When Instagram was purchased by Facebook early on last year, many devotees feared their treasured app would simply become an extension of the social network. To Mark Zuckerberg’s credit, he’s kept to his promise of allowing Instagram to retain its identity, but in an update released simultaneously today for both iOS and Android, the famed photo tagging feature has just been added to the Instagram repertoire.

Angry Birds has been the runaway success of the mobile era, and having started as a simple game for the Apple iPhone, now spawns every major platform with numerous adaptations of the original title. We learned early on last month that Angry Birds Friends, a social take on the popular format, would soon be debuting over at the App Store, and today, creator Rovio Entertainment has delivered a double whammy of avian-slinging madness by releasing the title for both iOS and Google’s Android.

We’ve checked out an abundance of tweaks recently here at Redmond Pie for those who love nothing more than to play music on their iOS devices, and if you are reliant on your iPhone as a double-up mp3 player, you will have almost certainly experienced that rueful situation whereby you misplaced, forgot or even completely lost your headphones. No headphones mean no music, or at least it should do in a public place, but if you’re in ownership of an earpiece for purpose of making handsfree calls, a new tweak over at the ModMyi repo will see this double up as a makeshift earbud.

Want to use Google Now but don’t live in an area that Google deemed worthy of having it enabled? Read on for an easy, non-jailbreak way of forcing Google Now to work in any country.

Apple’s iOS weather app is functional, that’s for sure. In fact, it’s about the only really good thing we can say about it. It’ll tell you the weather forecast for any location you ask of it, and it’ll represent that forecast with some nicely drawn logos. Terrific stuff.

Weather is a funny old thing, unless you happen to be caught up in the middle of it. There’s nothing worse than the best laid plans being ruined by some unseasonal rain, or perhaps even unseasonal sunshine! The iOS App Store is literally flooded (bad pun!) with weather apps as far as the eye can see – some are good, some are bad, even more are downright abysmal.

The Google Search app for iOS received the update to cap all updates a couple of days back when it was revealed that the company had integrated its Now service to users on the Apple operating system. As is typical with initial Google releases though, the new Google Now for iPhone feature was restricted to U.S. only, but as it does so very often, the jailbreak scene has popped up with a solution for those whose Google Now functionality was restricted.

Spotlight search, although not a feature of everybody’s iOS-navigating repertoire, is still seen as an important feature of Apple’s mobile OS, and although relatively one-dimensional at stock level, the jailbreak scene has certainly found plenty of uses for the native search feature. Those of you who’ve used Alfred for OS X will be more than aware of its strengths when it comes to speeding up the process of finding exactly what you want, and one Cydia developer has taken the strengths of Alfred and sought to implement them into Spotlight.

The music controls on the lock screen of iOS, which are brought about with a simple double tap of the home button, are very useful in allowing you to play, pause, or skip through your music library without having to go and open the Music app itself. But if you’re one of those people that like to skip to certain parts of a song, you have to go through the tiresome rigmarole of unlocking, perhaps typing in a passcode, and opening up the music app before scrubbing to find that favorite part of the track.

It’s one of the reasons that Google’s Android is often preferred over Apple’s iOS, but Google Now is no longer an Android-only affair, with the personal assistant now available for the competition’s iPhone and iPad devices.

Printers, don’t you just love them? Well, no, not many people do. If you printer is anything like ours, then you find yourself buying new cartridges for it almost every time you use it, and then you forget which ones you need when you’re at the store, ready to buy some. For something that’s been around forever, buying new printer cartridges can be an arduous task indeed.

There have been plenty of hits and a fair few misses in the last couple of revisions of iOS with regards to the new features, but the consensus of the iOS notification banners introduced with iOS 5 seems to be one of positivity. Their unobtrusive nature allows iPhone, iPad and iPod touch users to continue their task in hand without being interrupted, but despite their discreet demeanor, they are rather bland and one dimensional. Looking to invigorate some life into these plain white banners is Bailey Seymour, a jailbreak developer who has come through with a theming tweak for this particular iOS element called BannerImage.

The so-called ‘walled garden’ of iOS is hardly renowned for its customizability, but thanks to the freedom brought about by a jailbreak, the look and feel of the Apple mobile OS can be morphed and manipulated in all manner of ways. A new Cydia entry by the name of Accentify is one such tweak, sneaking into the iOS API and delivering universal changes to the entire, predominantly off-blue color scheme. If you’ve grown somewhat bored with the rather dull, uninspiring appearance of your iOS device, Accentify could be just the lick of paint needed to liven things up.

VoIP is quickly making the same kind of waves on mobile as it has done over the past decade at desktop level in providing a cheap way for folks to communicate in real time. Calling long distances worldwide has long since been a monopoly, but thanks to services like Skype, we no longer have to pay a huge premium to hear the sound of another’s voice from anywhere in the world. Facebook is currently dabbling in this technology, as is clear from the rollout of the VoIP feature within Facebook Messenger for iOS, but if your area has not yet been supported officially yet you wish to unlock and use the calling feature, there’s jailbreak tweak for that! Details, as usual, after the jump.

Message Box, a tweak which allows iOS users to enjoy a full Chat Heads experience system-wide on iOS based on the Facebook app, has just been released, and we’ve got the details coming up right after the break!

We are, some more quickly than others, gradually adapting to the touch-based keyboard. With that said, we’ve all cursed the auto spell-checking features of our devices, and at a time when we can carry out so many complicated tasks using our smartphone or tablet, doing something as simple as typing a message or note should not be so trying. TouchPal Keyboard for iOS offers a refined, gesture-based typing experience built very much in the image of Swype for Android, and if you happen to be jailbroken, you can make this intuitive keyboard a system-wide implementation.

Companies like Nike are showing an extreme will to embrace the mobile landscape and bring forward the benefits of fitness to users around the world by using accessories like the FuelBand that wirelessly transmit captured data back to a dedicated app. General day-to-day activities can be recorded and turned into a fitness challenge. Nike themselves have just brought out a great update to the official FuelBand for iPhone app that introduces some new social sharing features, so it makes perfect sense that jailbroken users should also receive some Nike based love with the NikeNotification+ tweak.

The pull to refresh feature within the iOS Mail app is not only a win for smooth, seamless functionality, but the animation has a certain laid-back element of fun about it, something you wouldn’t necessarily associate with Apple’s often uptight mobile operating system. One developer has taken such a shining to the feature that he’s decided to bag up the look and feel of the pull to refresh and distribute it among other apps using WebView. With support for custom colors and just about any app that utilizes WebView, it’s a novel little tweak, and we’ve all the details coming up for you after the break.

As expected, Gameloft has dropped the official Iron Man 3 title today for both iOS and Android and we’ve got all the details, as well as those all-important download links, coming right up after the break!

In the early days of iOS, the lock screen was considered, if anything, an ornamental feature of the Apple platform. Presenting little more than the time, date and the patented Slide to Unlock, the face of an ecosystem was traditionally one of decided blankness.