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Nokia announce Windows Phone the Lumia 710. It takes advantage of the same 1.4GHz CPU found in the Nokia Lumia 800, offers a 3.7-inch ClearBlack display and comes in “stealthy black” and “crisp white,” with replaceable back covers. For availability, you can expect to see the Lumia 710 hitting France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain and the UK in November and then Hong Kong, India, Russia, Singapore and Taiwan by the end of the year, with additional markets in the first part of 2012.

The front is covered by that 3.7-inch 800 x 480 ClearBlack AMOLED display, which rests under ever so slightly curved glass, giving a raised effect. This is Gorilla Glass, so hopefully it being exposed in this way won’t danger its visual purity. Needless to say it looks as good as the display on the Nokia N9 it’s quite simply gorgeous.

Nokia announced that it was making Windows Phone 7 its primary Smartphone OS. The company promised that its first WP7 devices would be on the market, We know about the Sea Ray, which was briefly shown off by Nokia CEO Stephen Elop at a private event this past summer, and we know that anyone Nokia shows it to thinks it’s absolutely stunning.

Curious what the minimum specifications for Windows 8 will be? As are we. Microsoft’s remaining mum on specifics, but the outfit’s Steven Sinofsky – President of Windows and Windows Live – just confessed during the opening Build 2011 keynote that an antediluvian Lenovo S10 was potent enough to run Windows 8. And in fact, it’ll do so with more poise than with Windows 7. A brief demonstration explained that Win8 demanded fewer system resources (barely, but still) than Win7 on the same hardware, proving that an early-gen Atom CPU and 1GB of RAM is “enough” to run the outfit’s upcoming operating system. We highly doubt it’s enjoyable, but at least you (probably) won’t be forced into an upgrade if you don’t want to be. Have a gander at the actual numbers just after the break!

Windows Phone users can look forward to deeper integration of voice command functionality built-in to the Apollo update. Nokia US’ CEO, Chris Weber, first spilled the speech recognition beans in an interview with VentureBeatback in early August, referring to the tech as a killer WP feature. Now, a report over on ZDNetbacks up that leaked info with resume tidbits from former MS Windows Phone / Mobile Communications team members that had a hand in creating the so-called “Voice-Compose” and “Read-Aloud” features for native email clients – even tipping us off to a possible Windows 8 and WP 8 convergence. There’s also mention (gleaned from a company job listing) of MS’ lower-end mobile OS splitting into two separate versions – Tango1 and Tango2.

HTC’s video on demand service will allow users to check out the latest movie trailers for free and rent or buy premium movies and TV shows. The app looks like most other WP apps, and the service should work exactly the same as it does on HTC’s Android powered devices. Since there no Mango powered phones from HTC on the market, we’ll just have to wait a bit longer to see if HTC Watch offers anything new or unique. Windows Phone users already have a few other options to rent or buy movies or TV shows, including Microsoft’s official Zune store (which is not available in all markets).

While Microsoft was one of the last to launch an app store on Windows Mobile 6, the company will be the first to shut one down as well. Microsoft has alerted Windows Mobile 6 customers that the company plans to shut down the entire service, including the ability for new developers to submit new applications on July 15th. Though customers will still be able to purchase and redownload apps, we’re guessing that’s coming to a close pretty soon as well.