The Android-using world had reason to rejoice in the last few days thanks to the release of the Google Chrome browser for Android devices which many users feel has taken far too long to reach the public. Now that the dust had settled, and users have had time to get Chrome for Android installed and browse their favorite sites using it, the inevitable comparisons and tests between this Chrome browser for Android and Apple’s Mobile Safari for iOS are starting to filter through.

I don’t know if it is something that has been out into the global water supply recently, but swiping seems to be the new tapping. Why take the time to lift your finger up and decompress a button when you can feel manly and powerful enough by quickly swiping your finger across the screen to achieve the same result? I certainly know which one I prefer.

Apple has evolved a lot since its inception by Jobs and Wozniak, two college buddies with a strong work ethic surpassed only by ambition. Whilst Macs – in their various forms – now run at lightning-speed whilst encased in sleek compilations of various materials, this wasn’t always the case.

In what can only be described as an interesting turn of events, the FBI has released a document put together when Steve Jobs was being considered for a role under President Bush in 1991.

It seems that the iPhone owning and application using world has been going a little bit loopy over the last few days thanks to the revelations that popular journal application Path has been liberating entire address books of data and uploading it to their servers in the form of a plist file without asking for the user’s permission. The company CEO David Morin quickly responded to the outrage by claiming that the name, telephone numbers and email addresses of the user’s address book are captured to help users find friends and family who are using the Path application, but the bottom line is; that the contacts data doesn’t actually belong to the user and therefore they don’t even have permission to upload it should it ever be requested.

Regardless of whether you are a fan of the Apple iPhone or not, it is very difficult to argue with the freight train momentum and success that the mobile smartphone has achieved in the last five years. Judging by the statistics that surround the sales of the phone, and the record breaking financial results posted by Apple for the end of 2011, it seems that the popularity of the iPhone is set to rise and rise with every release.

Profiles are in the process of being pushed through to numerous mobile carriers selling Apple’s iPhone appear to suggest the rather delayed release for iOS 5.1 could finally be happening on 9th March.

The sheer number of Twitter applications available for the iPhone often makes choosing just one a very difficult choice for users. The official Twitter app is free of charge, but generally represents a love it or hate it situation amongst users with a large number of regular iOS Twitter users opting to look elsewhere for on-device Twitter usage. If you ask any seasoned iPhone user which Twitter application they prefer, the same handful of names generally pop up and usually includes the likes of Osfoora, Echofon, Twittelator Neue, Tweetbot and Twitterific.

The ‘Path’ iOS application will no doubt go down as one of the most popular applications of 2011 thanks to its mix of having an innovative and beautiful user interface as well as operating as an extremely functional journal-type app. Although the Path app had been around since November 2010, the 2.0 release in final quarter of last year introduced a revamped UI which gained the application quite a lot of media attention and a large amount of new users.

For any consumer who may be taking the time to consider purchasing a new mobile phone, or a tablet computer, they will more than likely begin by considering either an Apple iPhone or iPad as their purchase of choice. With over a quarter of a billion iOS devices sold around the world, the iPhone and iPad are insanely popular, and considered by many to be the leading products in the mobile computing sector.

I don’t know about you, but I tend to favor mobile applications which do exactly what they say on the tin without attempting to deviate too much from the core functionality. One of the more recent applications which falls into this category has to be YouTube Producer for iOS devices by Musicshake Inc.

Of all the areas of our smartphones we’d call the most precious, text messages would be somewhere near the summit. On top of that, it’s one of those segments we like to keep the most private – obscured from the eyes of those prying brown-nosers.

The good people over at eFusion have introduced an application to the App Store which offers the ability for users to record conversations which are taking place via services such as Skype, or through the use of other Voice Over IP services such as the iOS Viber application. The application is called SkyRecorder, and is predominantly aimed at people who find themselves on a VoIP call and need to take down notes but are unable to for whatever reason.

When Siri was introduced back in early October, it was regarded as one of iPhone 4S’s greatest features. Siri, as most of you already know, is a voice-based personal assistant and a knowledge navigator that uses natural language processing to let users give it a wide variety of questions and commands in everyday language. It then taps into services like Yelp!, Google, Wolfram-Alpha and iOS system apps to give the required answer.

Simon Prakash, Apple’s former senior director of product integrity, has just been hired by fierce rivals Google to begin work on a supposed “secret project”, details of which are currently unknown.

The smartphone industry is full of analytics, metrics and research companies that love nothing more than tearing through sales figures and producing lovely graphs and pie charts which detail every little intricacy about a company’s product sales. Needless to say, in recent times a lot of this attention has been centered around Apple and Samsung, not only because they are constantly competing against each other to be the largest smartphone vendor in the world, but also because the two electronic giants also seem hell bent on battling it out in the courts.

Apple’s release of the iPhone 4S brought with it more than a few raised eyebrows. Was Apple really launching a new iPhone that is, for all intents and purposes, last year’s model with a few bells and whistles added on?

We’ve been hearing rumors and counter-rumors of an Apple television for a couple of years now, but things have really heated up of late.

What do you get if you cross a British rock band, a stylus, a Hollywood movie director, a Korean electronics company and a mobile device big enough to sink an ocean cruise liner? Yes, that’s right, you get a truly cringe worthy Samsung Super Bowl commercial.

Nobody who hasn’t been hiding in a cave for the last two years can argue against the quality of the cameras in Apple’s last two iPhones. First the iPhone 4 brought impressive photo quality to the iPhone lineup with a 5-megapixel camera, and then the iPhone 4S took things a step further with an 8-megapixel shooter.