Tennis has to be one of the most underrated but highly contested sports around. When it comes to major tournaments, they don’t come any bigger than the French Open, otherwise known as Les Internationaux de France de Roland-Garros. Named after French aviator Roland Garros, the French Open spans across a period of two weeks and features some of the best tennis players in the world all coming together on the clay courts of the Stade Roland Garros.

Samsung’s Galaxy S III announcement was either a roaring success or an abysmal failure, depending on your affiliations. Regardless of your feelings on the phone or indeed that whacky announcement event, what you cannot ignore is the fact that Samsung’s software is arguably the star of the show. Or that was the plan.

In the Google Play store, there are numerous utilities/apps that you can download to help optimize and improve your experience when using an Android phone. But there’s one tool in particular that combined the functionality that’s usually spread across multiple of these utilities into one. It’s called Cosmos, and it offers the ability to monitor the sneaky privacy settings of the apps you have installed, moderate your battery usage, and delete useless junk files off of your device. It also features a pretty straightforward and easy to use – but not as easy on the eyes, unfortunately – user interface.

It’s been a pretty significant day on the browser front, and with the possibility of a Chrome browser for iOS on the horizon, Mozilla has also released a new beta version of its Android browser – the very first to be released to the public.

A lot of people, including most of the Redmond Pie team, live with their smartphones in silent mode. With the vibration motors being so good on handsets these days, you can probably hear the thing as well as feel it, anyway!

If you want to reclaim some long lost storage space on your Android smartphone and happen to be someone who is installing and removing apps more often than most, then SD Maid may be the app for you. By completely removing traces of uninstalled apps, SD Maid promises to reclaim some of that storage space that you probably never thought you would see again.

It’s amazing that, although our devices offer features such as LTE, pin-sharp cameras with 1080p recording and screens bereft of a hint of flaw that often, some of the more ‘bread and butter’ features such as notifications aren’t as convenient as they should be, and with such high-end hardware packed into our smartphones, we expect the software to perform at the same advanced level.

The ability to run custom launchers is one which certainly gives Android the edge over rivaling mobile OSes, and Go Launcher – a home screen alternative we featured a short while ago – is without doubt one of the best around.

Android and iOS are two very different ecosystems, and while it’s a matter of opinion as to which one is more superior, each has its strengths and weaknesses. Up until last October’s release of iOS 5, the notification system of Apple’s mobile OS was nothing more than a whimsical collection of popups and alarms, but the Notification Center soon saw to that, and thanks to iPhone Notifications for Android, a similar system can be replicated on devices running Google’s domineering mobile software.

A combination of great camera hardware and the rise of Instagram has given developers behind image and photo-centric apps something to shout about, but having said that, the app still has to deliver the goods and offer a substantial array of features to have any lasting effect on consumers.

Once upon a time, an alarm clock was a simple, sharp sound played in a loop at a given time in order to wake one up. In the days of Android and iOS, however, the process of rising from sleep is something many developers are trying to nail down to a fine art, and as such, there are bunch of apps purporting to help you feel fresher, more alert, and less cranky when morning comes.

The battle for supremacy in the cloud computing market is hotting up, and although Apple was the first of the big companies to push forth its iCloud service last year, Microsoft and Google have both joined the party in the last couple of months with their SkyDrive and Google Drive services respectively.

Smartphones have great range of uses – a range which is increasing all the time, but occasionally, an unexpected use crops up, and Metal Sniffer – a utility allowing you to locate scraps of metal using just your Android device – certainly falls under that umbrella.

If you check out any technology lover’s arsenal of gadgets, I am pretty sure it will contain pieces of kit that cover all aspects of the consumer electronics spectrum. In today’s day and age it isn’t uncommon to walk into a home office and see a desktop computer as well as a laptop or notebook, also accompanied by a smart mobile device such as Apple’s ‘Post-PC’ iPad tablet as well as the a smartphone like the iPhone.

Popular photo altering/sharing social app Instagram has enjoyed a pretty decent last few months by all accounts, and soon after releasing its long-awaited Android app, Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook came along and purchased it for an unbelievable $1 billion.

Flipboard is a prime example of how an app should look, perform and function. It’s clean, it’s crisp, and everything just works, and it is truly unmatched on both the iPhone, and primarily, the iPad.

Within our phone books and contact lists, there’ll always be those few people we only make short, uninteresting, mundane small-talk with, and most of us absolutely detest those conversations which scarcely deviate from “how are you?” “what are you doing?” or, “oh really, how is that going?”

Android users have been pining for system-wide Google Voice implementation for quite some time now, and that calling may have been heard by MDR Tools, Inc., which has created an app purporting to offer just that.

Whether you’re an organized person or somewhat scatty, your cause can always be aided by means of technology. Tablet and smartphone devices offer an almost infinite list of to-do apps, keeping you updated and in-sync with everything occurring in your life day-to-day.

The various app hubs specific to each mobile operating system offer tens of thousands (or in the case of Apple and Google, hundreds of thousands) of apps and games enabling those using them to prosper, be more productive, organized and of course, entertained. Unfortunately, the vast majority of the apps on offer are pretty underwhelming, failing to really capture the imagination due to lack of thought, preparation, or execution.