Up until now, CyanogenMod ROMs were released with root access available by default. But this had become a cause for concern over time; making root access available meant giving apps complete access to your device and thus putting yourself at a security risk.

So in order to take care of this situation, the CyanogenMod team has decided to disable root access over USB from CyanogenMod 9 onwards. Read more »

One of the problems with porting Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich over to old Snapdragon S1 based devices, such as the Nexus One and the HTC HD2, is the lack of GPU binaries. Because of this, initial releases of ICS ROMs for these devices did not support GPU-accelerated UI.

Later, however, developers figured out a way to enable GPU acceleration on these devices but the performance was still less than ideal. Now to make the lives of these developers and all those people out there who run custom ICS ROMs on these older Snapdragon phones easier, Qualcomm has decided to lend a helping hand in the form of GPU binaries for the Adreno 2xx series of GPU. Read more »

The highly popular ‘Cut the Rope’ game has been available on Android for a while now. But it’s next version, ‘Cut the Rope: Experiments’ has been an iOS exclusive since launch. But not any more, because developer Zeptolab has announced on its Facebook profile that the game is now coming to Android.

For the time being, ‘Cut the Rope: Experiments’ is only available on the Amazon Appstore for the Kindle Fire for $0.99 but it is expected shortly on the Google Play Store as well (Zeptolab says Saturday but I still can’t see it on the store). Read more »

It’s been just a week since Apple announced the new iPad and already we are seeing a decent number of apps optimized for the Retina resolution. In fact, Apple has even created a new category within iTunes that highlight these new apps optimized for the new iPad.

Now these aren’t new apps but just ones that have been spruced up to run at a higher resolution. In some cases, such as the Kindle App, it was basically making the text look sharper and in cases of 3D games like Infinity Blade II, the developers would have had to go through a lot more trouble to pour in enough detail to make the game look good enough at that resolution. Read more »

The highly anticipated iOS version of the popular Mac email client Sparrow has finally arrived. Sparrow is now available for download on the App Store and costs $2.99.

The reason everyone was waiting for this app is because anyone who has used the built-in Mail app on iOS can tell you that it is quite mediocre. Although Apple has spruced it up a few times over the years it still lags far behind the official Gmail app on Android or the email app in Windows Phone. Read more »

According to the folks at Engadget, who recently visited Samsung’s Korean headquarters, Samsung is considering adopting an open operating system for their cameras. And when we hear ‘open’, the first thing that comes to our minds these days is Android.

Now of course, Samsung could use any of the other open OSes out there. Two such examples are Samsung’s own Tizen and Bada. But practically speaking, Android makes the most sense right now. Read more »

Oh, Firefox 10, we hardly knew ye. Also, 9. And 8. And 7, 6, 5 and 4. Thanks to the new rapid release cycle, Mozilla is just flying through the version numbers for Firefox. And so as expected, v11 has just been officially released.

So what’s new in this one? Quite a few things, actually. First of all, Firefox now recognizes Chrome if it is installed on your machine along with Opera and Internet Explorer and will ask you if you want to import bookmarks from it. If Mozilla intends to win back some of its old users from Chrome, this new feature is in the right direction to make the process of jumping over that much easier. Read more »

After announcing several point-and-shoot cameras in the past few months, Sony has now outed a new single-lens translucent (SLT) camera, the SLT-A57, which comes as a replacement for the original A55.

The list of specifications for this new camera includes a 16.1 megapixel APS-C CMOS sensor, ISO 16,000, which can be boosted up to 25,600 and 1080p video recording at 60 fps. Read more »

American band Chairlift have released a new music video for their song ‘Met Before’. But unlike other music videos, this one actually lets you choose the events that occur in the video, which affects the story and the ending, like an RPG game.

The video starts with the main character (who is also the singer of the song, Caroline Polachek) as she follows two other characters in a class room. Right at the start you get the option to choose which one of the two you will pursue and then the video changes according. Later on, you are offered more choices that affect the way the video progresses and eventually ends. Read more »

Speaking at the SXSW today, Instagram founders Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger said that the Android version of the popular Instagram app is coming very soon. In fact, Systrom even said that in some ways the Android version of the app is even better than their iOS app and that it will be the most amazing Android app we’ll ever see.

Now we have been hearing about this Android version of Instagram for quite a while now when Instagram itself mentioned it on their blog a few months ago but we did not have any concrete date for the launch. Unfortunately, we still don’t have that yet but it’s nice to know that it will be coming shortly. Read more »

Ever since the big announcement at the MWC last month Nokia has steadily (and sneakily) released additional camera samples from the Nokia 808 PureView than what they showed at the event. We have covered some of those before but today we have some more to share with you.

For these bunch of photos, Nokia has moved from the rocky mountains to a sandy beach. As before these images are in bright sunlight so you cannot assess low light performance but it does give you a look at some of the other abilities of the camera. Read more »

Although there is no dearth of third-party keyboards for Android, this one in particular stands out from the rest due to the inclusion of some nifty shortcut keys that you can use to enter commonly typed phrases with just a single tap. The keyboard presents you with a bunch of icons, each of which has a handful of commonly used phrases assigned to it. You just press the relevant buttons and the phrases are automatically entered into the text box. With just a couple of clicks you can have an entire message ready to send. You get a whole bunch of icons with several phrases that you can customize and you can also download additional sets from within the app.

Another cool feature is the way it lets you enter time. Instead of typing out the entire time or date into a message you just click on the clock icon and select the time on the clock or the date you want on the calendar and the keyboard enters it for you in the text box. Read more »

Last year, Tether submitted their iTether app to the App Store, which would let users tether to their iPhones even if the functionality was not available by default from the carrier. Although Apple initially allowed the app, it was later on removed, saying that the app burdens the network.

Now, however, Tether has come up with a new HTML5 version of iTether, which lets you tether to your iPhone using the Safari browser instead of a dedicated app. Read more »

The default Bing search on Windows Phone has always been awful (at least in my experience) but there was some respite in the form of the Google Search app. However, compared to the Search app on Android, the Windows Phone app was noticeably bare bones.

Now, however, Google has updated the Search app for Windows Phone 7.5 devices, which brings some much needed features. Read more »

When Apple announced the new iPad, they made quite a fuss about the new iSight camera on the back. This 5 megapixel shooter uses the new 5 element-lens system that they first used on the iPhone 4S camera, along with an f/2.4 aperture, backside illuminated sensor, hybrid infrared filter and face detection that can detect up to 10 faces simultaneously. You don’t run into tablets with such camera specs that much often. On top of that the new iPad can also record 1080p videos with Apple’s excellent digital image stabilization.

But of course, a camera is only as good as the pictures it takes, so to prove that the new iPad camera takes great videos and images, Apple has uploaded some samples on their site. Read more »