Nokia Lumia 525 becomes official

Update: According to one of Nokia’s localized Facebook pages, the Lumia 525 should ”be available on 14 December at the suggested retail price of SGD249 at Nokia Stores and Nokia Solution Partners”. That translates from Singapore Dollars to roughly $199.

The first time we heard about the Nokia Lumia 525 was at the end of October when a certain contest announcement revealed its existence. Since then, we’ve seen the device leaked in press renders showing off future possible color options, and today, the Nokia Lumia 525 becomes official.

We’re expecting the press release to be published soon with details on pricing and availability. Until then, there’s the official product page which mentions the specs: four-inch WVGA display, the same dual-core Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 processor clocked at 1GHz and found on many other models, 1GB of RAM, 8GB of internal storage (expandable via microSD), five-megapixel main camera (sans flash), and a 1,430mAh battery.

As far as color options are concerned, the Nokia Lumia 525 will be able to accept “glossy, changeable covers in dazzling orange, radiant yellow and luminous white”. More details can be found at the source link below, and in the embedded video.

Source: Nokia (YouTube, Facebook, Pocketnow)

Thanks everyone for the tip on pricing and availability!

Windows Phone Marketplace Adds Web Access For More Countries

Back at the end of March, we heard from Microsoft that it was adding support for a number of new countries to the Windows Phone Marketplace. While Zune support was going live nearly straight-away, at the time the company indicated that these countries would get access to the web-based version of the Marketplace within about a week. The entirety of April has passed in the time since then, and that web-based support never happened. Microsoft hasn't forgotten about things, though, and today announced that the Marketplace is now accessible in twenty-two new nations. 

All told, Windows Phone users in Bulgaria, Costa Rica, Croatia, Estonia, Iceland, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Turkey, Ukraine, Venezuela, UAE, Bahrain, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kazakhstan, Israel, Thailand, and Vietnam can use the web-based Marketplace as of this afternoon. 

In addition to this expanded access, Microsoft also discussed its efforts to make keywords a more useful tool for finding relevant apps. The company will be pouring through keywords currently tied to apps and doing a bit of pruning, removing those without strong ties to the application they're associated with. By effectively cutting down on the level of noise, those keywords that remain linked to apps should be more on-target than ever.