Vine’s official app for Windows Phone 8.1 has received a pretty big update today, which brings it a few new features. First off, you can now import videos from your camera, just by tapping the new icon in the bottom left corner.

You are also able to edit your Vine, rearranging clips or getting rid of those you don’t need. Drafts can be saved too, so later you may pick up from where you left off. Read more »

Last year saw a sharp decline in the global rate of Android malware installs, according to Google’s Android Security 2014 Year in Review report.

Adrian Ludwig, Lead Engineer for Android Security, highlighted a few of the key findings of the report in a blog post. He said that the overall worldwide rate of Potentially Harmful Application (PHA) installs decreased by nearly 50% in 2014, adding that less than 1% of Android devices had a PHA installed last year, and less than 0.15% of devices that only install from Google Play had a PHA installed. Read more »

Building up hype before the market launch of its Watch, Huawei has come up with a 12-strong list of things you need to know about the wearable. The number isn’t arbitrary, instead it’s inspired by the 12 hours on a traditional watch face.

Huawei starts off with the smartwatch’ design, which is the closest the mobile industry has gotten to replicating an ordinary mechanical timepiece. Read more »

If you need ultimate performance on your PC then SATA drives just don’t cut it – fast SSDs need to be hooked up to the faster PCIe bus. The new Intel 750 SSD promises read speeds of up to 2,400MB/s and writes up to 1,200MB/s.

The drive offers high performance in random reads and writes too. Read more »

OnLive, the cloud-based game streaming service was introduced six years ago and was way ahead of its time. Today, the cloud gaming company posted a message on its website stating that the gaming services will shut down on April 30.

Apparently, Sony has acquired important parts of OnLive and won’t continue the support of the game streaming service. Read more »

An update to HTC Blinkfeed for Android renamed the application to Sense Home. The new app brings BlinkFeed, HTC Themes, as well as HTC Sense Home widget under one roof.

HTC Themes functionality allows users to change icons, colors, wallpapers, and even the sound bundles of their device. Read more »

Today Microsoft has brought its pretty successful Office Lens app from Windows Phone to iOS and Android. Office Lens was initially introduced for the company’s own mobile platform more than a year ago, and Microsoft says it’s now one of the most popular free apps for Windows Phone.

The concept behind it is simple. Office Lens allows you to capture a lot of different things with your smartphone’s camera, then automatically crops and enhances the images and saves them to OneNote or OneDrive. And thanks to optical character recognition, the text inside your captures becomes searchable. The app can even convert images of paper documents into Word documents, PowerPoint presentations, or PDFs for easy editing. Read more »

Today Skype has announced updates for both its main app as well as Skype Qik. Skype itself has been renewed for both Android and iOS, but the former platform gets more new features.

For example, Skype 5.3 for Android gives you a new bubble-style chat layout, similar to the one already employed in the iOS and desktop apps. It also receives support for emoji, so you can express yourself better. Read more »

The curse of modern day life – limited battery endurance – has been causing us anxiety and shortening our lives due to stress for the entire existence of the smartphone. Keen to keep its customers sane, British carrier EE is launching its brand new initiative, which will provide a free power bank to eligible customers.

Now, you might think that eligibility is the operative word, but the terms are actually pretty relaxed. Read more »

Succeeding in the very dynamic and demanding tech market of today often requires a lot more than technological advances, beautiful design and competitive prices. People are starting to pay more attention on how their products are made, what they are made from and, most-importantly, how eco-friendly they are.

This increased consumer concern is definitely a step in the right direction and will hopefully fuel the advancement or sustainable and renewable tech. And while projects like Google’s modular ARA are taking a more radical approach to the problem, there are a lot of things any technology manufacturer can address to help and when we are talking about a giant, like Samsung, efforts usually show quick results. Read more »

Vertu keeps reskinning its Aster smartphone. The latest variations are the Quilt (sporting a leather with distinctive stitching) and the Stingray (which features actual stingray leather). The hardware specs are unchanged, though the price differs.

Starting with the more affordable model – if you can call it that – the Vertu Aster Quilt comes in Black and Blue. Read more »

Nikon has launched the latest entrant in its compact mirrorless camera series, the Nikon 1 J5. The camera has a 20.8 megapixel, 1″ CX format BSI sensor, with EXPEED 5A image processor and an incredible 171 point contrast detect AF system with 105 phase detect AF points.

Speed seems to be the camera’s forte, as the company claims a burst mode of 20 fps at full resolution with continuous autofocus and up to an astonishing 60fps with fixed focus. The camera also boasts of 4K video recording, but does so at a lackluster 15fps, making it entirely useless for most people. Thankfully there’s the more usable 1080p60 recording mode as well 120fps slow motion 720p video. Read more »

Facebook’s Creative Labs department has come up with a new app for iOS and Android, called Riff. Riff lets you create videos that your friends can add to and contribute to videos created by your friends.

With Riff, you can make short videos that you can share with your friends. By default the videos are only visible within the app but you can also choose to post it on Facebook so it appears on your timeline. If someone wants to add to your video, they have to hit the + button on your video within the app, and their clip then gets added after yours. You can do the same to your friends’ videos. Read more »

The Taiwanese tech giant Acer took the wraps off an all-in-one Chrome OS desktop with a 21.5” touchscreen. Acer Chromebase will hit the shelves at some point in the second quarter this year.

Acer Chromebase packs a Tegra K1 chipset with quad-core CPU and 4GB of RAM. Read more »

Today Google has launched the latest update to the oft-forgotten News & Weather app for Android. This started life as little more than a widget built into Android, but then got released in the Play Store last year. Since that point, it’s received quite a few big updates, this latest one probably among the biggest yet.

This app is slowly but surely growing up into an interesting source for news, though Google has another app for that purpose – Play Newsstand. Read more »