Today at the Nokia World 2013 held in Abu Dhabi, Nokia announced their new Refocus camera app for the Lumia 1520. Refocus promises users the freedom to selectively change the area of the photo, which is in focus.

The Nokia Refocus is a separate camera app for Lumia phones (unlike what we first heard). The camera app aims to reproduce the shallow depth of field that pro cameras have and it does that in a really high-quality way. Details about how it works are scarce at the moment so we are not quite sure whether it snaps a series of images and stacks them into an image, where you can dynamically manipulate the active focus point or if it maps out the depth of the image and subsequently creates the lens blur purely artificially but in a nice looking way. Read more »

Nokia World is in full swing and while it’s mostly about Nokia’s products, some important app announcements were made, including a quick visit from WhatsApp CEO Jan Koum. Mr. Koum announced that the highly popular instant messenger has now reached 350 million monthly active users.

In mid-April this year the CEO announced that WhatsApp is bigger than Twitter with 200 million monthly active users and that number was 300 million in August. Read more »

Nokia finally took the wraps off its first phablet, the Lumia 1520 and now it’s time for the promo videos to pop up on YouTube.

The phablet got three of those, focusing on its smart side, artistic side and also on its hardware. Read more »

Over at its Abu Dhabi Keynote Nokia released its first slate dubbed Lumia 2520. The tablet runs on the Windows RT, has a 10.1″ FullHD display a Snapdragon 800 chipset and comes with a variety of color options – black, blue, white and red. The price before subsidies will be $499.

You can get the Lumia 2520 slate with an add-on keyboard, dubbed Power Keyboard, with additional USB ports, battery and integrated kick-stand. Read more »

At the stage of the Nokia World event, Stephen Elop has just announced that Instagram is finally coming to Windows Phone 8 devices.

With over 130 million users on tap, Instagram is one of the most popular photo sharing social networks. Nokia Lumia users will finally be able to the cool filter effects that they can apply to their photos before they share them. Read more »

Nokia has released three new videos advertising its HERE products. They all feature HERE’s employee Alex Osaki and made in the style of the James Bond movies.

Nokia will soon become a service-focused company after selling its device business to Microsoft next year. HERE is one of Nokia’s key weapons on Windows Phone and one of the features that keep the mobile OS alive and attractive to users. HERE will continue to live after the changes at Nokia and those ads confirm company’s dedication to it. Read more »

Microsoft announced the Windows Phone 8 GDR3 update yesterday and many got excited over the news for the addition of a third column of Live Tiles on the Start screen. As it turns out, however, the third column will only be available for Windows Phone devices packing a display of full HD resolution.

As a result, all current WP8 smartphones, including the Lumia 1020 flagship, will be limited to a two-column Start menu only. Devices with lower resolution also follow suit. Read more »

Nokia has just published an awesome app that builds upon the popular Glance Screen feature. If the Glance screen was a bit too boring for your taste, you can now spice it up by adding a background to it.

Thanks to the Glance Background (still in beta), you can choose a set of backgrounds for your Glance Screen. Read more »

We’ve been hearing that Windows Phone and Windows RT might merge but a new rumor suggests it will be more like Phone displacing RT. Microsoft is working on a Windows Phone 8.1 update, which will allegedly add support for 7 to 10 inch screens to enable WP8.1-powered tablets and merge parts of the API so developers can easily create apps for both platforms.

Multitasking is reportedly the biggest issue ahead of this plan – the GDR3 update will let users close apps manually, but apps running in the background are still a no go. Not until the 8.1 update that is. Read more »

Twitter updated its Windows Phone app and along with some useful new features is a hidden surprise – a Vine app. The new Twitter app makes reading tweets easier – you can set it to show tweets on the lockscreen and also pin keyword searches to the homescreen.

The app can also notify you when your favorite accounts tweet. Read more »

After getting blocked a couple of months back, the official YouTube app for Windows Phone is now back in the Marketplace as version 3.2. The popular app however, has lost some functionality compared to last time it was available.

YouTube for Windows Phone has returned to simply being a shortcut for a web-player. Read more »

The Glance Screen is a really great feature of the Lumia range. It’s a tribute to the MeeGo lockscreen (and Symbian smartphones), where you can always see a clock and get any missed events listed right on the standby screen.

Until now the Glance Screen, which premiered with the Amber update, had two color options – the default white font and the optional night theme that paints the clock red. Read more »

Red Bull held a freerunning competition called Art of Motion in the picturesque Santorini island. That was in mid-September but if you missed it you can watch Claudiu Voicu’s video called free runtastic! that captured the highlights of the event and was shot entirely on a Nokia Lumia 1020.

Claudiu is no stranger to using a Lumia to shoot freerunners – he did it before with a Lumia 900. Read more »

Nokia teamed up with hospitality IT solutions company LOCATEL and is set to deliver various NFC-based services to various hotels around the globe.

The new NFC-driven solutions could be used for enhancing the hotel stay experience for Nokia customers by using tags in various locations in the hotel for calling a taxi, viewing mobile TV, downloading apps etc. Read more »

Windows Phone 8 devices have the ability to save maps for offline viewing, but until now when a map has been updated you’d need to delete the stored one and re-download.

Now WP8 smartphones have the functionality to update the maps saved for offline viewing on your device without wasting as much data. The new functionality is available for all Windows Phone 8 smartphones, not just Lumias. Read more »