First off, there is no way to back up your device and restore all your apps, saved games, and configurations on a new device. There is hints that Microsoft might be working on implementing this in a future release. But as of today, there is nothing. As such, before you head down this path, you should head over to Windows Phone Marketplace on your PC and see that it has an accurate list of the applications you’ve installed. This will serve as a handy way to recall what apps you want to reinstall on your new phone.

The next thing you’re going to run into is paid apps. What happens to all those apps you paid good money for on your old phone? You’ll quickly notice that the Marketplace on the phone does not have any indication that you’ve already purchased the app. There’s no indication that it’s free for you to re-download onto this new device. Rest assured, it is. Once you find the app, simply select “Buy” at this point, the marketplace figures out that you’ve already paid for it, and allows you to download it to the new phone for free. Not very intuitive if you ask me.

But hold on… all paid apps are not equal. Things are a little different if you picked up an application during a promotion where the developer was offering it for free. For example, I picked up Cocktail Flow during MIX 2011 when the developer had a free – during the MIX conference – promotion. It’s an awesome app, and I’ve used it many many times. Unfortunately, it’s not considered a paid app on my account. So when you tap the “Buy” button on your phone for these apps, you will actually be purchasing the app. It’s not a big deal for me, as Cocktail Flow is well worth the money. However, it’s very misleading for the consumer. If I acquired an app during a free period and at some point later it becomes paid, I should still be allowed to re-download it on another phone without having to pay for it.

Other than this gotcha with the free promotion apps, you’re good to tap the “Buy” button while re-downloading your apps on your new Windows Phone.

So, to better answer John’s question, I figured I would just share with everyone, all the apps installed on my phone. So here’s the list, and just so it’s clear, some of these are not the best app out there. However they do what I need and do it well. Take a look and let me know what app I’m missing, or share your thoughts on what I’ve already got.

While the name, Yivosoft Recorder, doesn’t roll off the tongue nicely, the application provides all the functionality you need for a very affordable price of $1.99. However, they have a very generous trial. You get all the features of the app for as long as you want. If you’re happy with the product, then they ask that you buy it. It’s that simple and generous. Pretty nice, right?

Yivosoft Recorder offers your typically recording features, and adds the ability to sync these files over the air to your PC using their desktop server component. They also offer the ability to trim the files and even set them as ringtones on your phone. Other features include pinning audio clips to the start screen, add images to clips, and add reminder alerts.

I really like how Yivosoft goes straight to the recording screen when you launch the app. A quick swipe to the side and you’ll be greeted with a list of your existing recordings. I’m not a big fan of how things are displayed on this page. All the needed information is there: date, time, length, and file size. However, all recordings have the same icon next to them, and if you attach a picture to the file, it adds a little icon under the details. But that icon doesn’t show a thumbnail of the image you added. So all recordings with a picture attached have the same icon. I would rather see the big play icon beside the track details replaced with a thumbnail of the attached picture. At least then you could make sense of what image is attached to the audio clip.

Tap and hold on any of the audio clips and you’ll find a nice menu of options. The Ringtone and Trim option lets you fine tune the clip to just the part that you want. And once you’ve got it just the way you like it, you can set it as your ringtone. The sliders along the bottom allow you to fine tune where your trimmed clip should start and stop. The slider allows you to crop in between the second markers. Basically, you can clip off the first half a second if you want. It’s a pretty good slider for controlling, and the play button lets you quickly hear if you’ve got the right spot or not.

The Advanced Player takes you to a bigger and easier to control screen. You’ve got the typical pause, play, forward, rewind and stop buttons along the bottom. A colorful background, and with large second counter displayed. It would be cool if I could choose the picture I wanted to display in the background here. As well, it would be nice if, when paused, I could tap on the progress bar and adjust the position in the recording. Unfortunately, you need to use the buttons along the bottom. The progress bar is just there for looks.

When it comes to capturing and editing audio files on the phone, the Yivosoft Recorder fills the needs at the right price.

Good friend, Clinton Fitch has posted his Open Letter to Windows Phone developers asking them to update their apps. I agree with his intent here. Many developers that jumped on board at launch last year have still not updated their apps to support new features offered by Mango and fix all the bugs that have found by your loyal users. The issues that Clinton highlights with Netflix and TripIt are frustrating, but could be easily fixed with an update – and without the new features offered by Mango.

