The highly popular Instagram app was recently updated and brought a handful of new features and changes. First of all is the new Lux effect, which brings out more detail in your images. It works a bit similar to the HDR function built-into the iPhone’s camera and brings out the details in the dark as well as light areas of the picture. This effect can then also be accompanied by a filter.

Other changes include the addition of a new filter called ‘Sierra’ and a redesigned interface that uses an updated header and menu buttons for a simpler and more refined look. Instagram has also added tappable notifications, where tapping on a notification will take you to the relevant image, comment or profile page in the app. Read more »

Apple may have opted against a spot amongst the other big names promoting mid-Super Bowl, but that doesn’t mean the marketing team have been standing idly by.

The iPhone 4S features in two new ads, which were released by Apple last Thursday and Siri is again the star of the show in both instances. Read more »

Phones4u, one of the UK’s largest independent mobile phone retailers, has unveiled a program which lets you upgrade to a new phone every six months, regardless of your carrier contract.

While being able to rub the latest iPhone or Android device in your friends’ faces every six months does sound enticing, the new service does some weight to your monthly phone bill. Read more »

We may still have a week to buy the flowers, chocolates and cards, but Samsung are giving their Valentine’s gifts out early.

Ahead of Valentine’s Day (February 14th), Samsung Bada and Android users are entitled to a number of paid apps, for free! Read more »

Dropbox just released a beta version of its next Android app and is offering lucrative prizes for everyone who takes part in the testing. Dropbox 2.0.9 introduces a cool new feature called camera upload – it lets your phone automatically upload whatever photos and videos you capture to your Dropbox account.

The best part is that you can earn up to 5 GB of extra storage for your Dropbox account just by downloading and using the beta app. All you have to do is set up your account, and enable the camera upload feature. Read more »

Nowadays, your average smartphone or tablet comes with wireless connectivity options such as Bluetooth, WiFi b/g/n and maybe 3G as standard and each of these has its own benefits and drawbacks.

Speed is the key in wireless data transfer and Panasonic are working on some tech that promises to be quick, really quick; able to transmit a DVD wirelessly in 60 seconds thanks to WiGig. Read more »

CyanogenMod is working on releasing their very own application store for Android. The idea was originally by one of CyanogenMod team members Koushik Dutta, who wanted to create an application store that would host applications that were removed from Android Market for some reason. This would include stuff like one click root apps, game emulators, tether apps, visual voicemail apps, etc. Although Google’s Market is open, some of these apps do get removed from time to time when they don’t meet Google’s or the carrier’s terms and conditions.

The other reason to have their own application store is so that they could use a small portion of the money coming in from app sales to fund the CyanogenMod project, which has been made available to users for no cost at all. Read more »

Microsoft has been using data from Navteq for their Bing Maps since the beginning, a subsidiary owned by Nokia and has also allowed the use of Nokia Maps on Nokia’s Lumia phones. Now, they will be making this partnership more visible to the user.

Microsoft will now be displaying Nokia’s name within Bing Maps. And this applies to every device that runs Bing Maps and not just Nokia’s. Read more »

Just as expected, Apple made three important education-related announcements at their event in New York today. The company unveiled the next version of iBooks for iPad – iBooks 2, which now features interactive textbooks.

Apple also unveiled iBooks Author – a Mac OS X application that should greatly facilitate the creation of those textbooks (or other interactive books) and iTunes U iOS app, which lets you access complete courses from leading universities and plenty of free educational content. Read more »

This innocuous little white SD card is the first to use the SD association’s Wireless LAN standard, making file and photo management quick and cable-free as a result.

This is the Toshiba FlashAir WLAN SD card and it’s showcasing its talents at this year’s CES. The card actually broke cover last year at IFA 2011 too but it’s here now to drum up interest before its official launch next month. Read more »

It was effectively impossible to miss hearing about Siri, the ‘virtual assistant’, at the launch of the iPhone 4S and since it was unleashed on the world we’ve seen some impressive practical demonstrations and a far larger proportion of comedic ones.

But what if we told you that using Siri could potentially double your data usage compared to that of the humble iPhone 4 user, something you might not notice until your next nasty bill. Read more »

The popular file syncing app SugarSync just got an update, which makes it even easier to keep the multimedia files on your computer and your smartphone/tablet synchronized. The update hit both the Android and iOS versions of the app, but the change logs for the two seem a bit different.

On iOS, the SugarSync version number jumped to 2.5 and it got batch uploads for multiple photos and videos. The rest of the changelog follows below: Read more »

Have you ever been in the middle of a phone call and had the need to quick switch applications, perhaps to check an address or a location on the map, well unless your using an iPhone, this handy feature might not be around for long.

We’re only half way through the week and Apple have already blocked HTC (and by extension Google) from utilizing a feature already implemented within Android (at least in the US), but now it appears that another such instance could disappear from any smartphone not touched by the hand of Apple. Read more »

Gmail mobile just added a solid dash of fun to the user experience, folks. The freshly announced Scribbles feature enables you to quickly put together simple drawings via a lightweight interface, which is embedded right into the email composer – a sharp and fun way to express yourself in a different way than the conventional smileys.

The feature is currently available for Read more »

Google has started rolling out the latest 3.4.4 update to the Android Market app, which should automatically get downloaded on your Android device, if it hasn’t already.

The big change being reported here is improved user interface speed. This might not be immediately noticeable on faster phones but slower phones are sure to benefit greatly from it. It also renames the ‘Auto-add shortcuts’ option to ‘Auto-add widgets’ (although it still just adds shortcut icons) and adds any videos in the screenshot carousal instead of separately at the bottom. Read more »