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 »

Xiaomi has plans to enter ten new markets this year, and India seems to be among the first of those. The Chinese smartphone maker with a cult-like following has started teasing its presence in India today.

There’s a new section for India on Xiaomi’s official website, and the company has even opened a new Facebook page for its Indian operations. Read more »

The really nifty FiftyThree Pencil stylus for iPad will get a new and exciting feature once iOS 8 becomes available.

Once the newest iteration of Apple’s mobile operating system hits the streets, the Pencil will automatically get support for pressure sensitivity. Read more »

Samsung has issued a new major update to its Gear 2 that will bring it up to speed with the Gear Fit. The update brings improvements to S Health and various bug fixes but more importantly adds Blocking Mode (already present on the Fit).

Blocking Mode is Samsung’s Do Not Disturb feature which we’ve seen on Galaxy smartphones and blocks all incoming notifications from getting to your Gear 2. Blocking Mode can be set to either always on or during sleep only, which is very convenient. 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 »

The Unicode standard will be upgraded to version 7.0 this year. Along with the additional of several new scripts, it will also be adding 250 new Emoji to the already long list.

Almost all of these are objects, with things such as ‘Thermometer’, ‘File Cabinet’, ‘Right Speech Bubble’, ‘Hammer And Wrench’, etc. but there are also some gems, such as ‘Man In Business Suit Levitating’ and ‘Reversed Hand With Middle Finger Extended’. 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 »

To say that Internet Explorer has lost a step in the browser wars is a bit of an understatement; there was a point in time, not too long ago, where if you told someone you used IE to browse the web, you were mocked.

But Internet Explorer has since cleaned up its act and is a way more capable browser than it once was, and now the IE team has decided to try and get more power users on board by creating an IE Developer Channel Release. Read more »

Ready or not, the next installment in the Angry Birds saga is about to hit a mobile platform near you. Following up the success of Angry Birds Star Wars and the recent release of Angry Birds Epic, Rovio has just announced Angry Birds Transformers.

This new mash-up will star Autobirds and Deceptihogs, and aside from the mobile game you should also expect to see new licensed merchandise and a product line featuring Telepods from Hasbro. 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 »