Before Nokia announced that its future smartphones would be powered by the Windows Phone OS, there was a lot of speculation as to whether or not the Finnish manufacturer would make the move over to Android.

Nokia has technically, released an Android handset with the Nokia X, but it is hardly a flagship phone. A portion of the Nokia team that did not transfer to Microsoft as part of the deal has decided to work in the Android sphere after all, by creating the Z Launcher. Read more »

The stock Email app that has been part of Android for a long time is now available to download in the Play Store. The app is also updated with a few new visual additions that reflect the latest look and feel of Google’s apps.

As part of the changelog, the Email client now sports increased security for Gmail accounts as well as easier account setup flow (not that it was difficult to start with). Read more »

Waze, the social navigation application that is famous for letting you alert other drivers about speed traps and traffic jams, has gotten an update.

The app now lets you send automated text messages and find other Waze users more easily. Read more »

It looks like Apple’s mobile devices are getting a lot of love from Adobe today. In addition to announcing Lightroom Mobile for the iPhone, Adobe has also made Ink & Slide and Photoshop Mix for the iPad.

Ink & Slide are a pair of image editing accessories that’ll give you a whole new way to use Photoshop on your iPad. Photoshop Mix is a photo gallery app that comes with a few neat features. Read more »

Adobe’s releases are no stranger to the iPad; Lightroom Mobile was released for Apple’s tablet in April and it looks like the software manufacturer has released Lightroom for the iPhone as well.

You’ll be able to sync between the three devices seamlessly, with the desktop and iPad and iPhone versions of the software all syncing up nicely with each other on Adobe’s creative cloud. Read more »

After having failed to outright buy Snapchat last year, Facebook has now released Slingshot, a new app that aims to compete with it.

Slingshot is available to download for Android and iOS, but it comes with a pretty strange twist. Read more »

Garmin has released a new navigation app for iOS and Android today. It’s called Viago and it’s much cheaper than Garmin’s previous efforts in this space, though it’s still not free.

Furthermore, you can expect to get only basic functionality when buying the app, with any premium additions coming at the cost of some in-app purchases. Read more »

Janet Kennedy, Microsoft Canada President, has detailed the Cortana availability. As it turns out Canada will be among the first wave of countries to get the virtual assistant upon the update rollout.

Microsoft has previously announced the first market where Cortana will be available is USA. The UK and China will be getting the same treatment and now it turns out Cortana will be localized for Canada in time too. Read more »

Nuance, the folks behind the Samsung’s and Apple’s in-house voice assistant programs S Voice and Siri, as well as other commercial speech recognition applications like Dragon Naturally Speaking, are set to potentially get bought out by the Korean company.

In anticipation of the potential deal, Nuance’s market cap jumped from a valuation of $5.5 billion to almost $6 billion yesterday. Read more »

Sony’s flagships are getting a new exclusive feature – Live on YouTube app. It lets them live stream video on YouTube. So far Sony’s flagships had the unique Social Live feature, which let them livestream video to their Facebook walls, but this time it’s YouTube we are talking about.

The exclusive app should be available for the Sony Xperia Z2, Xperia Z1 and Z1 Compact, though note that it’s not available in Germany and in countries where YouTube isn’t available. Read more »

Parallels Access was a service that would let you access your PC or Mac remotely from a mobile device. So far, the service was only available on the iPad but from now you will also be able to use it on an iPhone and any Android device.

Parallels Access provides remote access to your computer on the go. Your computer applications show up on your phone and you can work on them as you would on the computer. For functions such as cut, copy, paste the application uses the native mobile OS controls so it feels seamless. You can also pin your desktop applications on your mobile’s home screen for quick access. Read more »

So you may or may not know this, but the US Transportation Department believes that it has the authority to regulate the traffic and navigation applications that you use on your smartphone, and is now pushing hard to get Congress to agree.

A new proposed transportation bill will give the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration the right to “set restrictions on the apps and later order changes if they are deemed dangerous.” Read more »

One of the reasons why Blackberries, long after being obsolete in the consumer sphere, still managed to persist in the business world was because the handsets were just so secure.

Protection of data and Blackberries go hand in hand, so it didn’t come as a surprise when Blackberry announced BBM Protected, an extra-encrypted IM client. Read more »

Amazon is happy to report that its Android Appstore is now listing more than 240,000 apps. This is almost three times more than a year ago.

That number obviously doesn’t compare well to Google Play and the Apple iTunes App Store, both of which have long ago passed the 1 million apps mark, but it’s quite a feat nevertheless. Read more »

Group Program Manager for Microsoft’s Cortana virtual assistant Marcus Ash confirmed over Twitter today that the popular feature will be coming to users in China and the UK in the coming weeks.

In general, mobile virtual assistants are severely limited by the Chinese government in terms of what they can do, but if Cortana is able to get an unfiltered release there, it could spell a significant advantage for Windows Phone in the world’s fastest-growing smartphone market. Read more »