Instagram just received the biggest “like” in its two-year history, people. Facebook announced an agreement to acquire the wildly popular mobile photo sharing service today. The price which the social networking giant has agreed to pay for it is a cool $1 billion, which makes it the biggest Facebook acquisition to date.

The payment will be made in cash and shares. The Instagram crew, which consists of six people will join the social network’s workforce. Read more »

The evolution of the phone and subsequently the smartphone has been wild and uncertain, remember features like push-to-talk, me neither. Such functionality never really sat right in the grand scheme of mobile telephony and with the Swiss army knife approach that app-capable phones now employ, calling is only a single piece of the overall experience.

That being said, despite all the improvements to data speeds for mobile web browsing, better camera functionality and improved email support, call enhancements haven’t really seen the same levels of care and attention, something that is now slowly changing, finally. Read more »

Internal mapping has been in the mind of Google for some time, with the initial introduction of interior navigation making its first real appearance with Google Maps 6.0.

At the time you could use it to traverse places like airports, shopping centers and even your local IKEA, but navigating indoor spaces overall has remained relatively limited, something Google are attempting to rectify. Read more »

Google introduces a new way to track your personal usage by enabling you to view monthly usage statistics across various Google products.

Some of the statistics tracked include account sign-in locations, email and search usage, as well as how often you use various platforms. Read more »

The extremely popular memo app, Evernote, just got a pretty major update in its Android reincarnation. Version 3.6 brings speech-to-text support a new theme and several new widgets, which should help it serve its role as an extension of your brain even better.

So from now on you will be able to dictate your notes, rather than create them with the on-screen keyboard. Naturally, voice notes are also supported, but there are times when you need to have the memo’s text, rather than just an audio file. Read more »

If you like being a guinea pig and you’re a fan of Nokia, there’s every chance you’ve already signed up to Nokia’s Beta Labs and the latest app to enter this unique testing area is Nokia Play To, which is hoping to make it as the native DLNA client that’ll grace the Lumia Windows Phone family.

The Play To app already offers the ability to throw pictures, movies and music onto various connected devices around the home, with plans for Media Server support in the near future adding Xbox 360 and PS3 friendly functionality in due time. Read more »

Amazon are today celebrating their Android Appstore’s first birthday and in light of this fact, they’ve come over all generous. As well as a number of discounts on popular paid apps, they’re also giving away eight Kindle Fire’s between now and the end of March.

As well as the week-long app discounts, the company also revealed a number of stats which they’ve been able to pull over the course of the year. For one, there are now some 31,000+ applications available to download from the Appstore up from 4000 last year, but lets talk more about those deals. Read more »

FaceTime caused a lot of “oohs” and “aahs” but there are still problems with it – like needing a Wi-Fi connection for it to work. Even if you have blazing fast LTE connection on your shiny new iPad, you still can’t do a FaceTime call.

It has already been pointed out that using the iPad as a Wi-Fi hotspot and connecting an iPhone 4/4S to it to do a FaceTime is one way to get around this restriction, but that’s hardly an ideal solution and it certainly won’t work for everyone. 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 »

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 »

During the just iPad announcement yesterday we saw iPhoto migrate from a OS X-only to an iOS-capable app.

And while that on its own doesn’t deserve too much attention, the iPhoto maps integration is curious in that it no longer features Google’s Maps. Read more »

Android 4.0 was launched on November 17, 2011 along with the Galaxy Nexus. It was a major step ahead of Gingerbread, the OS it replaced, but like every new software, had its fair share of issues. Due to this, Google had to release the first update in the form of 4.0.2 on November 28, less than two weeks after the first version came out. This version can still be found on the Galaxy Nexus.

When the time came to release the update for the Nexus S in December, however, Google directly released Android 4.0.3. Google also announced that this will be the new base version of Android 4.0 and OEM’s should start with this version when putting ICS on their devices. However, like the two versions that came before it, 4.0.3 too had several issues. So many, in fact, that Google never released it for the Galaxy Nexus and also pulled down the update that was being sent out to all the Nexus S users. Read more »

An anonymous source has tipped off The Guardian that Apple is working on bringing HD sound quality to iTunes. This will reportedly happen through the introduction of a new file format with advanced functions.

The new audio format is said to be very flexible – it will offer both high-quality HD audio and a version with smaller size. It will also offer adaptive streaming depending on the device and the internet connections. Read more »

Opera has released a new beta of the world’s most popular mobile browser, called the Opera Mini Next. This will give you a taste of some of the new features added in Opera Mini, which will arrive in the stable version later this year.

The changes you see will differ depending upon whether you have a feature phone or a smartphone. On feature phones, you will see a new homepage, along with your usual speed dial page. This new homepage will give you quick access to all your social networks and other information such as news, weather forecasts, sports, entertainment and more. The speed dial list is also updated and can now contain an infinite number of items. Read more »

The Google+ app for iOS has always been (understandably) behind the curve compared to its Android counterpart, with some of the features appearing a bit later. The latest feature to trickle down from the Android app is Instant Upload.

As some of you may know, Instant Upload uploads the pictures you take with the camera on your phone and uploads it to a private folder in your Google+ account. It’s actually a neat way to back up your images on an Android phone but with Photo Stream in iCloud, iOS users might not be in any real need of this feature. Read more »