A great many applications were not designed very well – basically, I’m saying that a large part of the developer community didn’t correctly implment tombstoning. This is the idea of saving your applications state once the program has lost focus, so that it doesn’t have to restart from square one when it’s next called upon. Because developers didn’t take the time to get this right, apps like Netflix don’t remember where you are in a movie if you happen to leave the app to quickly check on something.

The solution here doesn’t require multi-tasking at all. It just needs better application design and understanding from the developer on how it should work. Don’t get me wrong, I agree 100% that developers should be upgrading their apps to leverage the cool new features exposed by Mango, but they need to fix the bugs and design flaws along the way too. In fact, this is almost more important in my opinion. I would rather see an application with proper handling of session state during the tombstoning process, than one that has a series of cool live tile updates but can’t remember anything about where you were in the app when launched.

Take a read of Clinton’s article and share your thoughts. Don’t forget to pin the developer of your favorite app and asking them when they plan to release a Mango/updated version. Let them know you’re interested and appreciate their work, and I expect you’ll get much better response from them.

First off, let’s get the availability questions out of the way. I’m writing this review based on Release Candidate of Carbon. If all goes well, the next step is releasing it in the Market Place. Hopefully there is no RC2 and you’ll be able to try it out yourself really soon.

What makes Carbon such a great twitter application? Features like: multiple Twitter accounts, Gesture support (for quick actions and replies), translations, username autocomplete, background updates, Live tiles and notifications, threaded DMs, and so much more. But perhaps one of the greatest features is that everything is available on the same screen. You don’t see a lot of windows opening. Most of the functionality is done with pivots.

When you launch Carbon the first time, you’re presented with the timeline view that will populate with the last 60 tweets in you stream. This number of tweets is configurable up to 100. This screen is pretty much what you would expect – scrolling up and down to view your twitter stream. Swipe your finger across the screen, and you’ll be looking at your mentions stream. A double tap on any tweet will kick you into the quick reply mode, or you can simply tap and hold the tweet for a list of actions like reply, quote, and retweet, that can be preformed on that tweet. Swipe your finger across the screen again, and now you’re looking at messages (DMs) and once more and you’re viewing the quickline. Quickline allows you to see any retweets of your messages, retweets to you, retweets by you, or select a list to view.

Along the bottom of these 4 main screens you have quick access buttons for creating new tweets, accessing the Carbon menu, searching, and refreshing the page. If you pull up drawer along the bottom, you will also have access to view trends (what’s trending on Twitter), go to @tweep, and accounts & settings. The really interesting one here is the go to @tweep. This will ask you for a Twitter account that you want to view. Just type in a name and it will take you right to that persons page. From here, you have access to all sorts of information like the person bio, location, and following status. You can also swipe to quickly view their timeline, mentions, friends, followers, favorites, and see any lists that they may be part of. You can also quickly tweet or DM them, and if need be, you can also report and block them.

 If you tap on a tweet in your stream, you’re taken to a new screen that shows you tweet, and if there’s a link to Twitpic or the like, it will automatically load that image below the tweet. So you don’t have to jump out of the app to see the image. If you pull up the bottom drawer on the tweet screen, you have the added ability to share the tweet over email or SMS. You can also copy the text of the tweet or even kick off a translate

Swiping on this screen takes you between the Tweep and their message. This screen is the same screen you would see if you used the go to @tweep feature I mentioned earlier. The only difference here, is that you have the individual tweet you tapped on, showing on the screen next to the users details.

If you happen to tap on a tweet that is part of a conversation, there is a new screen inserted between the individual tweet and the users details that shows you the entire conversation thread.

With the release of Mango for Windows Phone, developers have so much more that they can do with their applications. It’s nice to see that Carbon is already integrated some of those features into the product. The animated live tiles that flip between your avatar and the Carbon logo are pretty slick. Plus, you can pin the timeline for each account right to your home page. So with a single tap I can launch into the Mobile Jaw stream. If you enable the live tile updates, it will even populate the tile when there are new mentions or DMs. You can also pin the compose window on your home screen. So a single tap on that tile, and you’re able to start tweeting – quick and easy.

 If you do have multiple accounts in Carbon, the compose screen will let you tap on the account name, and quickly switch between accounts. Unfortunately, there is no way to post the same tweet from multiple accounts at the same time. You’re only able to select a single account to post messages from. However, considering how often I do something like that, and given the ability to Copy and Paste (thanks to the NoDo update!) I can quickly copy the text of my post before sending and then paste it into a new compose window so it can be sent again from another account.

