Considering we are right in the middle of the festive season, it shouldn't really come as any great surprise when developers take the plunge and reduce the price of some of their wares for a limited period of time. Australian based Halfbrick Studios has been hit with a fairly large dose of festive spirit, much to the benefit of iPhone and iPad owners. For the next 24-hours, the development outfit from down under have made all of their fantastic iOS games entirely free of charge as their gift to the Apple hardware owning community.
If you prefer your mobile operating experience to be of the Android variety and always opt to let Korean based Samsung handle your hardware requirements then the discovery of a new exploit within certain Samsung devices should be more than enough to peak your interest. The vulnerability in the Samsung hardware has been discovered by a keen-eyed developer over at the XDA Developer forums and has been classified as being at the kernel level that allows malicious applications to gain access to all physical memory on the affected device.
All of the recent Nokia and Windows Phone discussions may be centered around the Finnish company's launch of the fantastic new Lumia range of devices powered by Windows Phone 8 but if you happened to have gotten in on the Lumia action during the first wave of releases last year then there could be a nice software related surprise waiting for your Lumia 800 device when it connects to the Zune software. Those who still make daily use of their Lumia 800 have obviously made the conscious decision that the upgrade to a newer Lumia device isn't on the cards just yet but that shouldn't stop 800 owners from updating the device to Windows Phone 7.8 as it becomes available through Zune.
When iOS 5 was released, the most effective feature that I found to be was iMessage – Apple’s own web-based messaging solution that worked not just on iPhones, but also iPad, iPod touch, OS X, and then some, making conversation easier than ever before. I had used a lot of internet messengers before for both Android and iOS, but none matched the convenience of iMessage in my opinion. However, if you’re on Android, the best alternative that you get is, beyond question, WhatsApp Messenger. The app is fast, it’s sleek, and works just right. The support for almost all versions of Android also mean that it doesn’t suffer from the platform’s segmentation issue as much as some others do.
Cydia is constantly being updated with new packages and enhancements that change the way how iOS devices operate, but it's always nice to see a new tweak land in the store that actually enhances the iOS software. The Speaking Keyboard package is one of those that pretty much does exactly what it says in the title, by bringing text-to-speech functionality directly to the keyboard on the device. The package requires iOS 5 or above and integrates with the built-in keyboard to bring audible letters, words and sentences as the user presses the keys.
There are plenty of iOS device owners out there who love nothing more than jailbreaking their device in order to customize it to its full potential. On the other hand, there is a huge demand for tweaks and enhancements that offer a certain set of functionality without the user really having to do anything. The Fade tweak that has just landed on the BigBoss repository is definitely one of the latter types that requires absolutely no setup whatsoever and just makes itself at home when the user invokes Notification Center.
In this Digital Age, we're somewhat spoilt for choice when it comes to finding new music. Not only are there countless download and streaming services available at our fingertips, but most of them also point us in the direction of other artists and songs we'd perhaps like, based on our listening habits. Last.fm is considered by many as the go-to service for the discovery of new music, and although several scrobbling apps have been released by third parties as well as Last.fm itself, todays App Store debut of Scrobbler for iOS presents an app truly worthy of the popular service.
When talking about the mobile market and assessing its strengths and weaknesses, conversations and debates usually take an Android versus iOS format. Each of the two major mobile operating systems has its own perks and limitations, and in the case of Android, one of the key issues for a long time has been that of malware. Its open source nature leaves it naturally more susceptible than its Cupertino counterpart, but according to security research firm Lookout Mobile Security, things could take a turn for the worse in 2013.
With Windows Phone 8 still being a very new platform in the vast mobile market, good apps for those running it are still at something of a premium. Even some of the common apps from the big companies seem to be missing, or lacking an update from Windows Phone 7, but today, WhatsApp has offered a reprieve to those app-starved early adopters by bringing its popular Messenger app to Windows Phone 8.
Samsung’s smartphone-tablet hybrid, known as the Galaxy Note II, has managed to turn many heads since its announcement this last August. Should your bank balance be way too uncomfortable to get your hands on one, no worries: there’s a new knockoff in town that might actually be convincing enough to trick your less tech-savvy friends.
