SUNNYVALE, CA, United States – After narrowing down the list of 32 down to 16, we’ve actually done it – we have arrived at the Excellent Eight. 

From our large field of apps divided into the four categories including: Games, Social, News and Entertainment and Utilities and Productivity, we now have eight apps that will duke it out on the way to the finale later this week.

Yesterday we began the Excellent Eight voting with the Social and Games categories and today we finish off this round with News and Entertainment and Productivity and Utility voting.

To see the full bracket, updated with the Excellent Eight winners and contenders, see this link.

Of course, if you need to research your choice and study the form, visit the Windows Phone Marketplace – and remember, you can try the apps before you buy on a Nokia Lumia phone. You’ll find over 70,000 apps on offer there.

Voting is simple. Under each pairing, select your favorite from the choices below. We’ll take it from there.

News and Entertainment

We have some excellent choices in the News and Entertainment category so let’s dive right in.

Newsy 

Newsy is aimed at being your one-stop place to get news-focused video content straight to your Nokia Lumia. The app pulls in sources from across the web, so it’s a video aggregator of sorts.

By showing you short videos on subjects from more than one source, Newsy makes you a smarter news consumer.

We love that you can share videos out via messaging and email, but integration to other social networks such as Facebook, Twitter or even Pinterest would be a welcome addition. Overall, Newsy is a nice way to grab news bites on a variety of stories.

AAWP: All About Windows Phone

All About Windows Phone is an app that corresponds with the terrific Windows Phone publication aptly named All About Windows Phone. The publication is anchored by Rafe Blandford, Steve Litchfield, Ewan Spence and other long time pundits who consistently provide unique viewpoints and amazing coverage on all things Nokia and Windows Phone.

The AAWP is a great mobile app experience featuring a clean look and feel. By using the Metro user experience, app users can easily see the latest headlines, browse the sections of All About Windows Phone (including news, reviews, features and media), Search and Podcasts.

Once inside an individual article, you can browse photos and text easily. You can even browse the links in each article and share the article out via social networks and email. Lastly – comments are enabled in AAWP, making the app an amazing way to interact with the fresh content that is updated daily on the site.

Utility and Productivity

Nextgen Reader

There a lot of Google Reader fans out there. As far as web-enabled RSS readers go, it is the number one choice for many of us. Accessing Google Reader via a Windows phone can be frustrating using Internet Explorer, but luckily for us, we have Nextgen Reader.

Nextgen Reader is an extremely fast app that unlocks your feeds in Google Reader and lets you easily browse your news on your Nokia Lumia. Featuring Live Tiles to give one-click access to feeds or groupings of feeds and Read It Later integration, Nextgen Reader is the top choice for news readers.

Nextgen can fully sync with Google Reader, meaning your read status is consistent on Google Reader after you’ve ready your news on your mobile. 

SkyDrive

SkyDrive is one of those utilities that once you work with, it’s hard to understand how you ever conduced file sharing and syncing without it. SkyDrive is Microsoft’s cloud storage offering, similar to Dropbox. However, Skydrive is fully integrated into your Live account and you get 25Gb of online storage for free.

Plus, with full integration of SkyDrive in the Microsoft Office online suite and the Windows Phone app that ties into it, SkyDrive goes beyond simple file syncing. SkyDrive on Windows Phone allows you to manage your files and folders by deleting and moving folders, sharing any file via email with a simple link sent to the other party, browse files shared with you, uploading your pictures and more.

Because we get SkyDrive as a user of Windows Phone, the mobile app makes the experience seamless. Unlock your 25GB of online storage and use it to its fullest extent.