Barnes & Noble have announced that they will be adding support for the Google Play Store on their NOOK HD and NOOK HD+ Android tablets. So far these devices have been restricted to downloading content only from Barnes & Noble’s content store but are now open to the entire Google catalog as well.
Along with the 700,000 apps and games, NOOK HD and NOOK HD+ users will also be able to access music, movies, books and magazines from the Play Store. Other than that, Barnes & Noble is also adding the Google Chrome browser and Google services such as Gmail, Google Maps, YouTube and Google Search. Read more »
Instagram has released v3.5 of their mobile app for iOS and Android and along with that introduced a new feature to the service. Now, you will be able to tag your friends in your photos and see all the pictures you have been tagged in in your profile.
To tag someone in a photo, click on the ‘Add People’ option after you take a photo. You will them be asked to tap anywhere on the photo you want to tag someone and then type their profile name. You then select the ID and the photo gets tagged. You can not just tag new photos but also existing ones by clicking on the options key in the bottom right of each photo. Read more »
The enormously successful App Store is about to cross another milestone – 50 billion downloads. As usual, Apple will be celebrating the event by giving back to those who made it possible, that is, the users.
To the person who will be downloading the 50 billionth app, Apple is offering $10,000 App Store Gift Card. But that’s not all. This time, the next 50 app downloaders will also be getting something, which in this case is a $500 App Store Gift Card. Read more »
Steve Kondik, creator and leading developer at the most popular custom ROM project – CyanogenMod – went on Facebook with a very important screenshot. It shows a Samsung Galaxy S4 model SGH-M919 (for T-Mobile) sporting CM 10.1.
The Galaxy S4 in question is the one yielding the Snapdragon 600 chipset and despite being an exclusive (and early) port it could mean all Snapdragon-equipped S4s will eventually get the CyanogenMod treatment. Read more »
The original Angry Birds, the game that made Rovio famous, is now available on the Windows Phone app store. And if that wasn’t good enough, the game is free for a limited time.
Despite being available for Windows Phone 7 for a long time, Rovio failed to include all of the updates that it launched for the game’s iOS and Android counterparts. The new version fixes this and is available for both Windows Phone 7 and Windows Phone 8. Read more »
Google finally delivered its Google Now service to iOS. First there was a leaked video then Erik Schmidt vaguely told people to ask Apple when to expect Google Now on iOS. And yet here we are – using it on iOS already.
Coming from an Android device you’ll immediately recognize Google Now. The design scheme is left unchanged with simplistic UI elements, clean tile-like cards of information, the font, etc. but there is also an unmistakable iOS feel to the app which users might appreciate. Read more »
Refocus is quite an interesting camera app compatible with all Windows Phone 8-running smartphones. It has one major feature – it lets you refocus after you snap a picture.
This sounds cool and is quite simple to operate – the app just takes a few shots with different focus and works with those. There is no magic or heavy post-processing involved here. Read more »
Microsoft has been asking users of other platforms to switch to Windows Phone for a long time now but so far the biggest hurdle has been the lack of a good quality apps on the platform. Or at least that’s what it seems like. Things aren’t that bad in reality, though, and there are Windows Phone versions of several of the popular apps out there right now.
To bring this to everyone’s notice, Microsoft has now released a new app for Android, called Switch to Windows Phone, which scans your Android phone for all the installed apps and then shows you which ones are available on the Window Phone Store. Read more »
Android custom ROM developers CyanogenMod have added support for yet another Android smartphone in their list of supported devices for their CM10.1 ROM. Starting today, you will be able to install CM10.1 on an Oppo Find 5 as well.
The Oppo Find 5 is one of the best Android smartphones available on the market today, with a 5.0-inch, FullHD display, quad-core 1.5GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon processor, 2GB RAM and a 13 megapixel camera part of the spec sheet. The phone comes with Android 4.1.1 as standard with a custom skin on top. If that’s what bothered you about the phone then you no longer have to worry as you can now replace it with CM10.1 and have a more stock Android experience. Read more »
Recently, HTC launched the developer edition of the HTC One in the US. This model was mostly identical to the model sold by the carriers, but comes with the network and the bootloader unlocked.
Now, HTC has provided the RUU (ROM Update Utility) and the full ROM for the HTC One developer edition on their developer website. This would allow users to restore their devices safely in case things go wrong while flashing custom ROMs. Read more »
Is it me or is Nokia’s Beta Labs the most important part of the company? The Labs team constantly churns out Nokia-exclusive apps and features in a bid for your attention. The latest is a beta version of Nokia Chat for Windows Phone 8.
Chat is not a new service – it’s been around Symbian and Series 40 (including Asha) for a while now. Now Windows Phone powered Lumia phones get to join in on the discussion, too. Read more »
BlackBerry’s Q10 QWERTY messenger will launch very soon and the BlackBerry World app store will greet it with a good selection of messengers (obviously, aside from BBM). This includes arguably the two biggest names in the game, Skype and WhatsApp.
Skype will be available for the BlackBerry Q10 at launch, or at least in Canada (where the phone hits the shelves on May 1). Read more »
After what seems like an eternity, Swype keyboard for Android is now finally out of its beta stage and available for download on the Google Play Store. The app is currently priced at an introductory price of $0.99.
For those who don’t know, Swype pioneered the sliding gesture-based typing method on phone keypads back in 2010. Since then this method of typing has been incorporated by several other keyboards, including the popular SwiftKey, and even built-in to several phones as standard. Read more »
According to a study by German Security firm AV-TEST Institute Google is a safer search engine than Bing. The study spanned across 18 months and included more than 40 million search results (read sites) and pit together Google, Bing and others like the popular Russian search engine Yandex.
Microsoft’s Bing delivered more than four times as many infected with malware websites than Google. The chart above shows the results – from almost 11 million results on Google around 272 were infected, while the same number of search results on Bing contained 1285 potentially dangerous pages. Read more »
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