Windows Phone limits you to one Twitter account. I’m not sure if there is a limit to the number of accounts you can setup with Carbon, but you can certainly see that it allows both of my accounts to be set-up, and it’s still allowing me to add another one. So it’s at least, 3 accounts.

There’s just about everything you would like to find in the settings for Carbon. You can customize and fine tune the experience to be just what you like – define the retweet style, change the number of new tweets to download, after refreshing what should have focus, and even support for things like TwitLonger, bit.ly and bit.ly Pro.

For my usage, Carbon has proven to be the most reliable, the fastest, and the easiest to use Twitter client on Windows Phone. The developers were more than happy to work with the beta group and listen to all their feedback. The end result is a really solid version 1 release that is loaded with features and functionality. Give it a try when it appears in the marketplace – I think you’ll be impressed as well.

Free Ringtones is one of the applications in the Windows Phone market place offering the ability to download ring tones directly to your phone. I’m always a little cautious of any “free ring tones” web site, and I have to admit that I wasn’t too sure about this app at first. But I decided to download it and see what it had to offer. What I found, was an app that didn’t have that slimy web site feel that so many free ring tone sites have. The app is pretty clean and works surprisingly well.

When you launch the app, the first page you see is Hot Ringtones. By default, this page will show all the most downloaded ring tones. If you tap on the Most Downloaded hot link, you can change this filter to show Featured, Newest, or Top Rated. If that doesn’t help you find some cool new sounds, you can swipe to the right and use the built-in search.

Once you’ve located a sound that you’re interested in, tap the headphone icon to listen to it, or tap the arrow to start the download process. The download will kick off on the same panoramic, so simply swipe right to get back to the Hot Ringtones page.

The only tricky part of this app was the final step. I figured that once downloaded, I was ready to use the new ring tones. That’s not the case. In order to use what you’ve downloaded, you need to swipe to the MyDownload page, and then click the Save icon beside each of the sounds you downloaded. I’m not sure what this step is actually doing, other than making it show up in the list of ring tones in the settings menu. I would prefer the act of downloading would automatically do this last step. Regardless, it’s certainly not a hard or complicated step.

At this point, you’re ready to enjoy the new ring tones. The samples I listened to all sounds pretty good. There was one sound that was a little rough sounding, but I just selected the next result in my search results and it was perfect. There is an ad floating along the bottom, but it didn’t get in my way. If you’re looking for some fresh sounds, give Free Ringtones a try – just like the name indicates, it’s free so you have nothing to lose.

The free app has launched on iPhone, Android, and BlackBerry. In just a few quick taps I was able to see a listing of the departure time for trains from my local station. The only thing it didn’t tell me, was what track I needed to be waiting on. I can understand why they might have decided to leave this out of the app, as the track can often change at the last minute. However, it is the one key thing that everyone is fighting to see when they get to the station. You can see the track listed under the Union Station info, but it’s missing when I look up a specific train/station departure.

If you live in Ontario, more specifically, in the GTA – and you use the train a little or a lot, this is a handy app to have on your device!

And because having new versions isn’t enough, Ilium is also kicking off a big Back to School sale starting on Monday. Fro a limited time, eWallet GO! for iOS, Android, and Windows Phone will be priced at just $0.99. That means you can pickup the premier digital wallet program for just a dollar! At the same time, the desktop version of eWallet (for Windows and Mac) will be free. So you can outfit all your devices, and all of your friends for next to nothing. Once the new auto-sync features make it over to the other platforms, I’ll be able to keep my eWallet sync’ed on every device and desktop I use – that’s pretty impressive.

If you’re not familiar with Ilium, or their eWallet GO! application, I strongly suggest you head over to their web site and read about it. These guys have been doing secure information management on mobile devices since 1997. Check them out!

Text Text Revolution helps you to learn the keyboard but at the same time, it helps Microsoft better understand what people are actually typing when they try and type a word. And forget all that – it’s just plain fun! When you finish a level, it shows the keyboard with colored dots showing where you pressed for each letter. Check it out and let us know what kind of words per minute speed you’re able to achieve.

Perhaps it’s the spring-like weather talking, but… Baseball season is off to a rocking start this year! If you’re a baseball fan and you’re powered by an iPhone or iPad, you’ll want to check out Clinton’s review of MLB 2011. Clinton makes sure to cover all all aspects of the app making sure you know what you’re getting for your $14.99.  Check it out, but don’t blame me if you’re team doesn’t make it to the World Series.