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 »

Ricoh hasn’t been making headlines lately but has the imaging pedigree to stir the attention of photography enthusiasts. Today, the Pentax-owned company came out with the GR – a compact camera with a 16.2 MP APS-C (read DSLR-sized) sensor on board and a fixed 18.3 mm (28 mm equivalent) f/2.8 lens.

The Ricoh GR comes to challenge the Nikon Coolpix A but at a lower price – $800, coming to the US next month. Read more »

Announced at the MWC 2013, the HP Slate 7 is HP’s move back to the consumer tablet market. Shying away from its own webOS, the company stakes on Android, instead.

The HP Slate 7 key selling point is not its latest high-performance hardware (or software), but rather the low asking price, which in the case of the UK is £129. In the other European countries the price should hover around €149. Read more »

Amazon has revealed that it will soon be expanding its global app distribution and the Appstore for Android will soon be available in nearly 200 new markets, which include South Africa, South Korea, Brazil, Mexico, India and Australia.

The developers are allowed to submit their applications for the distribution in the newer markets. The expansion of the Appstore, which was earlier available in only few selected countries, will now allow Amazon to compete against the likes of Google and Apple. Read more »

The Samsung Galaxy S4 is heading towards Europe on schedule, and it brings along some free content as well.

Samsung today announced that the popular racing game Need For Speed Most Wanted is going to be available in the Games Hub for the first 100,000 buyers. 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 »

After introducing Facebook Home to Android, Facebook is now bringing some of the new features to iOS, notably chat heads. With the latest update, your Facebook chats will now appear alongside the screen, which sounds nice until you realize this only works within the Facebook app and that unlike on Android, the chat heads don’t work universally within the OS, thanks to the limitations in iOS.

Along with the new chat heads feature, you also get stickers on the iPhone, which are just really large and detailed emoticons that you can use in your chats. Other than that, both the iPhone and iPad versions get a refreshed UI with a redesigned timeline.

To download the new Facebook update, click here or update through the App Store.

The freshly announced HTC First made its way to our office. The AT&T exclusive smartphone, as its name mildly suggests, is the first to come with the Facebook Home Android launcher out of the box.

The HTC First is powered by a Qualcomm Snapdragon 400 chipset with two Krait CPU cores, clocked at 1.4GHz. Read more »

We’ve heard this one before. Over in Hong Kong at a booth in the local Electronics Fair resides a case that was supposedly made for an early next-generation iPad mold.

If the case is legit we can gather that the fifth generation iPad will sports a thinner and narrower body, meaning if it retains its 9.7″ Retina then we can expect slimmer bezels on each side of it, in order for it to fit the smaller footprint. Read more »

Samsung Galaxy S4 does not feature FM radio and that’s surely a bummer for many. We were so used with the FM radio receiver on Samsung phones that we noticed its absence only when we got the latest flagship in our hands.

But what’s the reason to make Samsung drop its long-running tradition? Hi-Tech.Mail.Ru got an official statement from Samsung on the matter. Read more »

The Samsung Galaxy S4 comes with support for the MHL 2.0 standard, which aside from streaming high definition content to your TV or monitor set can also allow the external screen to charge the smartphone along the way. The Galaxy S4 is the first smartphone to offer the MHL 2.0 standard, which means that you no longer need to plug in a charger in your adapter.

Now, the good news is the first Samsung-made adapter is already available and can be yours for £33 or around $40. It still comes with a microUSB port for charging, so it’s backwards compatible with MHL 1.0 devices like the Galaxy Note II and Samsung Galaxy S III. Read more »

Good news, Windows 8 users. Whether you are using the latest Microsoft OS by choice or because you simply bought new hardware with it, you are probably frustrated by the Start screen at boot.

As it turns out the latest leaked build of Windows 8.1 codenamed Blue includes a boot do desktop option. It seems our prayers have been finally heard. Read more »

The Samsung Galaxy Ace 3 is rumored to hit in late May or early June and while there’s not much known about the mid-range droid, data from GLBenchmark gives us some info on the screen, OS and chipset.

The Galaxy Ace 3 is expected to have a 4” screen and GLBenchmark reports WVGA resolution. That would put it on par with the Galaxy S III mini with 233ppi pixel density. Read more »

The Sony Xperia Z is a tough device – water and dust resistant – so how tough can it be to take apart if you need to repair it? Well, Rounded.com, a spare parts supplier, has a video walking you through the process.

You’ll need a scraping tool, a Phillips 1.5×45 screwdriver, a pincet, a hair drier and a suction cup. Read more »

Ever since the Skype app was released on the Windows Phone 8 platform late last year, it has been under the beta tag. With the release of the new 2.5 update, the app has finally shed that tag.

Unfortunately, there is not a whole lot of new stuff here to see. Other than stability and performance updates, the only major change includes the ability to see toast notifications for your friends using Messenger. Read more »