And then there were two.
After weeks of furious voting and hundreds of thousands of ballots, the inaugural Windows Phone Next App Star competition has come down to this: ProShot vs. Wikipedia. The app that earns more of your votes by 11:59 p.m. Pacific on Monday wins the competition and earns a coveted spot in a Windows Phone TV ad. So head over to Facebook now and start clicking!
To have survived five rounds of voting against so many worthy and popular apps is a huge coup, and I’m sure the next three days will be a nail biter for Eddie Kezeli and Rudy Huyn, the two guys behind these amazing finalists. Read on to learn a little more about Eddie and Rudy and their creations (a confession: I lifted some of this material from a very nice post my colleague Emilio wrote earlier this week for our developer blog).
And don’t forget there’s something at stake for you, too. With Next App Star in the home stretch, you have just three more days to earn a chance to win a Nokia Lumia 920*. Every vote you cast is an entry in our daily giveaway. Will you take home one of the three remaining phones?
Now, on to the finalists:
ProShot
We’ve featured the first finalist on the blog before: ProShot ($1.99) is one of the first, best, and highest-rated Windows Phone 8 apps designed for serious mobile photographers. ProShot developer Eddie Kezeli of Roseville, Calif. says his goal was to give Windows Phone owners the same level of control over key image-making elements like shutter speed, ISO, white balance, and aspect ratio that owners of DSLR cameras have at their fingertips. “Big features should not be limited to big cameras,” he says. Judging by the app’s ratings and popularity, it looks like plenty of other shutterbugs agree.
Wikipedia
The popular free Wikipedia app was created by Rudy Huyn of Rennes, France— a city of 206,000 people in the northwest corner of the country, according to his app. Huyn’s goal, he says, was to put “a complete encyclopedia in your pocket” by creating the ultimate Wikipedia app. The result boasts tons of bells and whistles: It uses the phone’s location to find relevant articles and supports speech recognition, NFC sharing, QR codes, and services such as Pocket (formerly Read It Later) and Instapaper. You can also search in more than 100 languages. Truly a tour de force reference app for your phone.
If you’re still on the fence and want to see these two apps in action, watch Laura Foy’s latest episode of Hot Apps. Then hustle over to Facebook and cast your vote!
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* No purchase necessary. Open to registered Facebook account holders 18+. Ends April 8, 2013. See the official rules for details.