the iPhone 5, Samsung Galaxy S4, and HTC One. The plastic also feels a bit cheaper than the materials used to build the Lumia 920, and its squared-off design isn’t nearly as attractive. This model is an improvement in many ways, but it’s hardly ideal for those who like thin and light phones.” The Galaxy has almost no build quality to it so I can’t imagine it’s below that standard.

This is about all they have so far. They noted the camera was good but they haven’t put it through its paces yet and they still need time for a full review. They did provided these photos and state “Finally, this isn’t the only new device Nokia has for us this week. It will announce another phone with a metal body and 41 megapixel camera called the Lumia 925 at a press event in London Tuesday morning.”
You can read it in full (with high resolution photos) here.