Yesterday, Nokia finally went through with its long-coming plan to disallow unauthorized users to download from their online repository for firmware updates, Navifirm+.

It has since been revealed that users who retained their Navifirm+ caches are still able to download updates from the repository. Read more »

Today is a special day for the Google Maps team as Street View has become available in 50 countries with the launch of the service in Hungary and Lesotho.

As it also happens, Google is also releasing its biggest Street View update ever, expanding the coverage in France, Italy, Poland, Romania, Russia, Singapore and Thailand and updating over 563,270 kilometers with new imagery. 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 »

Google has recently enabled Google+ integration into their popular blog-publishing service, Blogger.

This means that all comments made about your blog posts on Google+ will show up in your blog’s comment threads, allowing you to see activity from your visitors. Read more »

We’ve heard about this before but it doesn’t hurt to mention it yet again – Instagram is coming to Windows Phone. So says the official Nokia Sweden account on Facebook in response to one user. The response reads roughly like this – “Instagram is on the way but can’t give an exact date right now”. The comment has been taken down, which does add an air of legitimacy to the information (or just the opposite, depending how you look at it).

Last month, a Nokia Sweden account tweeted that an app for WP is under development, which fueled the users expectations. The question is – do Windows Phone users really care if Instagram is coming? Read more »

Last week we reported on the rumors of Twitter releasing its own music streaming service, which were backed by the music.twitter.com website which went live around that time but wasn’t quite functional back then. Now the service has been announced officially and is called Twitter #music.

At the heart of this service is the brand new app, which is currently only available on iOS, that too just on the iPhone. This app pulls all the tracks that are being listened by the people you follow by going through their tweets and also shows what other people are listening. Read more »

Microsoft’s email client for Android, the Outlook.com, got a massive update yesterday. The app has a brand new look and feel, and now features filters, threads and more.

The app now looks exactly like its Windows Phone sibling – color scheme, fonts, virtual buttons, everything. Read more »

Over at the AllThingsD Dive Into Mobile conference WhatsApp CEO Jan Koum took to the stage to discuss the app’s position, users and drop a bomb that his app is “bigger than Twitter” when looking at the active monthly users.

Although the two platforms differ in the way the work – Twitter being more of a social network where your tweets are public and WhatsApp being a peer-to-peer messaging service – Jan Koum said WhatsApp has more than 200 million active users a month, thus besting Twitter. Read more »

One of the best things about Google search is that it tries to cut down the distance between you and the data you need as much as possible. Two newly introduced features for the mobile search aim to help that. The first one is the expandable list of links to important pages on a site – e.g. if you search for “rotten tomatoes” you’ll get a link that leads straight to the In Theaters page of the site.

The other is more experimental and works for the English portion of Wikipedia only – it’s called Quick view and it previews the content of a page, which is much faster than opening the page itself. Read more »

Google is known to celebrate important events in its own whimsical way. Today marks the 57th anniversary of the VHS tapes, the format of choice for all video content back in the day. We have moved quite far since then, with video several times the length and quality fitting on a chip the size of a fingernail. But one can always look back and reminiscence over what was the only way to get video playing in our homes.

To celebrate this occasion, Google has added a new VHS button on YouTube videos. This essentially adds a filter on top of your videos that makes the video look blurry and distorted with the typical ghosting and snowing artifacts common to damaged VHS tapes. Some nice touches are the way the video distorts even further when you pause it and occasionally the video will loop vertically on screen. Read more »

After acquiring the online music discovery service We Are Hunted, Twitter was speculated to be working on launching its own music streaming service. At that time, however, these were just speculations, with no concrete information available from either Twitter or We Are Hunted.

Now, a new webpage – music.twitter.com – has gone live, which seems to confirm the rumors of an imminent arrival of a new music service from Twitter. As of now, however, the site isn’t working, with the sign in button sending you in an endless loop of logging in and then being sent back to the site, only to be asked to sign in again. According to AllThingsD, the Twitter music service is said to go live on Friday, so the site may start working any minute now. Read more »

Gmail, the popular email client, is celebrating its ninth birthday this month and to celebrate the occasion, Google has released an infographic that runs through the achievements of the service.

Google’s email client was launched on April 1 2004 as an invite only service with 1 GB of storage space for the emails. However, Gmail now offers about 10 GB of free storage for your electronic correspondence. Read more »

Nokia has released a new desktop application for their Nokia Music service on Windows 8, which can be downloaded from the Windows Store and takes advantage of the new Modern UI.

The Nokia Music app, as you might know, let you stream music from Nokia’s vast library and even download them to play them offline. Nokia also offers features such as curated mixes, which are essentially ready-made playlists spanning across different genres and artists, and provides suggestions based on the music you listen to. Read more »

BlackBerry is shutting down its BB Music service as of June 2 and will stop accepting monthly payments this month.

BlackBerry delivered the news to subscribes over email today. While there’s no sync option or way to transfer your collection to another service the company has given users a voucher code for a 30 day Rdio pass in the email. Read more »

It’s now exactly 1 year since Instagram launched on Android and the popular photo sharing social network has decided to celebrate the occasion with a post on its blog.

According to the developers’ statistics, after the first 12 months of availability droid users account for nearly half of all Instagram users. Read more »