Do you remember that news about the LG Optimus Black running Windows Phone 7? Well, as many of you guessed it, it’s faker than fake. The phone is not running WP7, but a specially created prank demo app that just looks like it – it’s not even a full featured launcher.

As it turns out, the Optimus Black was running an app, called aPhone 7 3D, which is available on the Android Market for free. Read more »

Google Maps for Android just got bumped to version 5.8, with the main focus falling on making Places and Latitude better. The new version lets you add a new place to check into, if one isn’t already available (bringing it up to speed with Facebook’s check-ins), and you can snap and upload your own photos of a place which will help other users decide if that’s a place they want to visit.

Two features that debuted on the desktop have made their way to the mobile client too – My Places and Descriptive terms. Read more »

SPB Software has released a new version of its SPB Shell 3D interface for Android. In addition to the 3D interface with panes and the 3D dynamic widgets, SPB has added lots of other awesome goodies.

The most notable new feature is the 3D stereoscopic support (Optimus 3D, anyone?). Read more »

If you like browsing on your mobile, but don’t like worrying about hitting your data cap, you might have opted for some sort of unlimited data plan (like myself).

Such plans have become scarce of late as carriers wise up to the potential revenue benefits that data caps can bring, whilst helping take a little load off their networks at the same time. Read more »

Google announced the updated version of the Android Market app a while back but there was one small problem, the update wasn’t available for download then. But now we are hearing Google has finally started rolling out the update to device with Android 2.2 and higher. And we couldn’t help ourselves and we went to see what it’s all about.

The version number for this latest update is 3.0.27 (the one that leaked before was 3.0.26). Apparently, if you were running the previously leaked version you will automatically be updated to the new version.

Personally, I didn’t receive the update automatically (and I have a Nexus S, for crying out loud) so I got impatient and sideloaded it. I have been using it for some time now and here are my quick impressions of it. Read more »

The iPad has been dominating the tablet market since it created it at the beginning of 2010. But there’s also been a dent in its shining armor and that is the lack of a Facebook app – a commodity every droid tablet out there has been enjoying for some time now. Finally, the iPad Facebook app has been confirmed and even tested by the guys over at TechCrunch, which discovered the app tucked away inside the code of the latest update to the Facebook for iPhone app.

The Facebook for iPad app has been discovered inside the code of the 3.4.4 update Facebook pushed out for the iPhone app. It was a minor one, bringing some fixes like the reappeared “send” button for the comment and chat functionality of the app. Read more »

We’ve already taken a peek at what iOS 5 has to offer, but it’s still in the beta stages of development. A report says that there will be a new feature that we haven’t seen so far – built-in face detection that is easily accessible to third party apps.

The same technology is already powering the face-detecting Photo Booth is OS X Lion, but it’s now coming to Apple’s mobile OS. Apple may or may not build their own app for iOS 5 that uses the technology, but third-party devs will get a go at it either way. Read more »

Apple has released yet another update for the iOS, just over a week after releasing the last one. Just like the last one, however, there is not a whole lot here to talk about.

The only change in this new version is a security patch for the certificate verification. While this might not mean much to an average user for a jailbreaker this means that jailbreaking this version of iOS will be just a wee bit more difficult. Or so one would believe because according to Redmond Pie, iOS 4.3.5 can still be jailbroken (tethered) using redsn0w, except on the iPad 2. Read more »

Group portraits are tough to get just right – chances of someone in the photo blinking or looking the wrong way increase with the number of people in the shot. Scalado’s Rewind technology is a time-warping solution to this age-old problem.

What Rewind does is take several full resolution shots instead of just one and then lets you combine people’s faces from these shots into one perfect group photo. Facial recognition makes this quite easy. It’s easier to explain by showing you the video demo. Read more »

A top-secret snapshot has surfaced of an “Assistant” function on iOS 5, which has people hitting the speculation button that this could be the fruits of the Apple’s Siri buy last year and the work with Nuance’s text-to-speech technology.

For those unfamiliar with Siri – it’s a voice-controlled assistant on the iPhone that can carry out cool orders like finding you a restaurant near your location, book tickets and more. So far it works via a dedicated app but this new screenshot could mean that we’re in for some deeper OS integration. The benefits of such an app built right into the OS is that apart from access to the internet it could get access to your contacts information and more, thus ending up being much more useful than a simple voice controller. Also such a feature could cut your physical texting in half by providing fluent voice-to-text conversion. Read more »

It’s been just over a month since the Mine and Dine Episode rolled out for the original Angry Birds game. It should offer 45 levels (not counting the golden eggs) – 15 are already available, 15 you get today and 15 more should be released in a month or so.

More pigs, more stalactites, more jewels and angrier birds await you. Read more »

According to the latest numbers posted by comScore, Android is continuing with its plans of world domination at freakishly fast pace. The market share of Google’s operating system grew by an astounding 634 percent in May 2011 in the UK in the past one year.

In comparison, iOS market share grew by only 46 percent, which might not seem much but it is still doing a lot better than the others, particularly Symbian and Microsoft, whose market shares fell by 10 and 32 percent respectively. Read more »

Apple has released the fourth iOS 5 beta version. For the first time you can get it as a OTA update (133MB) in addition to the standard download and install process via iTunes.

Actually, if you have an iOS 5 beta 3 running device, you should be already notified about the new update. Read more »

If you have an Android-based smartphone and don’t like to pay for games, here is some good news for you. Halfbrick Studios has just launched an ad-supported version of Fruit Ninja and you can get it for free from the Android Market right now.

The game was launched back in March in the Amazon’s app store for free, then hit the Android Market for $1.29. Read more »

Nokia Maps is well known alongside Google Maps and Bing Maps though it’s been naturally exclusive to Nokia phones on the mobile scene. Starting today, the service is available to iOS devices (iPod Touch, iPad and the iPhone) and Android phones with HTML5-compatible browsers. This means that you’ll be able to use the browser-based Nokia Maps services (directions, searching for places, browsing maps) on your iOS or Android smartphone without the need to change camps.

As I personally can attest, Nokia Maps works great on an iPhone 4. It offers full multi-touch support and feels fluid. All services on it (positioning yourself on the map, searching for directions, etc.) work just fine. Read more »