Microsoft to Android phone users: There's a WP8 app for that

Microsoft is trying a not entirely new tack to convince Android phone users that they should give Windows Phone a second look.

As first reported by CITEworld, Microsoft is poised to launch an Android app called "Switch to Windows Phone" that will help them find identical (or at least comparable) Windows Phone 8 applications to replace their Android ones.

This app is expected to be made available some time on April 25. Update (April 26): It looks like the launch of this app is delayed until some time the week of April 29.

Microsoft officials are not commenting on the expected app.

Microsoft's phone team has tried, in the past, to convince non-Windows Phone users that Microsoft has most of the most popular phone apps, even though it has considerably fewer apps overall compared to Android and iPhone. However, there are still some pretty obvious omissions from the Windows Phone app list (Instagram is one of those most often mentioned.)

The way the new Switch to Windows Phone app supposedly will work is it will inventory all the apps on a user's Android phone and then send that list of apps to SkyDrive. When customers log into the same SkyDrive account from a Windows Phone 8 device, the app will list the suggested replacements. (This makes it sound as if Microsoft is planning to use this app as part of a retail-store campaign.)

CITEworld explained the workings of the app, citing execs with Quixey, the supplier of the app-search engine within the Switch to Windows app, as the source.

In other Windows Phone news, Nokia sent to select journalists and analysts on April 25 to a May 14 event in London. The invitation specifies that the event will be about the "Nokia Lumia" story, which could mean anything from an unveiling of new rumored Lumia phones, including the Catwalk and/or EOS, to some kind of Lumia-branded tablet.

Meanwhile, BlackBerry announced this week that a preview of Microsoft's Skype application will be available on BlackBerry Q10 devices when they ship, starting in May 2013.